The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part II: Filtering Tactics
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Lynne Walker
and Furniture (1876)—one of many advice and information books written
by women for women in the late nineteenth century—claimed a substantial
role for interior designers, and indeed for themselves, in the design process.
ACCOMMODATING WOMEN
Among feminist priorities in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was
the provision of respectable accommodation for single middle-class women
working in the city. Agnes Garrett and her sister, Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,
were directors of the Ladies’ Dwellings Company (LDC), which built
the Chenies Street Chambers, around the corner from Agnes’s house in
Gower Street. Aimed at accommodating professional women at a moderate
cost, Chenies Street Chambers (1889) and York Street Chambers in Marylebone
(1891) were the most successful and architecturally ambitious schemes
of their kind in central London, while other similar residential projects flourished
in the affluent inner suburbs of Kensington, Chelsea, and Earl’s Court. 22
In Chenies Street, co-operative principles applied: individual
households retained their privacy but combined to pay the costs and share
mutual facilities for cleaning, cooking, and laundry. Individual flats were of
two, three, and four rooms, and although meals could be taken communally
in the basement dining room, each accommodation was self-contained with
either scullery or kitchen and toilet, larder, cupboard, coal bunker, and dust
chute. R. W. Hitchen’s system of silicate cotton and plaster slabs was employed
for sound and fireproofing. Rents were ten to twenty five shillings
per week, plus ten shillings for dining room and caretaker charges. 23 These
arrangements suited residents such as Olive Schreiner, the South African
feminist who wrote The Story of an African Farm and Woman and Labour and
lived in Chenies Street in 1899, 24 and Ethel and Bessie Charles, the first
women members of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who ran their
architectural practice from the York Street flats. 25
Feminist networks extended to male allies such as the architect of
Chenies Street Chambers, J. M. Brydon, who trained Agnes and Rhoda
Garrett and supported Ethel and Bessie Charles for membership in the
RIBA. 26 While the access of middle-class women to design was restricted,
as clients and patrons their participation was welcomed, which empowered
many women in the public sphere. Through Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,
Brydon was employed again for two other important women’s buildings:
the Hospital for Women (opened 1890), on Euston Road, and the London
School of Medicine for Women (opened 1898), on Hunter Street near
Brunswick Square. These women also relied on networks of kinship and patronage.
Commissions for interiors and furnishings were forthcoming from