Chapter 2 Nuisance

Observers have employed a range of measures and shifting registers to assess the ugliness of the city of London over the centuries of its recorded existence. The vast number of these judgments have no doubt been ephemeral, passing from various degrees of intense feeling into the unrecorded experience of the city. Many such judgments, though, have been marked upon some type of historical record, visual, textual, or material, that produced a link between aesthetic experience, judgment, and the physical composition of the city itself. One such record is the rolls of the Assize of Nuisance, the medieval legal body delegated to adjudicate a specific category of conflicts between neighbors: nuisance. As formulated in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the category of nuisance referred to encroachments upon the proper use and enjoyment of one freehold property by a neighboring property. Not every instance of neighborly misconduct was in legal terms a nuisance; some might be annoying but permissible, others might be criminal and prosecutable. Nuisances were a civil matter, and, as heard and judged in the Assize of Buildings, they had a physical, architectural manifestation, consisting of encroachment over property lines, or dispersal of drainage outside of a lot, or misappropriation of party walls.¹

In June 1333, the Assize heard a complaint whose conflation of architectural arrangement and visual repulsion makes it stand out among the litany of complaints within the rolls:

325. Andrew de Aubrey and Joan his wife complain that whereas they possess an easement in the use of a cess-pit common to their tenement and those of Thomas Heyron and Joan relict of John de Armenters, and the same was enclosed by a party-wall (pariete) and roofed with joists and boards (bordis), so that the seats (cedilia) of the privies of the pls. and the others could not be seen, Joan de Armenters and William de Thorneye have removed the party-wall (clausturam) and roof so that the extremities of those sitting upon the seats can be seen, a thing which is abominable and altogether intolerable. Judgment, after the site has been viewed, that the defs. roof and enclose the cess-pit as it was before, under the penalty prescribed by the law and custom of the City in such cases.²

The records of the Assize contain no further detail or comment, so much is left to the imagination. But the relationship between two aspects of urban circumstance is clearly established. The privy was enclosed by a wall of brick or stone and a wooden roof, creating a private interior shielded from general or public view. The wall was held in common between two neighbors, a shared party wall to which each had a legal right and over which each had a say in terms of its use, appearance, and upkeep. The cesspit below the privy was also held jointly, a typical arrangement in medieval London. But for an uncertain motive, one of the neighboring parties (the defendants, Joan de Armenters and William de Thorneye) removed the party wall and the roof, exposing to view anyone using the privy and thus creating an “abominable and altogether intolerable” circumstance or, in short, ugliness.

The Assize granted judgment in favor of the plaintiff, requiring that the wall and roof be restored. In this case, as in other less dramatic cases heard at each assize, assessments were made concerning specifically physical attributes and architectural relationships of properties. Party walls were a recurrent concern. The Assize of Buildings stipulated rules for their shared construction and possession—the requisite criteria were that each property owner gave one and a half feet of land in order to construct a three-foot-wide stone wall sixteen feet in height. Apertures and window openings were also a point of contention and therefore of legal regulation, with the Assize ruling that an owner could not create an opening overlooking or looking into a neighbor’s house unless that opening was more than sixteen feet above the ground. The very same plaintiff and defendant from the case of the exposed privy appeared before the Assize with their roles reversed, to address a dispute about an aperture:

326. As regards the aperture which the same Andrew and Joan his wife made in their room over the cellar of John de Armenters, now held by William de Thorneye, through which his private business (secreta) can be seen by those in the room above, and concerning which Joan de Armenters and the above-named William have made complaint, it is adjudged by the mayor and aldermen that it be blocked up.³

Such nuisances appear with great frequency in the rolls of the Assize, which was compelled to visit the sites in question, oftentimes with masons and carpenters in tow to help with measurements and expert assessments of causes and effects.

Architecture thus became the central medium for the judgment of nuisance in London. Though the judgments were responsive, reacting to situations already set in place, the Assize also assembled prospective codifications of architecture intended, in part, to delimit the possibilities of nuisance at a future moment.⁴ Such codifications also aimed to improve the city more generally, curtailing its risks and prompting it toward more congenial states of coexistence. Overhangs and similar encroachments of beams or rafters upon public ways were proscribed, for example. Fire was a paramount risk, of course, to which the Assize responded with a directive that stone or brick be used for all party walls in the city. While enforced inconsistently, this directive nevertheless placed an emphasis on a particular materiality—that of masonry—which was to become responsible for an increasing scope of judgments within the city, first the judgment of nuisance in its medieval form, and subsequently in modern forms of nuisance. Stone and brick became in this process an instrument for negotiation and a register of the reciprocities of the city. (Figure 9)

Even for a city with buildings made of brick and stone, fire remained a threat, exacerbated by the number of wooden buildings, or brick buildings with thatch roofs, that persisted alongside and despite the regulatory structure of the city. In September 1666, the risk was realized as the Great Fire of London burned over the course of two days, reducing thousands of buildings to ash and rubble across the full extent of the City and even in areas beyond its walls. The rebuilding that followed consisted of separate endeavors: an administrative regime of surveys and ordinances; economic investments in rebuilding and in speculative development; and campaigns for the improvement of the appearance and arrangement of the city. The first of these endeavors was realized through a new parliamentary Act for the Rebuilding of the City of London, which established more precise provisions for new buildings in the city. One of the most important pertained to materials: “And in reguard the building with Bricke is not onely more comely and durable but alsoe more safe against future perills of Fire Be it further enacted by and with the Authoritie aforesaid That all the outsides of all Buildings in and about the said Citty be henceforth made of Bricke or Stone or of Bricke and Stone together.”⁵ Construction of doors, windows, and roofs as well as the positioning of framing within the structure and near chimneys were all accounted for in the articles of the act.

