House-ownership from Rate Books

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Abstract
Professor Marion Bowley, writing of the housing boom of the 1930s which was uniquely based upon sales to owner-occupiers, remarked that ‘we have no means of knowing statistically the extent of owner-occupation before the Great War…Actually, it is more important to know why the change occurred [in the inter-war period] than to know its actual size, and there is no need to be led astray in a futile search for non-existent statistics’. The same ban would seem to extend to analysis of investment ownership of housing before 1914. What I want to suggest is that it is indeed possible to obtain statistics relating not only to owner occupation but also to the overall structure of the urban housing market; and that far from leading us astray, it is in fact important to acquire precise figures in order to understand with more certainty the structure of the nineteenth-century housing market – something of which we have remarkably little knowledge.

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