“A Daily Jolt into Another World”: Gendered Risk and Cultural Difference in Student Lodgings at the Victoria University of Manchester

For much of the twentieth century, most university students who left home to study lived not in university residences but in lodgings with local householders. Despite their critical role in absorbing ever-expanding student numbers, lodgings were regarded with ambivalence by the civic universities. Whilst lodgings fulfilled the practical need for somewhere to live, university authorities were concerned that their conditions were not always conducive to the “life of the mind” and were particularly problematic for students lacking prior familiarity with higher education. This paper explores this ambivalence, with a particular focus on the Victoria University of Manchester. It notes early concerns regarding the management of gendered risk, and broader anxieties regarding conflicting class cultures in the post-war decades. It is argued that these historical perceptions of lodgings reveal much about the changing nature of both the typical student and the lodging house over the course of the twentieth century.