Standards or grades of house were specified also, each relating to an accompanying character of street such as “streets of note” or “high or principal streets.” These stipulations reflected the aim, also expressed in the act, to achieve a higher degree of order and regularity within the city.⁶ Surveying practices would play a part, but the outcome depended upon an architectural consequence, upon the projection of more consistency and propriety among individual building facades and along streets. This architectural consequence was pursued more emphatically in the several proposals for rebuilding the city put forward by leading figures such as Sir Christopher Wren, John Evelyn, and others in the aftermath of the fire. These unrealized designs addressed the plan of the city as a whole, rather than its individual buildings, and sought to take advantage of the destruction to rebuild London with an orderly character and greater magnificence in its public architecture. A century later, they remained in view as an alternative to the uncoordinated and economically motivated growth of speculative developments across the northern edges of the city. The architect John Gwynn referred to the seventeenth-century proposals in the text for his own London and Westminster Improved, published in 1766. Gwynn opened his treatise with a discourse on “Publick Magnificence,” and then continued by way of a denunciation of the disorderly results of a century of private building and development. If London before the Great Fire had been “totally inelegant, inconvenient, and unhealthy,” one hundred years later it remained so.⁷ He identified the primacy of private property—the same factor that had brought the Assize of Nuisance into being—as the cause. The “mean, interested, and selfish views of private property” had produced an urban fabric marred by deformity and “absurdity upon absurdity.”⁸

Many of his contemporaries shared Gwynn’s view of London, noticing and emphasizing different ugly details in their disdain. For the architect, it was the irregularity of the buildings, for another it might be the unruly crowds overflowing every street, for another the stench and darkness of fog. Each offense might be susceptible to a particular remedy, and some of these remedies took architectural form. (Figure 10) But it was not architecture as a cure for the ugliness of the city that had the most resonant effect, for that obtained only as a matter of taste; it was in the role architecture had played in the Assize of Nuisance that a different significance of judgments of ugliness was established. The confluence of nuisance law, the masonry wall, and the visual experience of the city—the view of the abominable and altogether intolerable—forged a different understanding of the city itself.

Durability and the Houses of Parliament

It was another fire, in October 1834, that opened the way toward this different conception of the city and its monumental palaces, a fire that destroyed only one building, but that one most important: the Houses of Parliament. In March 1836, the four commissioners appointed to choose a winning design in the competition to rebuild the Houses of Parliament were summoned to explain their decision to the Select Committee overseeing the works. Appointed the previous year—only months after the fire and after public debate on how a suitable, economical accommodation for the Parliament might best be assured—the Select Committee was responsible for confirming that the design of the new building would fulfill its detailed programmatic requirements and be appropriately elegant in appearance. The members of Parliament and lords on the committee began the hearing by asking if the winning scheme—plan No. 64, a design in gothic style that had been submitted by the architect Charles Barry—had been preferred because of its merit according to these standards. Were the internal arrangements superior to other plans, and was the external architecture more beautiful? This was indeed the case in the opinion of the commissioners. Though they found it difficult to convey exactly how the aspects of the chosen design would offer a superior embodiment of the stature and aspirations of the nation, they were firm in their conviction that it would do so, while still answering to every practical demand in its use.⁹ (Figure 11)

After discussion had proceeded along these lines, Joseph Hume, MP, interjected with a different question: “You spoke of the style and beauty of the gothic; have the Commissioners considered the effect of air and weather on all exterior ornaments of that kind?”¹⁰ “No, certainly not,” was the reply from Charles Hanbury Tracy, chair of the commissioners and an MP himself; “that must depend greatly on the material; the selection of the stone, the quality of the stone.”¹¹ Hume pursued the point, noting that other comparably ornamented buildings in London had proved susceptible to decay, and asking whether or not the gothic style should be preferred to another style in regard to its likely permanence. Tracy answered again that such permanence would depend upon the stone used for the building. Hume posed his next question quite directly: “Did not durability form an element in the choice of the plan for building both Houses of Parliament?”¹² Tracy responded defensively, pointing out to Hume that the gothic style had been specified as a requirement for competition entries by decision of the Select Committee (of which both he and Hume were members) and that a concern for the durability of any given style ought to have been placed then; no blame should lie with the four commissioners for the absence of inquiry into durability in their considerations.¹³ Hume rephrased his question in a more conciliatory fashion, asking instead whether durability ought now to be considered by the Select Committee in its own deliberations, a suggestion with which Tracy readily agreed.

