House History Tool – Architecture
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2. Materials
Our first step is to identify the materials that the external walls were built of. Before the Industrial Revolution brought canal and rail transportation, heavy building materials were usually sourced locally. Although you can see stone churches everywhere, in the Midlands and south-eastern England timber was particularly favoured for houses during the medieval period, right up to the middle of the seventeenth century.
Brick became popular for grand buildings in the fifteenth century and for smaller houses during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). Since then, brick has never been out of fashion, but timber soon fell from grace. As a general rule, eighteenth-century builders did not care for timber-framed houses because solid masonry was the substance of the buildings they admired: the surviving monuments of ancient Roman and Greece. They often clad medieval timber buildings with a thin layer of brickwork, or plaster incised to resemble stone blocks.
But the Victorians admired the medieval past, and created street after street of houses with fake timber framing: look out for the bare brickwork on the ground floor and applied timber above, its projecting pegs trying to kid you that these thin, black-painted planks are more than just a face-lift.
How do you tell if a timber-framed house lurks behind a later brick frontage?
You can see many example of medieval and Tudor timber houses with later-often Georgian (c. 1714-1830) - frontages along the high streets of cities and market towns. The clue is in the arrangement of the windows. During the seventeenth century, house builders came to prefer a regular array of windows to suit their classical tastes. So, if they align horizontally and vertically, the house was probably built from scratch, during the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. But if the windows are misaligned and of different sizes, then you’re probably looking at a window pattern created in the gaps between the medieval structural timbers. If the Georgians were to chop new windows through the structure, the house might collapse.
