How can the social fabric of the inner city be maintained in the face of the pressures put upon it by the motor car and the office block on the one hand and by the segregative tendencies of modern urban society on the other? [...] It deals with the historical entity of the slum through the perception and handling of the housing problem as it took place in London in the course of the nineteenth century and it offers, at a bound, the definitive interpreta- tion of the origins of this whole branch of social policy in this country. [...] The emergence of overcrowding as the dominant question, the crucial and distinctive role of the medical officers of health, the random responsiveness of the vestries to their social obligations, the all too measurable gestures and schemes of philanthropists, and the ultimate approach to openly subsidized vii Foreword housing—to housing as a permanent element of social policy from here on—these are [...] The con- struction of the London docks, for example, resulted in the demolition of 1,300 houses, and that of St Katharine's dock, finished in 1828, of another 1,033 working-class dwellings.' 4 In the first half of the century the City's housing stock was reduced by some two and a half thousand houses, and the residents of the demolished dwellings had either crowded into the remaining houses or had [...] The price of building sites in central London, the economics of the building industry, the flow of capital into forms of investment more profitable than the building of working-class houses, the inability of low cost housing to compete with financial and commercial claim- ants for the use of central sites all combined to make the supply of housing inadequate to the demand and the rent structure on