No expertise on the matter of stone was immediately available during the hearing—the commissioners having been chosen precisely because they had a deep knowledge of architecture without the presumed biases of professional standing, and the MPs and lords equally possessed of only superficial knowledge. The consideration that Hume encouraged was thus pursued in terms of the visible properties of the respective styles that had been solicited in the competition, Gothic or Elizabethan. Perhaps the decision to require entries to adopt one of these styles was misguided, given the self-evident fact that the “plainer the building, the less ornamented it is, the less liable it is to be injured by the weather”; and yet the prevalence of the Gothic as the “creation of the severer climates of Europe” suggested that it was “not ill-calculated to endure the weather.” The decisive consideration was the stone, and with “proper care and attention paid in the selection” it would be possible to build a durable edifice in the style preferred, rather than have the style dictated in advance by a visual deduction of its possible durability.¹⁴

The committee moved on to other questions, about internal arrangements, prospective views, and probable costs, before Sir Robert Peel (prime minister at the time) returned to the question of the stone, stating that if the Select Committee chose the design the commissioners had preferred then it was crucial that a stone be selected that was “best suited for that particular style of architecture.”¹⁵ And when Charles Barry himself appeared before the same Select Committee the following month to provide details and estimates for his design, Joseph Hume was not the only MP to raise the issue of durability with the architect. “Do you think that the surface of the buildings will be subject to constant decay?” asked Sir Robert Peel. He did not, Barry replied, though much would depend upon the quality of stone.¹⁶ More than the commissioners who had preceded him before the Select Committee, the architect could claim some measure of expertise in the matter of stone and its durability, and could explain that uncertainty about the matter of durability was the consequence of a range of factors. He pointed out that durability would need to be considered alongside other qualities: “What may be a durable stone, may be a stone which will harbour the filth and smoke of the London atmosphere; I should say that siliceous stone was not so likely to imbibe the filth of the London atmosphere as the lime-stone and some of the oolites.”¹⁷

The Enemy of Beauty

What Barry described as the “filth of the London atmosphere” was the pervasive cloud of smoke and soot that enveloped the metropolis, the recurring thick fog known as the “London particular” that carried the granular deposits of thousands of city chimneys.¹⁸ The buildings of the city confronted not only the weather, not only the predictable annual climatic cycles of warmth and cold, and the equally predictable coursing of effacing rains across their surfaces, but also the specific circumstance of London’s atmosphere. Nearly two centuries earlier, in his Fumifugium of 1661, John Evelyn had deplored that “this Glorious and Antient City … Should wrap her stately head in Clowds of Smoake and Sulphur, so full of Stink and Darknesse.”¹⁹ The “Hellish and dismall Cloud” offended the physical health of the city’s inhabitants; against the aesthetic dignity of the city’s buildings it was an “Enemy to their Lustre and Beauty.”²⁰ The cause of this airborne pollution was the combustion of sea coal, in domestic fires to some extent, but more so in the forges and furnaces of smithies, breweries, dyers, and lime burners, in the city and its rapidly growing urban environs. Even as the use of other fuels with more efficient combustion was encouraged, the atmosphere of the city continued to absorb the consequence of an ever-increasing population and an ever-rising number of manufactures. The size of these factories expanded as well, and by 1800 the polluted air of the metropolis was severely worse than the conditions that Evelyn had deplored.²¹

Knowledge did not keep pace with consequence in the comprehension of this atmosphere. Technological innovation brought improvements to the combustive efficiencies of the city’s industries, but scientific insights into the physiological and material effects of the smoke they produced remained vague. While experience and anecdote gave clear suggestion of its deleterious effects, the causal connection between smoke-laden air and illness had not yet been definitively proven. Indeed, the theory of miasma still largely prevailed, maintaining a broad consensus that the bad air responsible for disease occurred naturally, produced by decomposition. In urban settings, concentrations of miasma would be expected to occur in proximity to effluence of sewage or graveyards or other sites of decaying matter. Smoke, in the view of miasma theory, offered relief and even protection from the contaminations of noxious vapors and therefore ought, at least to some degree, to be favored rather than mitigated. Limited (and largely ineffective) measures to mitigate the emission of smoke in London and its environs had been introduced even before Evelyn’s day, but such legislation only slowly gathered efficacy during the course of the nineteenth century as an increasing understanding of the physiological effects of polluted air began to motivate a more dedicated political demand for regulation of smoke.²² (Figure 12)

Scientific understanding of the material consequences of smoke also lagged. In 1713, just fifty years after Evelyn’s lament, Sir Christopher Wren observed that on some surfaces of Westminster Abbey, “the Stone is decayed four inches deep, and falls of [sic] perpetually in great scales,” a decay he attributed to an “unhappy Choice of Materials” poorly matched to the demands imposed upon them by prevailing climate and atmosphere.²³ With the rapid growth of industrial activity, in factories and also in steamdriven transportation, the city’s buildings were coated outside and in with layers of soot that rose from chimneys exhausting thousands of coal fires and furnaces, from thousands of buildings and engines. Evident to any inhabitant or visitor, these accumulating layers of soot blackened the polychromatic surfaces of stonework, and smothered the articulations of ornamental carvings.²⁴ In addition to causing this obvious aesthetic degradation, the London atmosphere was also suspected of hastening the physical degradation of buildings. Unlike the erosion of surfaces due to the natural course of time, and also unlike the contrived ruins in picturesque gardens, this premature degradation was judged aesthetically unseemly. Reviving the London prejudice toward Bath stone that John Wood had tried to overcome, the architect Alfred Bartholomew, for example, disparaged in visceral aesthetic terms the appearance of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, built less than a century earlier: “the Hospital, is coarse, gloomy and disgusting in appearance … and its whole surface is frowning, swarthed, blained, excoriated, peeling, and decomposed.”²⁵

Like Wren a century earlier, Bartholomew and other architects and builders at the outset of the nineteenth century depended upon unsystematic empirical observations to conclude that the quality of a given stone determined its longevity in the city; some types of stone had remained undamaged over long periods enveloped in the city’s smoke, while others decayed rapidly. When Charles Barry debated with the Select Committee the matter of the durability of the new Houses of Parliament, the opinions that he offered, while expert, were founded upon understandings such as these, necessarily imprecise understandings of the relation between the city and its buildings. Similarly imprecise were various assignments of responsibility that surrounded the project—those of cause and effect in the case of nonhuman elements such as soot, but also the responsibilities construed between persons such as experts and laymen or indeed between one body of experts and another. The still vague nature of such relational structures, and their corresponding categories such as agency or authority, was in large part the focus of attempts within adjacent but not yet coordinated scientific and legal and aesthetic efforts to bring clarity to material and immaterial relationships. The occluding atmosphere of the London particular was the very substance that would bring the correspondence of these efforts into view, as the aesthetic dimensions of the new Houses of Parliament, its style, appearance, and ornamentation, were to be safeguarded from the ugliness of decay by the application of scientific and legal protocols.

