THE EARLIEST HOUSE so far discovered in Britain is around 10,500 years old; archaeologists found it at a site near Scarborough. It represents the first point at which a settled domestic existence can be identified for people living in the British Isles. Like much traditional British housing, the walls of the Scarborough building had a structure made from a material close at hand: timber. This has been, and continues to be, a staple of domestic construction, even though the ways in which wood was used have changed and developed. Building with timber occurred in nearly all areas, though traditions were naturally much stronger where woodland was plentiful. Sparsely wooded areas, like the Scottish islands, inevitably used timber more selectively. Where timber was not the primary structural material, a different method of constructing walls was required. Building with earth or stone was the usual alternative, though brick grew in popularity as production methods developed. Common approaches to construction exist across Britain, but the materials available locally and the craft traditions involved in their use have shaped the character of regions and localities.
This book offers an introduction to the wide variety of materials and techniques used for the construction of Britain’s traditional buildings. It focuses on housing, and specifically on its most fundamental elements: walls and roof coverings. All building materials, however innovative at first, become ‘traditional’ if they are used in similar ways over a considerable period. For the purposes of this book the term is applied to walling and roofing materials in well-established use before the twentieth century. The period around 1900 was a transitional point in construction before new materials and methods, such as concrete blockwork, cavity walling and damp proof courses became widespread. Although materials such as brick and stone have continued to play a role in modern cavity walled buildings, this book looks at earlier traditions where earth and masonry formed solid walls, and substantial timbers were used to create a structural framework. For much of the past, thatch was the material normally used to cover house roofs, with stone slates or lead sheets reserved for the buildings of the wealthy or where manufacture was local. Fired clay tiles and materials like Welsh slate took off when production and transportation allowed.
Pembridge, Herefordshire, c. 1900, with a rich mix of brick, timber framing, thatch, stone roofing tiles, plaster and limewash.
A large team of builders from the early twentieth century, wearing flat caps not hard hats. Note also the use of timber scaffolding.
Traditional masonry walling involved solid wall construction, without damp proof courses or deep foundations (left). From the mid-late nineteenth century, modern cavity wall construction began to be introduced (right). The arrows indicate the movement of rainwater and ground moisture.
The ways in which traditional building materials have been used across Britain are often as recognisable as a regional accent. The steeply pitched thatched roofs of East Anglia are distinct from the shallow sloped, stone slate coverings of the Pennines. The softly rounded earth walls of Devon contrast with the crisply cut sandstone of Edinburgh. But whether Upland or Lowland, rural or urban, inland or coastal, all areas have made practical use of the materials to hand, with little waste. Thatching materials were the by-product of the harvest, and in rural areas field stones, which were a nuisance to agriculture, could be removed and recycled for house walls or for the plinth at the base of earth or timber buildings. In all areas the basic purpose of housing was to offer shelter from the variable and sometimes hostile climate. As one rental book of 1698 from Warwickshire noted, ‘the Great Lord of Heaven and Earth hath reserved such a power in his hand that he can and doth att his pleasure send a cold winterly season in the midest of the Spring.’ Provision for heavy rain was made in most parts of Britain, with the roof overhanging the walls at the eaves and materials like earth and timber kept off damp ground. Richard Carew noted in 1602, in his Survey of Cornwall, that ‘as for Brick and Lath walls, they can hardly brooke the Cornish weather, and the use thereof being put in trial by some, was found so unprofitable, as it is not continued by any.’ Traditional construction might almost be viewed as a form of natural selection. Builders around the country evolved techniques that allowed the materials available to be used in ways that could withstand local environmental conditions. On the west coasts of Wales and Scotland straw ropes weighted with stones helped keep the thatch in place against fierce winds; and lime or clay renders were frequently applied to protect exteriors.
A sixteenth-century carved oak bench end from north Devon depicting builder’s ladder and axe.
Sydney R. Jones’s depiction of England’s geology and the materials used for building, 1912. Jones accepted the drawing worked only ‘roughly and broadly’. It does not indicate use of earth in building.
An owner’s inclination was naturally to build as well as possible within available resources, but good building practice might be undermined if other factors had an influence over the construction process. Among them were speculative building and tenancy agreements with short lease periods. As John Smith said in his 1798 General View of the Agriculture of the County of Argyll ‘the landlords, without giving sufficiently long leases ... are disposed to throw all the burden on the tenant, except giving him, perhaps, the timber for the roof.’ There was clearly no incentive to build well, at your own expense, if the results might be removed at the landlord’s whim.
