Fig. 222.—Houses in Finsbury Square, London, cir. 1780.
Fig. 223.—Plan of a London House.
London, as may well be supposed, has innumerable examples of late eighteenth-century houses in such districts as Bloomsbury and Piccadilly. Bedford Square was built about 1780, and presents to the world some inoffensive, although not very exciting fronts. The central feature of one side is shown in Fig. [221]; there is nothing of striking originality in its design, but enough to break the monotony of the general treatment, and give a little interest to this rather dull though highly respectable square. Contemporary with this is Finsbury Square, which was laid out by George Dance, the younger, between 1777 and 1791.[80] A part of it is illustrated in Fig. [222]. By simple expedients the designer has imparted variety to his front, and has emphasised the principal floor, where, according to custom, the drawing-room is placed. The difficulty attending on the ornamenting of a row of houses with architectural features is illustrated here by the fact that one of the pilasters, which belongs in common to two houses, has been painted of two colours, which meet in a vertical line down the whole length of the pilaster—an effect certainly not contemplated by the architect. All these London houses have their kitchens in the basement, which is lighted from a sunk area between the house and the pavement. The plan generally adopted consisted of two rooms on each floor, one lighted from the front, the other from the back. Alongside the front room on the ground floor was the entrance passage, and next to the back room was the staircase, with its gangway of communication from flight to flight (Fig. [223]). On the first floor the drawing-room occupied the whole of the front, behind it was a bedroom; the other floors repeated the arrangement. Sometimes the drawing-room included the space elsewhere devoted to the bedroom, thus making a large L-shaped room. This plan was used for houses of fair size and also for artisans’ dwellings; it is still the staple plan for houses in the long streets which make up the modern extension of growing towns, with the important exception that the kitchen and scullery are not in a basement, but on the ground floor, occupying the back room and the annexe. Of the London examples here illustrated this arrangement applies only to the houses in Finsbury Square; the others are double-fronted. It is said to have been brought from Holland with William III., and this at least is tolerably certain, that no plan of this type is to be found in any collection of English drawings before this period, although there are plenty of plans with underground kitchens and offices. Thorpe has some plans for small houses in the city, with four rooms on the ground floor, one of which is a kitchen; he also has a house occupying the space of “three ordinary tenements,” from which we gather that an ordinary tenement had a frontage of 17 ft.
Fig. 224.—House at the Corner of Stratton Street, Piccadilly, London.
The house at the corner of Stratton Street, Piccadilly (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, 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 (Fig. [225]), which was built about 1814. Others may be found in Kennington Park Road (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.
