Understanding Early Terrace Housing
Uniform terraced town houses emerged in London immediately after the Great Fire. The government recognised both the urgency of regeneration for the thousands of now-homeless families, but also the requirement that this activity needed to be strictly regulated to eliminate the factors which contributed to the Fire in the first place. The Rebuilding Act of 1667 laid down the rules for domestic accommodation. Depending on the area and type of street, houses were specified as being of the First Sort (two storeys plus basement and garret), the Second Sort (three storeys plus basement and garret) and the Third Sort (four storeys plus basement and garret).
Projectors such as Nicholas Barbon and others set to work. Terraced housing proliferated through the late Stuart and Georgian periods, all complying with the Act. There are many of these rows of houses in London today, very fine examples to be found in Spitalfields and the Temple district (both areas untouched by the Fire), but elsewhere too. A good one is the Benjamin Franklin House in Charing Cross, recently covered.
Update: Good coverage on this and subsequent legislation by buildings sleuth Ellen Leslie, here.
1679-1688 surely?
Thanks, David!
Georgian ones I have been in. Did not know they started them in this period.
good stuff.
I assumed that terraced town houses emerged in London immediately after the Great Fire to preserve a unified, planned cityscape. So that there would not be a higgledy piggledy mess of different tastes and different qualities from different eras, before and after the Fire.
Of course there was an urgent need for new housing for the thousands of homeless families, but normally that means quick and nasty rebuilding. Clearly the new construction needed to be strictly regulated, to eliminate the factors which had made the Great Fire so horrible. But I cynically think that after most Royal Commissions, we just return to business as usual.
Aha, you are right to be cynical. A lot of these dwellings were indeed jerry-built, not a few of Barbon’s actually fell down at the time. He used huge gangs of labourers, many unskilled thugs not to put fine a word on it. Although the authorities achieved their two primary aims – to house people and to create a more fireproof environment – these properties were not especially admired down the ages. It is probably modern heritage sensibilities and the fact that these buildings survived the Blitz that makes us more sentimental about them than perhaps we should be.
I was having a smoke in my auntie’s (88) back garden yesterday. She has lived for over 50 years in a semi-detached council house built in the post-WWII housing boom. I couldn’t help noticing how incredibly well designed and built it was. Not especially pleasing aesthetically, it has barely been touched in terms of maintenance: it hasn’t needed it.
Council housing built just after both World Wats was built to better standards and there are many examples. In Tottenham the White Hart Lane Estate was built before and after WW1 and you can physically see the change in housing and open space.
We are also looking back to a time when Councils had their own direct labour forces.
The earlier examples were often built by local builders, not all as unscrupulous as Nicholas Barbon. In what is now Fitzrovia alongside the better known Goodge Brothers you had the likes of John Colvill, whose terrace of 1765 survives almost intact apart from V2 damage to the southern side towards end of WW2. It was not just the blitz that did the damage.
There are some particularly fine examples from the 1820’s which we look at on my Waterloo walk. The actual earliest examples I have come across are amongst the streets off Theobalds Road,
I was familiar with the basement plus garret pattern of houses for the well-to-do but had not known that there was a regulatory pattern to be followed, so that was very interesting.
We live in a Georgian terraced house ourselves (courtesy of Islington Council) and, of course, top and bottom floors have been converted into flats along with the middle floors.
During the refurbishment of our flat and, later, replacement of a staircase because of “fungus” (dry rot, probably), we were able to see some of the original building work. For example, the wall that separates our flat from the common hallway has woven wattle at its heart! I like the idea that work done by those builders, separated from me by several generations, has endured to the present day.
Doesn’t the 1630s extant row of terraced houses at Newington Green Hackney and the now lost Great Queen Street development off Lincolns Inn Fields suggest that the prototype of the standard regulated London house design was in existence long before the great fire? Therefroe the form of what became the ubiquitous Georgian terrace was evolving before the imposition of building regulations, (other than the ineffective ordances of James ! in realtion to the use of brick.)
Elizabeth McKellar argues in her book ‘The Making of Modern London’ that we tend to over look the contirbution of the houses built before the fire and in the restoration period in developing the plan and aesthetic of the typical London terrace house
Thanks, this makes perfect sense. I don’t suppose the brick terrace was as such invented by the Act or as a result of it. Perhaps it was a question of codifying approved existing designs and practices. I’m no expert on building costs, historical or otherwise, but I’m thinking maybe the “modern” brick structures cost more in both materials and manpower, pace Barbon’s jerry-building and his and others’ constant cash-flow difficulties. But then, overreaching oneself financially is a universal trait of the property developer to the present day.
The bricks would have been made on-site, a practice carried into the 20th century; I lived on a large Council estate in Edmonton that had been built n the 1920’s.
Bricks were in use before the Great Fire, it just hastened their use.
Builders bought plots of land and geting as many as possible in determined their shape etc.
The Building Acts referred in Mike’s oriignal post were part of on-going attempts by powers that be to regulate building.
I would also dispute us of term jerry builder here, that referred to much more inferior building, that did not survive long
Housing is integral part of my walks which explore London topography with aid of old maps.
Thanks, Ken, good input. Wasn’t suggesting that any extant housing today are of the jerry built type. All long gone centuries ago, of course. Saying that, many modern conversions are well dodgy, e.g. my own flat!
Mike you have started a really good discussion that has relevance both historically and to house people living in.
At some point it might make a good topic for one of your London Historian meetings, get a house historian along.