Fit and Proper Materials

During the Select Committee deliberations over the design for the new Houses of Parliament, as it became clear from the witnesses’ presentations that so much would depend upon the proper selection of stone for the building, the attention of some committee members turned to the question of how exactly that selection might be made. Who would choose the stone and upon what criteria? Certainly the architect must be largely responsible for the decision, but even with the palpable authority conveyed by Charles Barry, the evidence of the hearing suggested that there was no clear body of expertise upon which to base a decision, only an accumulation of empirical assessments. Sir Robert Peel proposed to his colleagues that a more systematic study might be undertaken “by some public department of the Government” in order to ascertain “the comparative advantage of taking particular kinds of stone, and as to the effect of a London atmosphere upon those classes of stone.”²⁶ This study would employ as its principal vein of evidence the facts of the physical presence of historical architecture itself, the durability or lack of durability of existing buildings such as those referenced by witnesses in the hearing, but analyzed in a systematic and most importantly a comparative method: “Supposing professional men were instructed to make a minute inquiry into the state of the most exposed parts of St. Paul’s Cathedral; into the state of the towers of Westminster Abbey; into the state of Henry the Seventh’s chapel; were to ascertain the quarries from which stones used in those buildings respectively were taken, and to make a Report to the Treasury upon the effect which the smoke and air of London had upon those several structures, do you not think that some very valuable conclusions might be drawn with respect to the probable advantage of selecting any particular stone for this intended structure, and for future buildings connected with public objects?”²⁷

Peel’s colleagues agreed and the Select Committee appointed four men to undertake such a study and then to advise on the selection of stone for the Houses of Parliament. The architect Charles Barry was one of the four, joined by a well-known architectural sculptor, Charles Harriot Smith, and two prominent geologists, William Smith and Sir Henry de la Beche.²⁸ The composition of this advisory group might be seen to reflect a parallelism of professional and scientific knowledge. Often enough conflated, these two modes were embedded with the contrast between practical and theoretical knowledge, or the empirical understanding derived from purposeful craft and that derived from disinterested observation. For Barry and for Harriot Smith, stone was the raw material of building and of architectural ornamentation; for William Smith and Henry de la Beche, stone was evidence of vast scales of time and the physical processes of nature. Both perspectives rested upon a nuanced and expansive knowledge of stone, but then revealed the further state of uncertainty that existed between the priorities of knowledge and action. The prerogatives of architect and sculptor differed, for example, and the two geologists were certainly participants in an unsettled and contentious field.²⁹ The aesthetic perspective was maintained, though now conflated not only with that of science, but with its uncertainties compounded by those of the adjacent discipline.

The group embarked in August 1838 on a three-month tour with a lengthy itinerary that would have them inspect several dozen quarries around Britain and examine nearly a hundred historic buildings in rural areas and in large towns. From August until October, the four men visited the selected quarries to assess the aesthetic, physical, and economic suitability of different types of stone that might be used, and scrutinized the series of historic buildings in order to verify the likely durability of different types of stones. At each building the men recorded observations of any visible decay or corrosion of surfaces, noting their age, orientation, and exposure. They collected sample specimens of stone from each quarry, recording characteristics such as color, composition, bedding, and available dimensions. (Realizing that their survey would not be comprehensive, they also accepted samples from quarries that they were not able to visit.) Upon the conclusion of their tour, the group consulted with John Frederic Daniell, professor of chemistry at King’s College, London, who (along with professor of experimental philosophy Charles Wheatstone) assisted them to ascertain the composition of the various samples they obtained.

At the conclusion of this lengthy investigative process in March 1839, the group reported to the Select Committee their recommendation that magnesian limestone from a quarry in Derbyshire be used for the building. They prefaced this conclusion with a summary of considerations. For example, economic constraints in the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament had excluded consideration of “granites, porphyries, and other stone of similar character, on account of the enormous expense of converting it to building purposes in decorative edifices.”³⁰ Similarly, the appearance of the stone had been evaluated taking into account the urban setting of the new building: “Colour is of more importance in the selection of a stone for a building to be situated in a populous and smoky town than for one to be placed in an open country.”³¹ Durability, though, was the pivotal concern in their assessments, a criterion for which the group sought, by means of observation and experiment, “incontestable and striking evidence.”³² As for the causes of the decomposition of stonework, these they could propose only in general terms as being “chemical and mechanical” (where “mechanical” referred to the expansions and contractions caused by variation of temperature). Exposure to weather determined the mechanical cause, the chemical cause would produce “a change in entire matter” of the stones, and the atmosphere of the smoky town would be expected to produce greater decomposition in stonework than the atmosphere of the open country. Though this differential process of transmutation was unaccounted, they were able to describe its circular nature: “These effects are reciprocal, chemical action rendering the stone liable to be more easily affected by mechanical action, which latter, by constantly presenting new surfaces, accelerates the disintegrating effects of the former.”³³

