L.S.E. 1920–1923

L.S.E. in those days had an appearance very different from what it has since become. Clare Market, once the haunt of thieves and prostitutes, was indeed free of such population, with the School on one side and a printing house on the other, although its present purely aseptic look, with the School installed in the rebuilt Clements Press, was not to come until much later. But Houghton Street, where the main entrance is nowadays, was still a squalid slum, the greater part of which was not swept away until the thirties; and to judge from the occasional round-ups by the L.S.E. porters, the thieving element at least was not far away. The accommodation of the School building was very limited: on the ground floor the Library, which was where the Haldane Room now stands, and the only large lecture hall, which was the present history reading room parallel to the Library — the only vestige of the old building to remain; on the first and second floors administrative offices and two or three small lecture rooms and rooms for senior staff; then, on the top floor, a refectory and its offices and a small common room shared by staff and students alike. All this was far too small for the post-war incursion of students — the Beveridge expansion had begun — and many of the lectures took place in converted Army huts, approached on duckboards amid the puddles and swamps of the Aldwych site, as it was then.