Homes Of The Homeless

We tend to imagine the Victorian home as a family affair, a place of stability and a retreat from the outside world. And that was the ideal for the Victorians themselves. But for huge numbers of Londoners the reality was very different. Tens of thousands made their homes in lodgings and lodging houses, renting a room - or often just a bed - by the week or the night in a building shared with strangers. And there were countless others who could not even scrape together the few pennies for this and who turned to the workhouse or refuges or who slept rough in whatever shelter they could find.

This special exhibition tells the story of these ‘other’ London homes in the 19th and 20th centuries, exploring the places and spaces the poor inhabited, bringing them to life through paintings, photographs, objects and the personal stories of the men, women and children who sought shelter in the capital.

While the poor undoubtedly struggled, Homes of the Homeless will draw on recent research to show that they also exercised choice and agency. The exhibition considers how people fought against the notorious workhouse system or used it to their own ends. It reveals the excitements and camaraderie as well as the privations of living in a common lodging house. And it looks at how the inhabitants of London’s new philanthropic and municipal ‘model’ lodging houses managed to make themselves ‘at home.’