How did people live before the construction of “mass housing” such as apartments , flats etc after WWII?
They lived in houses which were bombed or declared slums. In those days people lived in mass housing (which they rented) in high density terraced housing schemes – in towns close to industry. Hundreds of thousands of these were flattened in the bombing in eg The East End of London – and with poor sanitation (many lacked bathrooms) they were declared slums (not worth repairing) and after the war, partiularly in Northern cities, they were cleared to make way for the new Utopian vision which had been espoused by people like Le Corbusier. Few people lived in flats during the war. Better class of housing was the suburbs – much lower density and consequently less of a target than the inner city areas. These tended to be hit randomly by V2 rockets later in the war – but very much isolated pockets of destruction. The first flats or apartments were built in the 19th century in the more popu;ated cioties where land was scarce – but were never very popular. In Tyneside people lived in flats which