If the explanation of causes remained indistinct, their report did offer much more detailed assertions about the compositional characteristics that would give resistance against these causes. Relying upon the correlation of their field observations with Daniell’s conclusions about the microscopic properties of stone, they concluded that, with respect to limestones, “their decomposition depends … upon the mode in which their component parts are aggregated, those which are the most crystalline being found to be the most durable, while those which partake least of that character suffer most from exposure to atmospheric influences.”³⁴ A more rather than less crystalline composition being desirable, they then followed Daniell’s assertion that among the various samples of limestone, those that possessed a roughly equivalent proportion of carbonate of lime and carbonate of magnesia were the more crystalline. Chemical composition may or may not have been the decisive factor, but significantly it was now elevated as a criterion to the same level of importance as the much more familiar considerations of cost and appearance, assuming, in a sense, the prerogative of the aesthetic outcome. In concluding its report, the group of four advisors admitted that several different types of stone seemed to meet these considerations to satisfactory degrees; but based upon their scrutiny of evidence of durability (which came first in their listing of criteria), cost, and appearance (which was listed last), they proposed that magnesian limestone from the Derbyshire quarry of Bolsover Moor or from its immediate environs was the “most fit and proper material to be employed in the proposed new Houses of Parliament.”³⁵ With this decision approved, the construction of the Houses of Parliament could commence with the questions about durability and the atmosphere of London seemingly addressed.

Atmospheres of Decay

On May 4, 1852, the assembled members of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society listened to a talk by Dr. Angus Smith, a chemist in that city. Smith read a paper “On the Air and Rain of Manchester,” which aimed to demonstrate that the air, and specifically polluted air, could be subjected to chemical analysis. That polluted air (impure air in the then common terminology) existed was not in question; it had been both experienced and described for centuries. But, Smith argued, little objective evidence existed of the physical difference “betwixt good air of the finest mountain side, and the worst air … of the infected dens of large towns, so well described in various forms, of late years, to the public.”³⁶ Yet this difference was palpable to the senses, he continued, “as if the eye had obtained a mysterious power of seeing what was scarcely capable of being proved within the domain of substance, and the smell had a power of observing what was more an influence than a positive thing.”³⁷ Smith suggested that the air, and especially the air of towns, produced two sensible effects, one perceptible by the “ordinary senses”—sight and smell in particular, but also touch—and the other felt by what he called the “chemical senses,” the physiological reaction to exposure that would become known by illness or similar degradation of optimum health. This categorization and its indication of measurable effects suggested in turn that the air, or atmosphere, of towns like Manchester and London could be brought under scrutiny and made known as a substance.

Oxygen and nitrogen had already been identified as constituent elements of air, but analyses of the full range of other possible contents remained limited and uncertain. By turning his experimental techniques to the city in which he lived, Angus Smith could begin from the commonsensical knowledge that the air was laden with substance, specifically the particulate matter of coal smoke that was as obvious in this industrial city as it was in London. To investigate—to make visible and evidentiary—the seemingly intangible matter of air, he examined not the air itself, but the rain that fell upon the city, and this rain, he discovered, contained easily measurable quantities of sulfuric acid. These quantities decreased in samples taken further from the town, in the more pure country air, leading Smith to conclude that the smoke of the city’s furnaces and forges was creating an atmospheric condition that he referred to as acid rain. In the next few years, his accumulated experimental data were sufficient for him to present a more detailed account to the Chemical Society, which was published with the title “On the Air of Towns.”³⁸ Here, Smith confirmed finding substantive difference between the atmosphere of open country and that of the city. His experimental results could be (and subsequently were) supplemented by studies of other areas of Great Britain, enabling the possibility, in theory, of an atmospheric map making visible its invisible enclosure of air. Smith’s data, in tabular form, were in any case sufficient as the basis for a new knowledge that affected stones: “It has often been observed that the stones and bricks of buildings … crumble more readily in large towns where much coal is burnt than elsewhere. Although this is not sufficient to prove an evil of the highest magnitude, it is still worthy of observation, first as a fact, and next as affecting the value of property. I was led to attribute this effect to the slow but constant action of acid rain.”³⁹ The sulfuric acid precipitated out of the atmosphere as rain coated the buildings of a city, and left as residue the acid that would be insinuated into vulnerable stonework, decomposing its elemental structure and causing the decay of its exterior surfaces.

Angus Smith’s novel observations of acid rain and his conclusions about its consequences had an immediate relevance in London. Within a decade of the start of construction and with the building works not yet fully complete, indications of decay began to appear in some of the stonework of the new Houses of Parliament. By the end of the 1850s, evidence of serious deterioration was widespread enough to compel some remedial course of action, and in 1861 a new committee was formed to “inquire into the decay of stone of the New Palace of Westminster and into the best means of preserving the Stone from further injury.”⁴⁰ The membership of this panel included noted architects of the day—William Tite, the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Sidney Smirke, George Gilbert Scott, Matthew Digby Wyatt. They were joined by several chemists, including August Wilhelm von Hofmann, the director of the Royal College of Chemistry, and geologists, none more prominent than Roderick Murchison, then between terms as president of the Royal Geographical Society. The two geologists who had been responsible for the original survey and selection of stone, William Smith and Henry de la Beche, had both died, as had, only the year before, the architect Charles Barry; Charles Harriot Smith, the only one of the four commissioners still alive, was appointed to the new committee and asked to give detailed accounts of the process that he and his colleagues had undertaken.⁴¹

The committee also called upon some three dozen witnesses, from builders to scientists, and heard testimony that identified two causes for the premature decay of the stones. The first, a mechanical cause, originated in the transposition of stones from the quarry, where stones would have lain in a natural bed, to the building, where individual stones were then set in positions perpendicular to their natural bed. This translation, the committee was informed, could make certain pieces of stone more liable to fracture or decay as they carried loading within the overall structure. Though this knowledge was commonly held by masons and architects, careful supervision at both quarry and building site was required to forestall any improper translation of stone, or the use of compromised stone, and this level of supervision had not been provided during the initial stages of construction at the Houses of Parliament. The failure lay in procedure of work rather than any incapacity of the conventions of architectural thought and aesthetic imagination.

