Britain’s first women-only tower block, 15 storeys of 102 units, has just been given planning permission in Ealing, west London. Women’s Pioneer Housing (WPH), founded by suffragettes a century ago, will offer tenancies only to single women, prioritising victims of domestic abuse and black and minority ethnic women who face pay discrimination, so can’t afford private rents.
It may be the first all-female high rise, but this is by no means the UK’s first single-sex social housing experiment: the social reformer Mary Higgs published Where Shall She Live? in 1910, launching the call for “lighthouses”, accommodation to house and preserve the reputations of low-paid, unmarried women. The historian Emily Gee describes a network of organisations with the same mission, housing women who were respectable but poor – including the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, which converted a London townhouse into 57 lodgings for single women. Structurally, these bore a striking resemblance to the WPH female-only development rejected by councillors in Hammersmith and Fulham last year.
