an architectural history

edward denison & GuanG yu ren

the life of the British home

an architecturaL histOry

edward denisOn & GuanG yu ren

the Life Of the British hOme

12 sticks and stOnes

the ancient aBOde frOm the stOne aGe tO rOman invasiOn

30 rOman hOmes and the newfanGLed rectanGLe

rOman Britain ad 43–410

48 wOOden waLLs and fLedGLinG haLLs

anGLO-saxOn and vikinG Britain c ad 410–1066

64 the hearth and haLL

medievaL Britain 1066–1485

8 intrOductiOn

cOntents

106 architecture and avarice

the tudOrs and earLy stuarts 1485–1649

164 the cOmpact cOmmOdity

civiL war and fOur GeOrGes 1649–c 1830

220 hOme sweet hOme?

the industriaL aGe c 1830–1910

264 the ‘mOdern’ hOme

the 20th century and BeyOnd

290 BiBLiOGraphy

298 index

302 featured sites

304 picture credits

8 the Life Of the British hOme

9

the Life Of the British hOmeintrOductiOn

10 the Life Of the British hOme

… our dwelling houses in our life are only Inns, wherein wee staie but for a time, but there we shal dwel as in our proper & natural lodging unto the last day.

James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man, Joseph Barnes, Oxford, 1607, p 130

Home – no other word possesses a meaning that is so indistinct yet so universal. Defining our sense of place, home might be anything from a physical structure – the rural dwelling of a peasant farmer or the town house of an aristocratic lord – to an elusive idea: the memory of a medieval hall or the pervasive pull of rural retreat. This story about the British home is a journey through the life of the physical structure and in particular its plan; it is more about space than place – how the area defined by the walls and covered by the roof evolved over the thousands of years since humankind on this island off the coast of mainland Europe ceased being nomadic and chose to settle. It explores examples from the kaleidoscopic variety of types from the earliest known dwellings to the 21st-century ‘eco home’.

While the journey offers views of how we have styled, decorated and filled our homes and the consequences of amassing these homes to form villages, towns and cities, it is primarily an exploration of the arrangement of space within the home and how it evolved in response to our shifting needs and changing conditions. It reveals the spaces that define home – the rooms that we have created to help us pursue our private, social and commercial interests over millennia and the fascinating solutions that we came up with in seeking the seemingly simple but ever elusive notions of comfort and convenience.

This story about the life of the British home charts its way through the dominant types and trends of house planning. It begins in the fourth millennium BC and ends at the dawn of the third millennium AD. For guidance along the way, it gives voice only to characters from each era and relies exclusively on examples that are both still extant and publicly accessible, with the exception of streetscapes and multiple-occupancy housing, where many homes are gathered in a single building. This deliberate proviso is designed to enable you, the reader, to experience these remarkable homes beyond the printed page by discovering them for yourself and finding out how these individual sites fit into the wider landscape of our nation’s domestic history. From the earliest known settlements on the remote Orkney Islands to some of the largest residential blocks in Europe, almost every example illustrated in this journey can be visited and most can be explored inside and out.

The journey does not claim or seek to be encyclopaedic by attempting the impossible task of illustrating all types of home

the southwest elevation of wollatonhall, nottinghamshire, commissioned by sir francis willoughby and completed in 1588.

11 intrOductiOn

from all periods, but looks instead for what shaped defining or dominant trends in home planning in each period and, in particular, originality, novelty and innovation. Consequently, the Stone Age roundhouse can claim equivalence with the medieval hall as much as the Tudor mansion shares the limelight with the Victorian apartment block, or the Georgian terrace with the Modernist villa. Examples of all these and many other types of home are illustrated throughout this journey, depicted either as photographs to reveal how they appear today or as diagrammatic plans and illustrations to explain how they appeared when they were built.

John Ruskin, the 19th-century writer and art critic, claimed ‘there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture’. If this is so, then the British home is either beneath architecture or a symptom of amnesia. Both, to some extent, are valid. The nation’s spiritual homes, its cathedrals and churches, enjoy ample appreciation, and the former homes of the powerful and prosperous – the palaces, castles, and mansions – are resoundingly revered, leaving the more humble home comparatively and conspicuously overlooked. The homes of the wealthy few, though legendary, are significant on this journey for their role as pioneers that others emulated, but they were far from being the only examples and even further from being the most common. As William Morris, the designer, writer and admirer of Ruskin, said: ‘they differ only in size from the little grey house[s] ... that form the mass of our architectural treasures, the houses that everyday people lived in’. On this journey it is not any single house but the wider idea of home that is given the spotlight, since home is what we all share in common, whether a peasant’s cottage, tenant’s flat, suburbanite’s terrace, city-dweller’s town house, aristocrat’s apartment, lord’s manor, or royal’s palace.

