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' entitled '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.