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The first section of the paper uses information from the 1976 Family Formation Survey to investigate the extent and pattern of the housing movements made by women at and subsequent to the breakdown of their marriages. Overall, half the women who had experienced breakdown left the marital home at breakdown, but this proportion varied with age, tenure, sharing status and whether or not there were children from the marriage. The Labour Force Survey of 1981 is then used to provide more detailed cross‐sectional information on the housing and household circumstances of divorced and legally separated men and women than is currently available from other official statistical sources. It is shown that the parental home is an extremely important source of housing for young manual‐class men whose marriages have broken down.

The socio‐economic geographic demographic and characteristics of young outright owner occupiers in Britain are examined, using data from the 1981 Labour Force Survey. They are shown to be a heterogeneous group, including wealthy professionals, fanners and high proportions of the manual social classes. Omitting the specialised sub‐populations of professionals and farmers, it was found that young outright owners are more likely to be self‐employed or unemployed than are mortgagors; more likely to be from a lower social class; more likely to live in ‘peripheral’ areas of the country and more likely to be of Asian ethnic origin. In addition, the physical condition of outright owned homes is substantially inferior to that of mortgaged owner occupied homes. The only major common feature to emerge for this group is their marginal labour force status. It is suggested that outright ownership represents an alternative to publicly‐rented tenure for groups who are denied access to conventional channels of mo...