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The house-building sector of London's economy, 1550–1650

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2012

WILLIAM C. BAER
WILLIAM C. BAER*
Affiliation:
USC Sol Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, Lewis Hall 312, Los Angeles, CA 90089–0626, USA
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Abstract:

London historians marvel at London's population growth during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but never at how those hundreds of thousands of people got housed. It did not just ‘happen’; building tens of thousands of houses required marshalling land, money, materials and labour, and directing them at specific building sites. The task was performed by a myriad of small-scale builders from most walks of life, projectors who used contracts to have work done they could not perform themselves. All this was done in an environment of considerable risk in building new houses because of royal prohibitions against doing so, and facing large fines, sometimes imprisonment, and their new houses pulled down.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , August 2012 , pp. 409 - 430
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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