Hidden House History

Various

Many streets in truly old towns and villages will represent constant changes and rebuildings over time, like at Corfe in Dorset.

Medieval -
Elizabethan

Most of the Britain’s houses were built of timber until the eighteenth century. This street in York demonstrates the effects that overhanging timber jetties achieved during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries.

Tudor

Later timber-framed facades become very complex: this is due to a taste for extra decoration rather than a need for extra structure. The Feathers at Ludlow is a classic example.

Early Georgian

Early Georgian facades are extremely orderly. Look at the way the doors are regimented, each flanked by two windows. The curved window heads are also classic for c. 1690-1730.

Mid Georgian

Mid Georgian houses were influenced by illustrated pattern books that promoted stylish features. These extravagant ‘rustications’ can be found on a house of c. 1740 in Stamford.

Victorian

The Victorians rejected the formulaic arrangements for Georgian doors and put them side-by-side, so now terraced houses were set as pairs in mirror-images.

Victorian

Well-to-do mid-Victorian houses were set upon basements which served as kitchens. Servants often slept in the restricted attic spaces. Finely-moulded doors and bay windows emphasise the smart living rooms of the owner

Later Victorian

Later Victorian mansion blocks epitomise city living on high-value plots. The absence of a garden is compensated by balconies, whilst patterned windows enliven the surface. Here, the fashionable material of terracotta is used in a Marylebone example.

1930s

After the 1920s, the modernist trend in architecture sought to strip away the nineteenth-century taste for ornament. These 1930s flats in Highgate, London, are enlivened by sweeping, streamlined curves.

1960s

After World War II, the Brutalist movement sought to emphasis the structure and plain materials of grid-like buildings. The need to accommodate large numbers quickly created a stacked aesthetic wherein all the services are vertically aligned.