Housing the Poor and Mechanick Class in Seventeenth-Century London

• Published in: London journal Vol. 25; no. 2; pp. 13 - 39
• Main Author: Baer, William C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Burnt Mill, Harlow, Eng Routledge 2000; Longman
• ISSN: 0305-8034; 1749-6322
• DOI: 10.1179/ldn.2000.25.2.13

Housing increased markedly in seventeenth-century London despite numerous royal building proclamations and parliamentary statutes against its proliferation. A housing needs approach is used here to better understand the housing circumstance of the poor and mechanick classes in the face of these policies. The schema provides a consistency framework to order what is a composite of various household behaviours and housing opportunities. By partitioning these classes into their respective housing circumstances, we can begin to appreciate the types and relative magnitudes of housing deprivation they encountered. Depending upon their degree of poverty, the poor sought free shelter, charitably-provided shelter, or crowded into rooms, chambers, tenements, divided housing and so on. But the upper end of the mechanick class might have been able to afford new construction. This aspect is explored first by charting the distribution of the quality of housing enjoyed by most Londoners based on their occupation and the number of hearths in their housing. Then some tentative estimates are made of the cost to build new housing and what it might lease for annually. Finally, these costs and their associated number of hearths are plotted against the initial distribution of employment and hearths to make a rough assessment that some of the mechanick class could have afforded new construction built according to proclamation requirement and especially to the standards established in the Rebuilding Act following London's great fire. Such an analysis also permits an assessment of the effects on housing provision by the various building proclamations.