12 the Life Of the British hOme

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sticks and stOnesthe ancient aBOde frOm the stOne aGe tO rOman invasiOn

14 the Life Of the British hOme

Home. There was, quite literally, no place like it until our ancestors switched from a nomadic life of hunting and gathering to a settled life of domesticity sustained by agriculture. During this transition, which took thousands of years, dwellings replaced mere shelters and their habitation heralded the home. In Britain, the origins of the home can be traced to the New Stone Age, or Neolithic period (c 6000–c 2500 BC), which began around the time that Britain finally became an island cast adrift from mainland Europe by the rising tide of Ice Age meltwater. The consequent development of the home on this island realm traverses nearly six thousand years of history: from isolated Stone Age dwellings built on Britain’s periphery in the 4th millennium BC to the highest homes in Europe, built in the 3rd millennium AD, that tower over the nation’s capital, one of the largest cities on earth. Launching us on this journey to explore the life of the British home are the earliest examples – the places and spaces in which our settled ancestors, whose forebears had only known how to roam, could call home.

The retreat of nomadism throughout the Neolithic Age and the emergence of permanent or semi-permanent settlements signalled not only the birth of the British home but also the pursuit of agriculture and the taming and organisation of the landscape during the Bronze Age (c 2500–c 700 BC). Agriculture, in turn, brought about important social and economic transformations in the Iron Age (c 800 BC–c AD 100). Throughout the thousands of years of early history that are parcelled into the fathomable portions of Stone, Bronze and Iron, the British home was born and flourished.

ceLLuLar settLements

The perceived primitiveness of prehistoric dwellings in Britain belies their importance as the first manifestation of the home. The ancient inhabitants of this island were anything but incompetent at construction. Their concerted efforts to undertake ambitious building projects outside the domestic realm were immense and predate many early types of homes. Britain is peppered with hundreds of burial mounds and other sites devoted to rituals, such as Maes Howe in Orkney and, most famously, Stonehenge in Wiltshire, both of which were built in the 3rd millennium BC. The construction of these monumental sites required exceptional devotion to an ideological cause and an unprecedented level of social cohesion and organisation, whereas the emergence of the first settled homes on mainland Britain was consequent on something far more practical – the production of food.

The gradual process of human settlement and the development of agriculture began in remote areas of Britain where there was less competition for resources. Britain’s first farmsteads were

the interior of a large roundhouse at Butser ancient farm, hampshire, modelled on the excavations at Little woodbury, wiltshire.

15 sticks and stOnes

established at the very limits of the British Isles, on the Orkney and Shetland Islands, where the first known permanent dwellings were built. In this bleak setting and battered for thousands of years by some of the most hostile weather on earth, stands the Knap of Howar, a domestic structure that is not only the oldest home in Britain, but also the oldest standing building in Northern Europe. Dating from the mid-4th millennium BC, this conjoined farmstead predates the earliest Egyptian pyramid by one millennium.

Like the pyramids, the Knap of Howar was built from stone and therefore has survived virtually intact while other structures built from perishable materials that predominate throughout much of the British Isles have long since vanished. Ghostly shadows of postholes on aerial photographs are all that remain of the largest known Neolithic dwelling in Britain – the huge 24-metre-long and 12-metre-wide rectangular wooden structure built at Balbridie (Aberdeenshire). Consequently, the Knap of Howar and other Neolithic sites on the Orkney and Shetland Islands represent a historical treasure trove – a virtual time machine that reveals to those living in the 3rd millennium AD the layout of rooms, formulation of space and even the type and function of furniture of those living in the 4th millennium BC.

Other similarly enlightening homes can be found nearby, including the slightly later dwellings at Skara Brae. Built in the late 4th millennium BC and inhabited until the mid-3rd millennium BC, Skara Brae was not the home of a nuclear family but a sprawling residence for up to fifty people with sufficient numbers of dwellings to form a settlement – one of the first settled farming communities in Britain.

› the plan of the entire settlement at skara Brae, Orkney, built in the late 4th millennium Bc and inhabited until the mid-3rd millennium Bc.