We spend our lives moving through passages, hallways, corridors, and gangways, yet these channeling spaces do not feature in architectural histories, monographs, or guidebooks. They are overlooked, undervalued, and unregarded, seen as unlovely parts of a building’s infrastructure rather than architecture.

This book is the first definitive history of the corridor, from its origins in country houses and utopian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through reformist Victorian prisons, hospitals, and asylums, to the “corridors of power,” bureaucratic labyrinths, and housing estates of the twentieth century. Taking in a wide range of sources, from architectural history to fiction, film, and TV, Corridors explores how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease: the archetypal stuff of nightmares.

Roger Luckhurst lives in a postwar utopian social housing estate in inner London and teaches at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is professor of modern literature in the School of Arts. He is the author of Zombies, also published by Reaktion Books, and wrote the British Film Institute Classics books on Alien and The Shining.

— Owen Hatherley, author of “Militant Modernism,” “The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the Communist Avant-Garde,” and “The Ministry of Nostalgia”

— Sukhdev Sandhu, author of “Night Haunts: A Journey through the London Night”

— Choice

— Times Literary Supplement

— Financial Times, "Best Interiors Books"

— Sherry MacKay, UBC School of Architecture and Landscape, Buildings & Cities

— London Review of Books

— World of Interiors

— Arquitectura Viva