Holland Park Living
Influences on the construction of London houses
Architectural styles came and went with superficial impact on the standard Georgian house. The basic layout and construction did not change dramatically throughout the Victorian period. Partly this was because the design worked. Partly it was because stringent building regulations limited how builders and architects could modify the design. Changes which occurred mainly came about as a result of improved manufacturing methods.
After the Fire of London in 1666, the Rebuilding Act of 1667 was passed to impose fire regulations and building standards for new London houses. There were to be four permitted house types: from two storey houses to “houses of the greatest bigness”. In the better type of houses - houses which fronted streets as opposed to slum alleys - the lower floors had to be 10 feet high, and the upper floors 9 feet high. Cellars and garrets had to be 6½ feet high. No house could be built less than 14 feet in width. The most expensive terraced properties could be up to 30 feet wide. Large detached houses for the most wealthy could be much larger.
To reduce fire risk, the use of timber in new houses was severely limited. No wood could be placed within one foot of the front of a chimney. Timber was banned inside walls round chimney flues. The flues serving the fireplaces were required to be placed inside party walls, back to back with the fireplace of the next house, to save space. Better quality houses were required to have an external balcony at the first floor level.
The Act banned timber from the outside of all houses, and required walls to be made of brick or stone. Such houses would be far more durable than timbered lath and plaster houses of Tudor and Jacobean times. That is why if you look at the residential areas London it is as if houses were invented by the Georgians.
As a result the basic Georgian terrace house emerged, brick fronted or stone clad, with a metal balcony at the first floor level. Brick houses in terraces was a creation of the Georgian age. The earliest Georgian terraces were uniform in style and symmetrical in layout. The façades incorporated classical pilasters, doors and windows crowned with pediments, and decorative mouldings. In the 1720s the “palace fronted terrace” came into fashion. The whole terrace was treated as one composition, with a long stuccoed front elevation with pilasters at intervals and a central pediment over the houses in the middle.
One of the earliest of the terraced estates in the Chelsea area was Hans Town, built by Henry Holland (1745 – 1816) from 1771 onwards. Earlier Georgian facades were brick. But in later decades stucco often replaced exposed brick, covering the entire façade, or merely the ground and basement levels. By the end of the 18th century the basic terrace had been developed into new shapes such as crescents and with some houses projecting beyond the line of the terrace. Nash’s terraces in Regent’s Park in the 1810s and 1820s marked a return to an unbroken line but he chose to cover the entire façade with painted stucco.
The earliest pre-Georgian terraced houses had just one room to each floor. So if the frontage was 24 feet wide, the house was usually 24 feet deep. In Georgian times, the standard design of a terraced house changed to the double-pile house, meaning the house was two rooms deep on each floor.
In 1707, fire precautions were strengthened by banning external wooden cornices, and in 1709 the boxes for sash windows had to be recessed at least 4 inches from the outer face of the wall.
The Building Act of 1774 classified new houses into 4 “rates” depending on the value of the house. Each type had its own structural rules. (The poor were not to be protected as well as the rich were.)
“First rate” houses had to have a minimum floor space of 900 square feet. “Second rate” houses could be between 500 and 900 square feet. For “third rate” it was 350 to 500 square feet and for “fourth rate” it was a minimum of 350 square feet. But although the minimum size of a house was specified, there was no restriction on the number of people who could live there.
The 1774 Act introduced more detailed restrictions on window frames, timber work and cornices, as a further protection against the risk of fire. No house was allowed to feature any woodwork on the exterior except where strictly necessary for doors or windows; and window frames had to be recessed behind masonry.
In 1696 a Window Tax had been introduced which taxed the owners of houses which had more than a certain number of windows. In 1766 the number of windows which triggered the tax was reduced to 7; and in 1784, it was reduced to 6. If you see period houses in London with the window openings bricked up, it may have been done at this time to avoid this tax. But sometimes it is a genuine architectural effect. If a real window would have been structurally impossible because of some internal feature like a flue behind it, a blind window in the form of a recess was often built into the facade to maintain the harmony with the real windows.
A Brick Tax was also imposed in 1784 to fund the fight against the Americans in the War of Independence. The tax was originally 2 shillings and 6 pence per 1,000 bricks (increased to 5 shillings in 1784). Builders responded by using larger bricks. The tax was also an encouragement to cover the front of a house in stucco, which became a regular feature of Georgian houses, because it concealed the bricks.
In most Georgian terraces, the road at the front was built up to be near the level of the ground floor of the house. There was a basement which was at the previous genuine ground level, and which opened onto the garden at ground level at the rear. At the front, there was an open area to allow light into the basement windows, with railings to prevent people falling into the area.
Later, it was realised that an annexe could be built at the back of the house at garden level to provide additional room space without blocking the light from the main “ground” floor rooms.
In early Georgian times it was normal for the ground floor to be for services and servants' accommodation and the first floor was the main floor or piano nobile. But in the Regency period the ground floor became the main family floor.
Victorian architecture became progressively more exuberant. The classical model was thrown off in favour of a revival of mediaeval Gothic. These changes in architectural fashion were often not reflected in London house building, or at least not immediately. Houses in the earlier Georgian style continued to be built in the Regency period and many streets of Neo-Classical or Regency houses were in fact built well into the Victorian era. In many ways, new building codes and taxes had as much, or more, impact on the design of what we now call “period houses”
