Downstairs, Upstairs: The Division of Domestic Space Between Domestic Workers and Super-Rich Employers in London

Abstract

London’s affluent neighborhoods are often reported as places where employers infringe migrant domestic workers’ rights. Much has been written on both the wealthy’s influence on cities and on domestic workers’ lack of rights, yet few have connected these literatures. In this article, I explore one of the UK’s most expensive addresses, Eaton Square, through contemporary and historical planning documents, to unearth a legacy of segregation masked by tactics to avoid public scrutiny. Through interviewing staff at Kalayaan, a charity that supports and advocates for domestic workers, and analyzing their survey data, I find that explicit segregation is being replaced by boundary erasure, with workers sleeping in communal areas and family members’ bedrooms, with little or no access to the city outside. The article questions the conflation of the physical house and social home that is regularly assumed, and argues for domestic workers’ human right to privacy to be enabled, rather than restricted, by spatial and legislative means.