Katharine Buildings were model dwellings in Cartwright Street,

Aldgate Aldgate () was a gate in the former defensive wall around the City of London. The gate gave its name to ''Aldgate High Street'', the first stretch of the A11 road, that takes that name as it passes through the ancient, extramural Portsoken ...

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

, the first project of the philanthropically-motivated East End Dwellings Company. The block was built during 1884, and opened in 1885 as

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person, or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin , . Models can be divided in ...

apartments for the working class. There were 628 single rooms with shared cooking and sanitary facilities, plus a top floor for the very poorest families.website of St George in the East
/ref> The buildings were named after the philanthropist Catherine Courtney. A key feature of the Buildings was the rent collection system. Whereas most Model Dwellings Companies employed a strict regimen of prompt rent payment, the EEDC employed female collectors following the successful schemes demonstrated by

Octavia Hill Octavia Hill (3December 183813August 1912) was an English Reform movement, social reformer and founder of the National Trust. Her main concern was the welfare of the inhabitants of cities, especially London, in the second half of the nineteent ...

. Beatrice Potter was employed as a principal visitor alongside Ella Pycroft,Morris, S. ''LSE Seminars: Social Policy: From the Victorians to the Present Day session 3''
/ref> living in the Buildings, and the scheme was assisted by Charles Booth, Samuel Barnett, Maurice Eden Paul, the Charity Organisation Society and Osborne Jay. The Buildings were demolished in the 1970s and replaced with

council housing Public housing in the United Kingdom, also known as council housing or social housing, provided the majority of rented accommodation until 2011, when the number of households in private rental housing surpassed the number in social housing. D ...

References

Housing in London Model dwellings {{coord missing, London

Further reading

References