Houses required substantial quantities of material for their construction and repair. It was not uncommon for timbers or masonry to be recycled from earlier buildings. Reused timbers are often betrayed by the presence of redundant joints; slender, salvaged Roman bricks are sometimes found in Saxon and Norman structures. If reusable materials were not available, new materials would have to be obtained. Today, a global market is provided through every local builder’s merchants, with materials like slate and stone available cheaply from India or China. This easy supply has inevitably eroded the degree of local distinctiveness that traditional building materials once brought. In the late seventeenth century, when visiting a town in an unfamiliar part of the North, Celia Fiennes ‘thought its buildings were all of brick, but after found it to be the coullour of the stone which I saw in the quarries ...’ Local distinctiveness was inevitably more marked at the lower end of the social spectrum where the cost of transportation could be afforded least well. Poorer builders in rural locations would make use of any cheap and serviceable material on their (potential) doorstep. Heather or ferns, for example, might be acquired from common land and used as a roof covering. Despite the limitation of road transport before the twentieth century, for wealthier owners there was always more scope for obtaining building materials from further afield. Stone might even be brought from places like Caen in France for the most prestigious commissions. Those able and willing to bear the cost often used waterways as the most practical means of transport and this use grew with industrialisation. There was a tax on slate carried by sea until 1831, yet despite this it has been estimated that by the late eighteenth century 12,000 tons of slate per year were being shipped from Penhryn in North Wales. Rail transport brought further change. By 1864, 100,000 tons of Bath stone per year were being dispatched from Corsham station in Wiltshire. It could go to Birmingham for 1s 5d per cubic foot or as far as Newcastle for 2d more.
Yard of C. Bland & Son, Greetham, Rutland with salvaged, historic architectural materials incorporated in the building.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought major change to transportation, allowing building materials to be carried over large distances at relatively small cost. Before, when carts and rough tracks were the norm, most building relied on materials obtained from the immediate locality.
Mechanisation and mass production gradually broadened the supply and use of some building materials but often at the expense of local traditions. By the late nineteenth century, for example, economies of scale, including new kiln technology, meant Bedfordshire’s small brickyards, which had typically employed under twenty workers, were ceasing to be viable. The benefit for builders was that mass-produced brick was cheap and more easily obtained. A shift to large scale, industrialised production altered the pattern of building material use but other changes were equally significant. Although materials such as earth walling and thatch had been used successfully for many generations, and could produce dry and comfortable homes, they started to be blamed for social problems. John Smith, arguing for agricultural improvement in the late eighteenth century wrote of ‘our common slovenly and incommodious buildings, ever needing repairs, and never right.’ Such criticisms marked a change in thinking about routine maintenance, which had previously been a normal expectation for occupiers. Thatch might need to be repaired or re-coated every season or two, and walls would require an annual coat of limewash. This had not proved problematic when people had time and the working calendar allowed. After the First World War, when manpower was particularly scarce, there was greater reason than ever to choose materials like Welsh slate, which was simpler to maintain, and cement-based products, which were easier to prepare and use.
Railwaymen at the Votty and Bowydd slate quarry, North Wales, 1952. Railways were crucial in creating a national market for heavy quarried materials. (Harry Townley Photograph, copyright Industrial Railway Society.)
Slate Quay, Caernarvon. Waterways had been used for transporting building materials since at least the medieval period. From the late eighteenth century sea, river and canal infrastructure allowed slate from north Wales to be sold across Britain.
A team of builders with aprons to protect clothing, some carrying the tools of their trades. Early twentieth century.
Building’s long establishment as a professional occupation is shown in surnames such as Carpenter, Mason or Pargetter. The building profession has always had its less reputable side, but the guild system within medieval towns, and long apprenticeships for many crafts, gave building high skill levels and status. Training was needed if a builder was to supply a ‘hansome, compleat, substantial, firm, and workmanlike’ house, as one eighteenth-century Cornish building contract put it. While it is myth that craftspeople today cannot produce traditional workmanship equivalent to that of the past, or that no comparable training exists, building as a skilled occupation is undoubtedly less respected than it once was. Even so, some specialist skills have always had to be imported. Just as experienced craftspeople from Poland and elsewhere have been sought in recent years, in the late-medieval period Flemish skills in newly fashionable brickwork were in demand. Often though, building was not highly specialised, but a part-time or semi-professional occupation. Construction based on traditional technology was largely seasonal, since earth building was vulnerable to rain damage and lime-based materials to frost. In rural areas in particular, seasonal building work was often linked to the agricultural year. Part-time involvement in building might even extend to the whole community. The tradition of the ‘one night house’ (or Ty Unnos in Wales) provided that if a dwelling could be put up overnight on manorial wasteland it would be permitted to remain. This required not only good preparation but also local voluntary effort.
Interior of a squatter’s cottage, c. 1800. The poorest often built their own dwellings using whatever was closest to hand. Here it was rough timber and earth, with the upright posts set directly into the ground.
Building in the past, whether professional or amateur, was predominantly a male task, but it would be wrong to consider it exclusively masculine. Women were involved in Lincolnshire brick making in the fifteenth century and in Oxford they were paid in the sixteenth century for collection of moss to be used in college roofing works. These may have been exceptions, but in rural communities women would routinely assist in tasks such as the preparation of thatch or earth for walls.
A woman and man carrying out work to a building in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, probably late nineteenth century. While traditional building may have been male-dominated it was never exclusive to men.
Traditional building materials vary greatly across Britain. This variety reveals much about the underlying geology of localities, and through their use in buildings these materials help illustrate the lives and aspirations of people of the past. Traditional building materials can be remarkably durable where properly maintained and, in contrast with many modern alternatives, tend to weather and patinate beautifully so that their character is enhanced by age.
Slate used with larger quoin stones in Cumbria. The mortar is set well back from the face of the slate, giving an appearance of dry stone construction.