The same could not be said for the second cause of decay, a chemical cause, which originated in the exposure of the stones to the atmosphere of the city. The balanced proportions of lime and magnesia and the “crystalline character” of magnesian limestone had been determining factors in its original selection, being qualities expected to provide resistance to weathering by limiting the absorptive capacities of the surfaces. But the subsequent investigation, being held twenty-three years after the stone had been chosen, had access to recent experiments in what had been coined “chemical climatology,” experiments that revealed the crucial factor of acidic atmospheric effects. The chemists on the committee referred to Angus Smith and his experiments in Manchester as well as other recent analyses undertaken to examine how the chemical composition of different types of stones was affected by atmospheric conditions.⁴² This gathering scientific knowledge made clear the significance of acids, carbonic and sulfuric, newly recognized as possessing a strong corrosive capacity to which the stone being used in the Houses of Parliament was in fact highly susceptible, precisely because of the carbonates of lime and magnesia of which its crystalline structure was composed—the very same criteria so favorably regarded twenty years earlier.

The stone used in the Houses of Parliament, so the chemists concluded, was “amenable to all the sources of disintegration which we have above enumerated,” including a mechanical process of fracture caused by water entering into the stone and freezing, but also and especially to the effects of acids present “in the air of towns.”⁴³ With this understanding of the problem, the committee also considered testimony regarding possible remedial treatments for the stonework already damaged as well as stones not yet affected. These remedial treatments consisted of various coatings applied over or absorbed into the stonework to provide either temporary or permanent preservative effects. A small number of these treatments had been tested on damaged portions of the Houses of Parliament prior to the convening of the committee in 1861. The inventors of these treatments were therefore invited to present the results; other treatments put forward were new inventions, not yet tested in the field. Some of the proposed solutions the advising chemists derided as “obviously erroneous, such as … ridding the building of the principle of decay by fermentation.”⁴⁴ Others of the proposed solutions might, they believed, be effective, but the examiners could not evaluate them conclusively because experimental evidence did not yet exist to support or undermine their claimed efficacy. The chemists suggested therefore that “it might be advisable to apply to portions of the New Houses of Parliament actually undergoing decay, certain processes selected as representatives … in order that their merits might be submitted to the only conclusive tests, those of actual application, and protracted exposure to the corrosive influence of a London atmosphere.”⁴⁵ The full committee agreed, though with a reluctance presumably caused by frustration with the lack of any immediate solution, and recommended this attenuated course of action to the government with a “confident expectation that a remedy will soon be found to arrest or control the decay.”⁴⁶

The frustration of the committee overseeing the construction of the Houses of Parliament resulted from the novel experience of a temporally extended process of constructing and sustaining architecture within the changeable circumstances of its surrounding atmosphere. The new Houses of Parliament would be turned into a site of material experimentation aimed at devising new mediations between building and atmosphere. This maintenance (for that would be the term for this new regimen) would consist not only of practices of cleaning, repair, and replacement to accompany the ordinary use of the building, but a theoretical understanding as well of the materiality of stones as the medium for interaction between architecture as a purposeful aesthetic intent and the city as an apparatus and an atmosphere. Decay in itself was not a novel aesthetic category, but the familiar recognition of the decay of stone as the inevitable process of exposure to time and the still fashionable recognition of ruins as aesthetic devices were now supplemented by an awareness of the decay of stones as a contingent process of exposure to the atmosphere of modernization itself. Just as the cultivation of ruins in picturesque gardens was at root an aesthetic of ugliness, of positive valuation, so too was the novel concept of maintenance an aesthetic of ugliness, though of negative valuation insofar as it aimed to remediate the possibility of ugliness. But where ruins and the natural decay of stones had always been encountered most directly in the register of visuality, maintenance was accessible or knowable through a range of mediating registers, visuality only one possible form of discernment and likely to evidence only effects and not causalities. In his experiments, Angus Smith examined rain in order to attain an understanding of that which produced the visibly impure quality of air; Frederick Ransome, describing to the committee his own experiments on the application of preservative solutions to specimens of stones, explained how he added color to “make perceptible” the relative depth to which the solutions were absorbed by the stone.⁴⁷ In the emerging concept of maintenance, visuality and the aesthetic register more generally provided not conclusions but prompts toward the larger structures of causation that surrounded the decaying stones of the Houses of Parliament.

