A Revolution in London Housing

'What terrible barracks... vast sheer walls unbroken by even an attempt at ornament, row above row of windows in mud coloured surface, upwards, upwards, lifeless eyes, murky openings that tell of bareness, disorder, comfortlessness within', wrote the Victorian writer, George Gissing in his book The Nether World published in 1889. He was describing an example of London housing built 'for the army of industrialism... a weltering mass of human weariness, of hopeless hope, of crushed surrender tumbled together within those forbidding walls'.