Fig. 225.—No. 18 Finsbury Circus, London, 1814.
Fig. 226.—From a House, No. 272 Kennington Park Road, London.
Fig. 227.—From a House, No. 282 Kennington Park Road, 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.
Fig. 228.—House in the High Street, Lewes, Sussex.
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. Baywindows 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 (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 (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 (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 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.