Legislation and Remediation

Through the latter half of the nineteenth century, the metropolis remained a soot-filled place, the caked and blackened surfaces of its buildings prompting a regular stream of articles in professional journals on relevant topics ranging from new combustion technologies to new formulas for artificial stones. The atmosphere—and the need to compensate for its effects—spurred the use of both, with advances made in interior ventilation paralleled by the innovative use of architectural materials such as terra-cotta that offered practical regimens of maintenance.⁴⁸ Novel compensatory aesthetic regimens were recommended as well, to shape an architecture immersed in the “gloomy pall by which the smoke demon obscured [the sun].” This phrase was spoken by Alfred Waterhouse, prominent both as an architect and a member of the Smoke Abatement Society, who advised an audience of students that a “varied sky-line with gables, dormer windows, high-pitched roofs, massive chimney-stacks, and other exceptional features” would be better than “mere surface decoration” in the metropolitan atmosphere.⁴⁹ For surfacing material, Waterhouse recommended terra-cotta as being “admirably fitted, from its peculiar smoke-resisting qualities, for use in the architecture of our great cities in the present day, when we found all our best building-stone more or less yielding to the acids which were generated with the smoke.”⁵⁰ Here though was a remarkable circularity: clay and coal, both drawn from pits in the earth, with the one (clay fired as terra-cotta) used to prevent the deleterious effects of the other (coal burned in the furnaces of the city). This relationship was noted by Waterhouse, among others, though he did not note the further circularity that the potteries that produced the clay to guard against the damages of coal smoke were themselves producers of that smoke in the London air. Across the river from the Houses of Parliament, in Lambeth, could be found the kilns and chimneys of one of the largest such producers, Doulton Potteries. What had been a small factory in 1815 when the Doulton company was founded had grown in size as the company met the soaring demand for glazed pipes for metropolitan sewers, tiles for building work, and china for domestic interiors. (Figure 13)

In 1893, the Lambeth Vestry entered legal proceedings against Doulton, arguing that smoke from the potteries was damaging Lambeth Palace, causing the visible decay of its exterior stonework. The suit fell under the common law category of nuisance, which had developed in complexity from its medieval origins in the London Assize of Buildings, but remained in essence an activity or structure of one property that adversely affected another property by preventing the use or enjoyment to which the owner of the latter property was entitled. By the close of the eighteenth century, categories of harm potentially arising from nuisance included atmospheric dimensions such as light and air, which could, for example, be rendered a nuisance by offensive odors. In the case of the Dolton pottery, the nuisance would be that the production of excessive, harmful smoke on the one property was causing the physical deterioration of stonework on the other. But the magistrate ruled in Doulton’s favor, determining that the company had made efforts to abate the smoke from its chimneys, which was sufficient to answer its legal liability. A few years later, with decay and local pollution still very much evident, the vestry considered renewed legal action, but was dissuaded by the argument that the pottery had continued to expend money on improvements and therefore would once again be found not liable under nuisance law. This judgment, which was less a finding that no nuisance existed than that the defendant was not liable, rested upon the distinctive evolution of nuisance law in regard to atmospheric pollution during the course of the nineteenth century.⁵¹

During the first half of the century a steadily increasing number of scientists, government officials, and interested observers came to regard smoke as a hazard to public health, in its direct effects upon persons by hindering respiration and occluding sunlight, and in its indirect effects, as for example upon agricultural production, as a root cause of atmospheric deterioration. Many consequently sought to have smoke emissions brought under more forceful legislative scrutiny, advocating legal regulation of the emission of smoke as a solution to mitigate the atmospheric effects of industrial development.⁵² There were few precedents for such a comprehensive regulatory structure, only highly localized policies or rules to control the burning of certain fuels or to mitigate quantities of smoke. But in 1821, following upon the findings of select committees convened to gather facts on the subject of smoke prevention, Parliament passed the Smoke Prohibition Act.⁵³ With the entire nation as its scope of application, the 1821 act asserted the government’s interest in promoting smoke abatement practices in rapidly developing industries. But the new law did not mandate smoke reduction; rather, it was designed to give greater strength to the existing framework of nuisance law by enabling judges to award costs to be paid to plaintiffs in successful nuisance suits. What might have seemed a minor change in fact aimed at the primary difficulty faced by injured landowners, which was the prohibitive cost of litigation. The new law also stipulated that judges might impose abatement requirements upon defendants found liable, suggesting that the goal of smoke reduction might be met incrementally, through a gradual encouragement of corrective measures adopted by smoke producers.⁵⁴

Data and scientific understanding were only gradually being compiled that might lend greater precision or efficacy to a parliamentary act. The passage of the 1821 act preceded by two decades, for example, Angus Smith’s experiments on the acidity of rain. Advocacy continued and additional parliamentary committees gathered evidence from local officials, industrialists, and scientists on the practicality and effectiveness of smoke abatement techniques. In 1846, Henry de la Beche and Lyon Playfair, under commission from Parliament, submitted a Report upon the Means of Obviating the Evils Arising from the Smoke Occasioned by Factories and Other Works Situated in Large Towns.⁵⁵ Their report summarized the current understanding of techniques of smoke abatement and served as the partial basis for further efforts at legislation, including the 1853 Metropolitan Smoke Abatement Act, the first legislation to require the suppression of smoke within London.⁵⁶ Yet here, as in the initial stages of the selection of stone for the Houses of Parliament, knowledge and action did not coincide precisely. Angus Smith introduced his 1859 paper “On the Air of Towns” with a critical reflection on the legislative process: “it seems to me a most unfortunate oversight that whilst laws have been made with relation to the impurity of the atmosphere arising from many causes, neither those who made the laws nor those who administer them have ever taken pains to find out what it really was against which they combated.”⁵⁷ Regulations concerning smoke continued to be inserted into public health legislation, culminating in the 1875 Public Health Act and the smoke prevention articles included among its broader provisions to improve the salubrity of Victorian Britain. With this developing framework of legislation, the instruments of law accompanied the potentials of the chemically composed surface as mediations between buildings and atmosphere. Architectural appearance was thus embedded with the juridical and scientific implications, so that an ugliness that had been confined to an aesthetic understanding might now be known also in its legal and scientific dimensions.

