South Kensington Living
Town house
The typical London town house was established during the Georgian period and remained more-or-less unchanged until the last quarter of the 19th century. Town houses were built in terraces. There would be a basement with 3 to 5 floors above. The façade would be brick faced, with plain inset sash windows and doors. Many such houses still exist in Bloomsbury and St Marylebone which were areas developed for occupation by the increasing middle-class population long before London expanded to rural Kensington.
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.
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.
By the time Kensington was being built in the mid-19th century the typical house was becoming fully stuccoed. As the Victorian era progressed, and as building moved further out of London to areas where land prices were relatively low, builders also began to build individual or paired villas with gardens. The town house was intended as just that, but as the builders transported the basic design to rural areas, they would sometimes make the concession of a small front garden between the pavement and the basement area.
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”.
