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Reviews
| The Small House in Eighteenth-Century London: A Social and Architectural History. By Peter Guillery. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press and English Heritage for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2004. vii+351 pp., 220 b/w and 50 color illus., maps, diags., notes, appen., bibl., index. $60 hb (ISBN 0-300-10238-0).
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Those who have spent countless hours working on historic preservation inventories, gathering historical data, filling out forms, and taking photographs may find themselves wondering about the future of all their data. Is the right kind of information being compiled? Where will the material be stored? Who will use the data? Peter Guillery, a veteran architectural surveyor for the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England, better known as English Heritage, knows how to answer those questions. He used English Heritage surveys of domestic properties in London to create a highly detailed, 300-page study that is narrowly defined (temporally, geographically, and architecturally) and lavishly illustrated.
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A champion of vernacular or "traditional" houses, Guillery is put off by previous architectural histories of 18th-century London that concentrated solely on style and emphasized aristocratic, or as he terms it, "polite" architecture. He writes not just about houses but also about their occupants. He has limited himself to "the bottom half of the top half, broadly definable as made up of artisans, that is skilled tradespeople and their families" (p. 1). This means that his focus is on southern and eastern London and not the wealthier western and northern districts better known to tourists
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He opens his study by setting the geographic and architectural contexts. By the 18th century, London was western Europe's largest city, and it housed 70% of England's urban population. Guillery estimates that fully one-quarter of the people living in the city, or about 100,000, would have been defined as artisans. This was greater than the number of household heads in any other English community. Furthermore, the city continued to grow An estimated 80,000 new houses were built in the city during the century. London's most important industries of this era included silk, leather and metalworking; shipbuilding; furniture, hat, and coach making; and brewing. Importantly, Guillery notes that much industrial labor happened not in factories but in domestic structures.
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Guillery defines "small" as houses with a frontage of less than 20 feet. A critical assumption by the author is that artisan houses would have been backward looking, conservative rather than innovative. An emphasis on verticality over depth in domestic architecture can be explained by the need for light, especially in work areas. A need for light also explains a recurring pattern of small facade windows, meant to illuminate stairwells. In setting this architectural context, the author demonstrates how much previous studies have overemphasized uniformity and neglected the surprising variety of house forms that existed in 18th-century London.
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The chapters that focus on centers for specific trades are particularly appealing for industrial archaeologists: silk weaving at Spitalfields and Bethnal Green; tanning and hatmaking at Southwark and Bermondsey; and shipbuilding at Deptford and Woolwich.
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Silk working, in the form of weaving, winding, and dying, was among London's largest 18th-century industries. In this industry, work was done in buildings meant both as residences and work places. In contrast to past assessments that suggested the work was limited to the upper floors, Guillery asserts that the vertical buildings he discovered were sized to fit looms on every floor. Distinctive fenestration in the form of broad weaver's windows can still be seen scattered throughout the upper floors of the Spitalfields and Bethnal Green districts.
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South of London Bridge and across the Thames River is Southwark, the city's primary 18th-century suburb. This was London's "scrap-heap," home to the city's prisons and human rejects as well as noxious industries like tanneries and leather-based productions such as hatmaking. Its low-lying marshes, fed by tidal streams, proved perfect for small-scale tanners whose pits were "filled to the brink with a dark, chocolate-coloured, thick liquid" (p. 125).
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Timber, obtained from local shipping wharves, became the predominant housing material in the absence of good clay deposits for bricks and where relatively soft ground required lighter weight timber framing. Use of wood continued even after the Building Act of 1707 made it illegal, although efforts were also made here and elsewhere to conceal timber-framed buildings behind brick facades. This was the area whose dilapidated wooden buildings inspired Charles Dickens's architectural pejoratives in Oliver Twist. A handful of actual examples still stand in the more eastern district of Bermondsey, but Guillery makes good use of historic artwork and extensive earlier architectural surveys, some dating as far back as the turn of the 20th century, to construct a comprehensive view. What he found in this area was a persistent resistance to the symmetrical architectural fashion of the wealthier Londoners north of the river and a wide variety of irregular, although traditional, vernacular housing. Like many of the houses pictured in the volume, nearly all of these are simply noted as "demolished." Guillery wants to make the case, not only that these houses once existed and have been ignored by architectural historians but, more critically, that their existence has importance for understanding the whole and should matter to modern investigators.
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Deptford and Woolwich were communities that stood apart from other London districts because of their royal shipyards and other military-industrial associations. The shipwrights who lived here were better educated and independent minded and, as highly skilled craftsmen, tended toward collectivism. A traditional form of in-kind payment allowed these workmen to take home waste timber or "chips" from the yards. Because these men (and, in several cases, women) also built houses, massive curved ship ribs ended up as house-frame braces. Ship carvers also executed their skills on the wooden consoles surmounting numerous doorways in these districts. Of the many central chimney houses that can be documented, relatively few survive, which Guillery speculates was due to the difficulty of adapting such buildings for shops or other uses demanding open circulation. Despite the assumption that 18th-century builders insisted on symmetrical classicism, here builders used it only for decoration. These craftsmen were comparatively well-to-do, but when dealing with their own houses, they found greater comfort and reassurance in the past than in the latest architectural fashions.
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Guillery offers a few comparisons of London's 18th-century houses with vernacular houses in other maritime and industrial communities, including several in "English" North America. Oval windows on facades to light staircases are found in the Netherlands, and Manchester houses recall those in London's silk district. A need exists, the author suggests, for other comparative studies. I recognize a lot of the details from my own early-19th-century braced-frame house in central Ohio in the numerous wooden finishes and frames pictured in Guillery's volume.
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By the end of the 18th century, a number of factors conspired to bring an end to the small vernacular house in London. Key among them was a variety of city laws that forced conformity on artisan builders, in particular the Building Act of 1774," aimed at eliminating "despicable cottages" of wood, once and for all. Demolition for the public good became possible and promoted the concept of a standardized urban improvement under individuals like George Dance, the clerk of city works after 1768, and the architect John Gwynn, an advocate for cleaning up London's built environment. Middle-class developers eventually found economic incentives to rid the city of what early-19th-century residents identified, for the first time, as "slums." London's enduring vernacular architecture, a backward looking phenomenon, could no longer withstand the onslaught of modernity, progress, and classicism.
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| Guillery's highly detailed treatment is insightful, comprehensive, and, at times, absorbing. The production qualities of the volume are excellent and help to soften what is an otherwise daunting cover price. The volume is bound to become a standard reference for those interested in understanding London's architectural history in its larger societal context. |
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