The essays in this collection explore both organizational intentions and inhabitants' experiences in a diverse range of British residential institutions during a period when such provision was dramatically increasing.

Introduction, Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins, Rebecca Preston; Chapter 1 Viewing the Early Twentieth-Century Institutional Interior through the Pages of Living London, Fiona Fisher; Chapter 2 'French Beef Was Better than Hampstead Beef': Taste, Treatment and Pauperism in a London Smallpox Hospital, 1871, Matthew L. Newsom Kerr; Chapter 3 From Asylum to Mental Hospital: Gender, Space and the Patient Experience in London County Council Asylums, 1890-1910, Louise Hide; Chapter 4 Refuge or Prison? Girls' Experiences of a Home for the 'Mentally Defective' in Scotland, 1906-1948, Mary Clare Martin; Chapter 5 Paupers and Their Experience of a London Workhouse: St Martin-in-the-Fields, 1725-1824, Jeremy Boulton, John Black; Chapter 6 'A Veritable Palace for the Hardworking Labourer?' Space, Material Culture and Inmate Experience in London's Rowton Houses, 1892-1918, Jane Hamlett, Rebecca Preston; Chapter 7 'The Place Was a Home From Home': Identity and Belonging in the English Cottage Home for Convalescing Psychiatric Patients, 1910-1939, Stephen Soanes; Chapter 8 'The Father and Mother of the Place': Inhabiting London's Public Libraries, 1885-1940, Michelle Johansen; Chapter 9 'Discipline with Home-Like Conditions': The Living Quarters and Daily Life of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps in First-World-War Britain and France, Krisztina Robert; Chapter 10 Halls of Residence at Britain's Civic Universities, 1870-1970, William Whyte;