Stair Parts Design in the Classic Innovations and Gothic Revival
Stair Parts Fig 224 Houses at Corner of StrattonStreet, Piccadilly London
The house at the corner of Stratton Street, Piccadilly ( Stair Parts Fig. 224), is typical of many of its contemporaries in London. It is plain to baldness, the most interesting things about it being the iron balustrades. This appears to be an early example of that method of designing which works on the supposition that the various faces of a building are as distinct in execution as they are on the drawings, and that a rich treatment of the front need not be continued along the side, nor even find an echo there, although the side is equally visible.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century a much plainer and duller type of house was in vogue than had been the case at the beginning of the eighteenth. The trend of design had been always in this direction, always towards a more severe treatment. This severity was endurable in large buildings where variety could be obtained by a skilful grouping of the masses, but in rows of small houses, or even in small detached houses, it resulted in a baldness that can only rouse admiration when other means of enjoyment are exhausted. Tennyson's "long unlovely " street consisted of buildings thus plainly treated. Another cause of this lack of interest was the erection of houses by speculative builders and owners. Such houses had of necessity to be cheap with simple plain stair parts , and where cheapness is the first consideration the amenities of design are generally the last. Design indeed had lost itself; the traditions which had been its guides were worn out; in looking for help it appealed for a time to Greece, and with its assistance planted a copy of the Temple of Erectheus in St Pancras and of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates in Regent Street. Upon many a country garden it bestowed a Grecian temple, set amid winding shrubberies, towards which some heroine of Jane Austen would steal to indulge her love-sick fancies.
Such pagan architecture eventually roused protests in this Christian country, and Pugin initiated the Gothic revival. But the consideration of this development is beyond our present scope, and it is only mentioned in order to show how completely design had lost its way. Its last effort in the old paths was to cover in part the plain front of a small house with a verandah enclosed by trellis-work, in which originality is still to be found. There is a good example in Finsbury Circus (Stair Parts Fig. 225), which was built about 1814. Others may be found in Kennington Park Road (Stair Parts Figs. 226, 227), somewhat more elaborate in treatment. Kennington Park was at that time a common, and was the place where malefactors from this part of Surrey expiated their crimes on the gallows. The progress of civilisation has not only reduced the number of crimes for which the penalty was paid on Kennington Common, but has withdrawn the last scene from public gaze. Doubtless, however, balconies such as these were often crowded by persons eager to watch the irrevocable punishment of offences now adequately purged by a few months' imprisonment.
Windows and Verandahs
Stair Parts Fig. 225 No.18 Finsbury Circus, London 1780
Stair Parts Fig. 226 From a House at No. 272 Kennington Park London
Suburban Developments
Stair Parts Fig. 227 From a House at No. 282 Kennington Park London
With the improved methods of road making which were adopted at the end of the eighteenth century, there came greater inducements for citizens to retire to the suburbs of London after finishing their labours in town. Probably no great city had such beautiful suburbs as those which surrounded London a hundred years ago. They were full of fine trees embowering large houses which stood in their own spacious grounds. But year by year these remains of the past are disappearing, and their sites are being covered with dwellings of a humbler kind, towards which an immense population gravitates every evening. Yet in spite of these changes there still remain, along most of the great roads which lead out of London, houses of moderate size dating back to some period of the eighteenth century or the early years of the nineteenth.
During the eighteenth century, especially as it grew older, the play of fancy which marks the work of earlier times diminished more and more. Consequently less interest attaches to particular features than was the case in the days of Elizabeth, James, and the Charleses. Chimneys and parapets had but slight variety, and so also the windows, for the sash-window has very little elasticity compared with the mullioned. Bay windows went almost out of fashion, so unyielding were the sashes with which they would have had to be fitted. In small houses a bay-window is sometimes to be found, such as those in a house in the High Street at Lewes, in Sussex (Stair Parts Fig. 228). Chimneys grew plainer and plainer, and came to be regarded rather as a necessary evil than as a means of adorning the house. Nearly all those on the houses illustrated in this chapter are of the simplest character, far removed, for instance, from that on the north front of Kirby Hall, in Northamptonshire (Stair Parts Fig. 230), which is part of the work attributed to Inigo Jones. The dormer window included in the same group is allied to the Jacobean type, inasmuch as it is in effect part of the wall, whereas from Webb's time onwards dormers were part of the roof, and were susceptible of very little variety of treatment. The stone chimney from a house at Wansford (Stair Parts Fig. 229 (2 dates)) from the end of the seventeenth century, and although much plainer, it is clear that pains have been taken with its design. So, too, with the four brick examples in Stair Parts Fig. 229; they are all interesting, though not elaborate. In later years even the touches which gave these their character were withheld, and chimney-stacks became mere oblong masses with the scantiest of caps.
Stair Parts Fig. 228 House in the High Street, Lewes, Sussex