In an article written for Women's Herald in 1893, a ‘special commissioner’ visits two buildings designed to house independent working women, Sloane Gardens House and Oakley Street Chambers, in order to investigate ‘Where the Unmarried Live’. Oakley Street Chambers, constructed in 1876 under the initiative of Lady Mary Feilding's Working Ladies’ Guild, was the first structure designed for the purpose of housing independent working women. Sloane Gardens House, built in 1888, was the first project of the Ladies’ Associated Dwellings’ Company and was, as Emily Gee notes, ‘the first large-scale, quality, purpose-built lodgings for lower wage but still quite clearly middle-class women’. By 1893 a handful of buildings designed to house independent working women existed in London and their diversity attests to the complexity of women’s changing social status at this time. Although the author of ‘Where the Unmarried Live’ might have chosen one of the residences built by the Ladies’ Residential Chambers Company, which were designed for more affluent middle-class and professional women, both Oakley Street Chambers and Sloane Gardens House were by this point well-established institutions. Sloane Gardens House, a ‘typical example as regards convenience of situation, charges, and general arrangements’, the correspondent comments, is ‘always filled with residents, and numerous applications have to be refused for want of room’. Nevertheless, the correspondent also finds that life at Sloane Gardens House could be surprisingly solitary. One resident explains to the author that her first experience of the residence was ‘intense loneliness’. Although many women formed small coteries with whom to ‘chat […] merrily’ over dinner, others were ‘glum and exclusive’ and took no notice of the newcomer.This resident soon discovered that the ‘majority of the residents stay in their rooms in the evening’ and claims that, on one occasion, her desperation led her to ‘rebel […] against the spirit of indifference’. The newcomer's rebellious behaviour is, however, comically reserved: ‘One morning I noticed a girl at the breakfast table looking very ill. I asked if there was anything I could do for her. That was the breaking of the ice and we are now good friends.’