Originally published in 1986, for the second edition of this standard text (previously only covering up to 1970) in A Social History of Housing 1815–1985, John Burnett has extended his study to take account of the next fifteen years. It remains a comprehensive and important survey, covering over a century and a half of developments in housing conditions both urban and rural, public and private, and tracing the evolution of mass housing through by-law terraces, back-to-backs and the tower block to the low-rise, high-density estates of the 1980s.