We’ve been spending the summer at our holiday home in Ramsgate. It was built
in 1842, nine years before our main home in Pimlico, London, though you
might not think so. Ramsgate’s terraces are not flat-chested, as they would
have been in 1750 or 1850; instead they ripple with late-Regency curves, in
the shape of bow windows and jaunty ironwork verandas. A number of them are
organised around the town’s unique contribution to town planning: the
“lawn”. Ours is in Guildford Lawn, a less rousing name than Nelson Crescent
or the Plains of Waterloo, though not so full of itself as the Paragon.
They tell you a lot about a place, names, but so do the properties that line
the neat streets. Every house has a story to impart, and every embellishment
and blemish reflects the history of the domestic home in England, our
tastes, obsessions, budget and ambitions.
Take the humble brick. England has more houses built in that material than
wood or stone. When I looked into brickmaking for my new book, The English
House: The Story of a Nation at Home, I found there was more to it than met
the eye. I’m not thinking here of the different grades of brick, with their
fantastic names: malms, pickings, grizzles and shuffs. Rather, the dreadful
life of the brickmakers.
It was a seasonal trade (they couldn’t work during the hard frosts of a
Victorian winter), forcing families to toil like slaves in summer. In both
Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son and Antho-ny Trollope’s The Last Chronicle
of Barset, the roughest characters are brickmakers: men drunk for days,
their women and children pressed into service carrying clay. All old houses
have secrets; one of them is that their walls, in many cases, are built of
misery.
Through a choice of 20 favourite houses, from palaces to prefabs, my book
tells the story of how we have lived over the past millennium and how our
homes have changed. Take the coming of the canals and then the railways. It
changed English architecture by making it possible to shuttle industrially
produced building materials around the country. Before 1750, most houses
were built of what was easiest to transport and work. Often that meant wood.
In the Middle Ages, not only houses, but also furniture, clogs and toys were
made from it. Carpenters practised a “geometrical mystery” and enjoyed a
high status: Chaucer’s carpenter in his Canterbury Tales rides along with a
silver-mounted knife.
The first house rescued by the National Trust, the Clergy House at Alfriston,
in East Sussex, was a modest timber-framed hall, built for a yeoman.
Hundreds of similar homes were built in the southeastfollowing the Black
Death.
Fyfield Hall, in Essex, one of the oldest inhabited houses in England, is
timber-framed. Some of the beams date from 1167, but Fyfield is a rarity:
wood is vulnerable to rot. Stone endures. Plenty of early stone houses, such
as the chamber block of the Norman manor at Boothby Pagnell in Lincolnshire,
built in the late 12th century, are still with us. Their disproportionate
number reflects their better survival rate. They belonged to what the artist
Eric Gill called “a handmade world . . . in which all things were made one
by one”.
Builders, however, will be builders, and some workmanship, even of Bath’s
elegant stone-built houses, wasn’t all it might have been. A character in
Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker inveighs against the
“adventurers” who rushed up dwellings that were “contriv’d without
judgement, executed without solidity [and] built so slight that I should
never sleep quietly”. Ramsgate is even flimsier; many of the brick houses
there are covered in a plaster coating that was originally used to ape the
effect of ashlar, but could also, in unscrupulous hands, cover up a
multitude of sins. Just as Pimlico was a reduced version of Belgravia, which
then struggled to achieve even middle-class status, so Ramsgate was a cheap
and cheerful version of Brighton.
Queen Victoria enjoyed childhood holidays beside the Ramsgate sands, but the
truth must out: she also contracted typhoid. Drains were to be a Victorian
preoccupation. And there were other things about Ramsgate that may have
elicited a grimace. It was occupied by the unrecognised “wife” of one of her
rackety uncles. Opium addicts such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wilkie
Collins added to the raffish tone.
Morals were getting caught up with everything, including architecture. Only a
few years after Guildford Lawn arose, Ramsgate opened its doors to a
high-minded gothic architect and propagandist, AWN Pugin. A leading
proponent of the gothic revival, he favoured “pointed architecture”, as he
called it, as the only true style. The movement began in the 1700s as an
offshoot of the picturesque style, which bore fruit in the Regency, in
buildings such as Endsleigh Cottage – the Duke of Bedford’s
honeysuckle-festooned escape.
For Pugin, columns and pediments spelt extraneous ornament and deceit. “Our
good old St John’s, St Peter’s and St Mary’s streets, are becoming Belle-vue
Places, Adelaide Rows, Apollo Terraces, and Royal Circuses,” he moaned. If
anywhere typified the Regency descent, it was Ramsgate. In defiance, Pugin
began the Grange in 1843 to live in with his family and, at times, their
priest. The house was triumphantly restored in 2006.
Respect for old buildings is another theme of my book. John Ruskin believed
ancient structures told the story of the people who made them. His own
house, Brantwood, in the Lake District, is strangely ugly for such an
aesthete; but he built it to be looked out of (I once took a dip in his
bathtub, which has a wonderful view of Coniston Water).
Ruskin’s ideals were, in turn, absorbed by William Morris and the Arts and
Crafts movement. By 1900, there had been a return to local materials. The
architect Edwin Lutyens, who rejoiced in idiosyncrasy, designed Marsh Court
in the Test valley, in Hampshire. It was probably the first house for
centuries to be built of clunch, a kind of chalk, and its white walls
shimmer like a vision from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.
Elveden Hall, in Suffolk, remodelled by Edward VII’s friend the Guinness peer
Lord Iveagh, seems about as far removed from this world as could be
imagined. The centrepiece is a dizzying Indian hall made of marble,
practically a hymn to the Empire. Yet it shows a devotion to authenticity,
having been designed with the help of Sir Caspar Pur-don Clarke, director of
the V&A. It must be one of the coldest rooms ever built, but the rest of
the house achieved a previously unattainable level of comfort.
After a century or so, the Arts and Crafts deference towards the past and
Elveden’s concern for authenticity filtered down to Ramsgate and Pimlico,
which, though hardly the sort of places Morris would have admired, have been
(Pimlico), or are in the process of being (Ramsgate), restored. Perhaps this
points the way to the future. The terraced house has proved to be one of the
most adaptable of building types. And as we become ever more environmentally
aware, we need buildings that last. + Clive Aslet is editor at large of
Country Life.
The English House: The Story of a Nation at Home is published by Bloomsbury,
at £20. It is available at The Sunday Times BooksFirst price of £18 (inc p&p)
on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
Aslet’s favourite five
1. The Clergy House, Alfriston, East Sussex
This modest timber-framed hall, built for a yeoman, was the first house to be
rescued by the National Trust
2. Marsh Court, Hampshire
A fairy palace, in dazzling white clunch (chalk), the house is an extreme
example of the devotion to local materials that was part of the Arts and
Crafts movement
3. Elveden Hall, Suffolk
Built originally for Maharajah Duleep Singh, then more than doubled in size by
the Guinness peer Lord Iveagh, it includes a spectacular white-marble Indian
hall – a tribute to the Empire at its zenith
4. Endsleigh Cottage, Devon
In 1811, the 6th Duke of Bedford built this rustic-style home, or cottage
orné as a retreat from formal Woburn: he shot pheasants; the
duchess fished; their children romped. Humphry Repton was seriously ill
while designing the landscape and had to be carried over the countryside,
but he thought it one of his best designs
5. The Grange, Ramsgate, Kent
Pugin’s bare-brick gesture of defiance to Ramsgate’s stucco-clad terraces was
not popular: sturdy doors and vast shutters, instoutest oak, turned this
Englishman’s home into his castle
