The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

The Feminist Remapping of Space in Victorian London
17.1 | Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s Hospital for Women.
Agnes’s sister and Rhoda’s cousin, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, in Cambridge
and in London, and from Elizabeth Garrett Anderson for her own flat in Upper
Berkeley Street; they also designed furniture for their Beale cousins’ new
country house, Standen, in Sussex. It was the intervention of Florence
Nightingale, Barbara Bodichon’s cousin, that ensured the funding and completion
of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s hospital on Euston Road. 27 As late
as the 1920s, the architect Ethel Charles was designing a decorative scheme
for paneling the library of her soldier brother at Camberley. 28
An effective practitioner of doorstep philanthropy and one of the
key members of the campaign for a Married Woman’s Property Act to secure
property rights for middle-class women was Octavia Hill. Unlike many of
her feminist contemporaries, she had known financial insecurity personally
and experienced firsthand the dire living conditions of the poor in the
homes of toyworkers whom, to earn her own living, she had taught. Although
her philanthropic schemes extended throughout London and her
principles of housing management were widely influential, Octavia Hill’s
first experiment in architectural and social reform was undertaken in 1864
about a hundred yards from her own house in Nottingham Place (number
14), Marylebone, at the inappropriately named Paradise Place (now Garbutt
Place). 29 By the early 1870s, her most ambitious program to date was
only a short walk away in St. Christopher’s Place, off Oxford Street, and involved
the refurbishment and partial rebuilding of Barrett’s Court, which