Four solid walls and a roof over one's head. These, from an essentialist standpoint, are the minima of homely existence. What happens then under conditions of speculation and subdivision when domestic walls are no longer stable givens, but become flimsy, mobile and contested? Drawing on a rich seam of popular British films from the late 1950s and early '60s -set in the transitional world of postwar London lodging houses -this paper examines how partition walls refashioned the interior space of the terraced house. Analysis of popular visual culture is supported by archival research centred on local valuation lists, which allow us to read the traces of these sometimes temporary, often illegal structures. The paper argues that partition walls were key to the extraction of value from a declining private rental sector by property traders and landlords. At the same time, these ubiquitous structures formed a series of highly charged thresholds between disparate individuals. Partition walls were instrumental in the 'spatialisation' of race in postwar Britain, serving to heighten an awareness of otherness while simultaneously bringing individuals into uncomfortable proximity. Finally, the paper asks how people overcame or lived between these divisions, and how this affected questions of visibility and representation.

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Rent Tribunals were first established in England and Wales in 1946 as a means of regulating rents among furnished lets in the private rented sector, before their authority was extended to cover unfurnished dwellings in 1949. This article shows how rent tribunals created an informal space of justice that provided a forum for tenants’ voices. Tenants used rent tribunals to dramatize their everyday complaints, articulate their sense of entitlement to better housing, and organize collectively to exert pressure on landlords and administrative machinery. The tribunals in turn reconfigured the state’s relationship to the space of the home and echoed representational tropes circulating in popular culture. But in putting landlordism on trial, rent tribunals, and those who participated in them, also came up against the limits of traditional constructions of property ownership and the home. The expansion of homeownership intersected and in some cases fused with increasingly racialized notions of belonging, domesticity, and national identity. Through an examination of these novel regulatory forums, the article highlights both the centrality of working-class agency and the contradictory nature of the welfare state.