How to Live in a Flat

How to Live in a Flat, if posed as a question, is worth asking today with so many articles on tiny flats with hugely inflated price tags in the newspapers. Flat-dwellers were faced with very similar problems in 1936. During 1932 and 1933 Heath Robinson had drawn a series of cartoons for The Sketch titled 'Flat Life', which depicted various gadgets designed to make the most of the limited space available in the contemporary flat. It was this series of drawings that provided K. R. G. Browne and W. Heath Robinson with the inspiration for their first full-length book together. It was called How to Live in a Flat and, as well as greatly extending the original ideas showing many ingenious ways of overcoming the problems caused by lack of space in flats and bungalows, the book also provided much fun at the expense of the more extreme designs in thirties furniture and architecture. The book was published for Christmas 1936 and was well received.

How to Live in a Flat is surprisingly relevant to life in Britain in 2014. In fact, several of Heath Robinson's space-economising solutions have been used in practice to maximise the use of space in small flats. We have beds that fold down from wardrobes fully-made and ready to sleep in, communal rubbish shoots, central heating and multi-purpose furniture. So Heath Robinson was way ahead of his time and reading How to Live in a Flat may spark other innovative solutions to making life bearable in a tiny twenty-first century home!

If, in addition to being a flat-dweller (perhaps in a garden flat), you are also married with a car and you play golf then you will find much to amuse and inform you in our other titles by Heath Robinson and K. R. G. Browne: