Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Some tanning wear and marking due to age. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> To believe that a housing problem in England dates only from the nineteenth century would be no more defensible than to argue that there were no poor hungry or badly clothed people before that time. Any historian of medieval times or of the Tudor or Georgian periods knows that inadequate and insanitary living conditions were always the lot of a sizeable proportion of working people whether in town or country. Slums were not new in the nineteenth century any more than damp floors rotting walls leaking roofs and open sewers. But in a real sense the modern housing problem was a creation of the nineteenth century-both because new demographic trends multiplied and exacerbated the inherited problems and because new social trends gradually raised housing expecta tions and produced a climate of opinion in which for diverse reasons housing evils came to be regarded as unacceptable. The nineteenth century therefore witnessed both an acceleration of the housing problem and the origins of policies aimed at its solution. Any discussion of housing has two main aspects quantitative and qualitative. People need shelter but they also need shelter which is adapted to geography climate and place of work and which provides certain standards of construction space hygiene and comfort in which the business of home-making can go forward effectively. Houses are physical structures homes are social economic and cultural institutions. But the most urgent housing problem of the first half of the nineteenth century was that because of a phenomenally rapid growth of population the stock of accom modation had to be utilized and expanded at a rate which constantly fell short of need and which produced many ill-effects on the comfort and health of the inhabitants. In 1750 England had still exhibited many of the economic and social characteristics of a pre-industrial society a primary dependence on agriculture low levels of national income and economic growth. (LL)