Under the statutory regime that emerged, smoke abatement was assigned as a responsibility in advance of any specific event; smoke was addressed preventively rather than retrospectively as in the case of nuisance law. When manufacturers such as Doulton made practical improvements to their furnaces, they fulfilled their responsibility under statutory law and mitigated their liability even though smoke would still flow from their chimneys. Local authorities could impose fines for days on which too much “black smoke” was emitted, but the possibility of eliminating coal smoke from the city was indefinitely forestalled by these new legal provisions for managing an equilibrium of the city and its architectural objects. This translation from the common law approach of nuisance to the statutory approach of abatement, and its revelation of the crucial analytical difficulty of causation, had a particular consequentiality for architecture. Under the former framework of nuisance law, the relation between architecture and its environment was conceived as specific and localized. A particular cause of damage to a building could be identified—spatially located—and remedied; this framework corresponded to an understanding of the city as a collection of discrete properties. But over the course of the nineteenth century, the circumstances of architectural decay due to polluted atmospheres made fully evident that the effects of damage were not directly linked to their causes in the manner envisioned by nuisance law. Buildings in the city suffered significant deterioration as a result of the contact of stonework and air. But by whom had these buildings been damaged? By the effects of smoke, certainly, but smoke originating from whose chimney? Cause and effect were distributed, generalized, their correlation often indeterminate; this framework would correspond to an understanding of the city as a structuring of mutable processes binding its architectural objects. Viewed through judgments of ugliness, these objects came into view less as discrete, singular events than as contiguous elements of a material and atmospheric system.

Evidence of Ugliness

Persuaded against pursuing legal remedy a second time, the Lambeth Vestry instead petitioned the London County Council (LCC) to investigate the problem of the destructive effects of smoke upon historical buildings such as Lambeth Palace. The LCC, whose formation in 1899 acknowledged the need to govern the metropolis as a complex arrangement of interrelated parts, responded by assigning its many district officers to a broad survey. Each officer was directed to examine the exteriors of historic buildings—churches, primarily, but also significant civic buildings—within his district and to observe the effects of weathering upon the stonework. These observations were recorded in charts provided by the LCC with entries noting the building, its date, the type of stone, and its current condition. The charts were in turn compiled into a full survey on “Weathering of Buildings,” with inspections of nearly one hundred buildings confirming that stonework in significant states of deterioration was to be found all around the city, and not particularly more so in one area than another.⁵⁸ The ugliness of architecture—of architecture in these novel and unanticipated, and therefore seemingly improper, states of decay—made visible the scope of the atmospheric problem, though it did not offer a straightforward resolution under the terms of nuisance. The chief officer of the LCC’s Public Control Department who had commissioned the survey confirmed in his annual report of 1901 that an examination of the decayed stonework at Lambeth Palace could not be distinguished in its characteristics from decayed stonework found elsewhere in the city and that an attribution of the specific damage to the neighboring Doulton pottery could not be drawn.⁵⁹

Through and throughout the transactions of action and knowledge on the matter of atmosphere, a constellation of visual modes enveloped the architecture of nineteenth-century London.⁶⁰ While these evidentiary modes supplied (at least provisionally if not substantively) coherence to disparate or difficult to discern elements of the city and its atmosphere, they challenged the conventional registration of the coherence of architecture in terms of style or in terms of the discrete extent of the architectural object. (Figure 14) Individual architects had by the latter part of the nineteenth century realized the implications of the metropolitan atmosphere and its consequential alteration of a prior, static conception of the relationship between stone and air, between aesthetic judgment and material understanding. By inquiring about resilience of the typical elements of a given style when situated in the London air, MP Joseph Hume had in 1836 joined the question of style to the issue of durability, and had linked the aesthetic and the material in a new equation that confronted architects during the decades that followed. The realities of the atmosphere prompted experiments in both aspects of the new equation. Alfred Waterhouse, for example, anticipated the inevitable accumulation of soot in choosing less refined and almost monochromatic schemes of ornamentation; Halsey Ricardo, by contrast, responded with refinement of ornamentation and the interjection of strong color.⁶¹ Both took full advantage of the corrosion-resistant properties of terra-cotta and faience manufactured by smoke-producing potteries such as Doulton, and to accompany their buildings, and other architecture of the city, there emerged a constant, and expensive, regimen of cleaning, coating, whitewashing, repainting, repointing, and repairing: a routine of maintenance.⁶²

Any one of these changes or techniques might be modest in itself, but taken as a larger composite these recalibrations of the coherence and extent of architecture suggest the dissolution of prior criteria of architectural comprehension and the precipitation of new ones out of the ugly buildings and the foggy atmosphere of the nineteenth century. As the novel forms of decay caused by chemical transformation prompted novel judgments of ugliness, the pursuits of remedy and remediation coalesced as a novel aesthetic of ugliness—but not in the sense that ugliness was the intention or the result, not in the sense merely of ugly buildings. The social mechanisms of legislation and maintenance and design constituted an aesthetic of ugliness insofar as they were mechanisms for the negotiation between aesthetic and political and economic registers, mechanisms for the negotiation of the ever more distributed nuisances of London.