Hostel, House and Chambers: accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian working woman

Hostel, House and Chambers: accommodating the Victorian and Edwardian working woman, Emily Gee, Historic England/Liverpool University Press, 2025, 176 pages, hard back, 53 black-and-white and 16 colour illustrations.

You may have walked past the buildings celebrated by this book without knowing their original purpose. Gower Street and nearby Store Street in London are two fine examples, both built to house women who worked at Bourne and Hollingsworth’s store on Oxford Street. Warwickshire House on Gower Street housed 700 women in its two phases (1912 and 1936) and is now student accommodation. The book’s focus is on hostels like these, built for middle-class women in London between the mid-19th century and the second world war. Emily Gee’s study began as an Architectural Association thesis, expanded from previously published papers. Gee, a former head of listing at Historic England, has been director for cathedral and church buildings at the Church of England since 2023.

The urban lodging houses built for working-class women are not the subject of the book, but it covers the wider social history background. Gee explains that although wage levels dictated women’s choice of housing options, the campaign to build housing for ‘respectable’ women was partly driven by a desire to protect them from the evils of common lodging houses. Social reformers like Mary Higgs campaigned in a feminist context for housing that enabled a middle-class woman to live ‘a self-supporting life’. As cities grew in the 19th century, thousands of new jobs emerged in shops, offices, libraries, hospitals, schools and colleges, attracting an influx of single women.

The book provides some contextual chapters: on the campaign for municipal housing for working women; on men’s lodging houses in London; and on the international context (particularly New York and Boston, USA). It takes us through the development of hostels and housing for middleclass working women. The YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) originated in 1857, when the North London Home opened in a Fitzrovia townhouse ‘to house Florence Nightingale’s nurses on their way to and from the Crimea’. Rooms were subdivided into separate cubicles with shared facilities. For the next 30 years, Christian organisations converted houses using this model.

In 1888, Sloane Gardens House, the first purpose-designed women’s hostel was built, for Homes for Working Girls. Built in three phases, it housed 150 women, with communal dining and sitting rooms, a library and music rooms. By the early 1900s, this template had evolved into vast, architecturally imposing hostels such as Warwickshire House on Gower Street, with its ballroom and swimming pool. Alongside the architectural detail, Gee provides fascinating accounts of the women who lived there. The book mentions only a few examples of housing for middle-class women outside London, including in Manchester where the corporation built Ashton House in 1910.

The book ends with a section on conservation; many of the buildings have been successfully repurposed. Just eight are listed, but the book shows that many more are significant. It is well-produced and illustrated with contemporary plans and images, and there is a detailed bibliography and index.

This article originally appeared as ‘A self-supporting life’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 186, published in December 2025. It was written by Marion Barter, historic buildings historian .

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation