Families and housing in seventeenth-century London

The study of family and household offers insights into how demographic, economic, and social change are experienced. A marked diversity of family forms and living conditions between London's prosperous city centre and its spreading suburbs emerged over the seventeenth century; while the former still contained large households focused on nuclear families, in the latter both houses and households were smaller and poorer, families apparently more fragmented and unstable. Lodging was common in both areas but may have had a different character in each. By 1700, London was already expressing the social impact of immigration, urbanization, and commercialization, felt much more widely in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries