Throughout this article the author, Robin Evans, attempts to understand the reform of the mid nineteenth century London dwelling’s and how Robert Kerr pushed his model family dwellings forward through the manipulation of the narrative of the dwellings. Evans begins to look at the moral within the dwellings and how it impacted the political stature towards the dwellings themselves. The reformers of the nineteenth century used the negative attitude towards the slums as fuel to push for the Artisans’ and Labourers’ dwellings improvement 1875. The article highlights the illustration by Hector Gavin ‘Section of a common lodging house’ (1847), this illustration embodies what is to have been the worst morals of the dwelling and the ‘malign power of bad dwellings’. The rookeries resembled an abstract version of The rookeries were known to be full of crime and disease which was not surprising due to the foul living conditions in which the unfortunate poverty had to live in. The dwellings were connected to one another through an extensive system of tunnels and doors, in fact most rooms were simply used as passages instead …show more content…
In reaction to these dwellings Henry Roberts designed a Model house which addressed the main issue of moral; Roberts’ first step into this was to reduce movement and create a more controlled design in order to discourage the use of rooms to mere passageways. Additionally, Roberts’ also separated the boys, girls, and parents bedrooms, something which had not existed in the dwellings before; this separation was one of the first steps towards creating private and public spaces within a single house. Although this was a significant impact on the moral of a dwelling it was also a major step towards the isolation of a family and also an attempt to adapt the richer middle-class living conditions into the lower-class