The fashion of dating houses
By Gordon Taylor
If you can imagine a time before Covid-19, imagine going to a pub for lunch? My bet is the cod will be balanced on top of the chips. Having a burger? The chips will be in a bucket. Why? Fashion; once one does it, others follow. Fashion has always been with us, and increasingly I believe it applies to the style of houses with dates.
In my articles in the KAS Newsletters 93 & 94 in 2012 and survey of Kent’s Dutch and Flemish Gables in Archaeologia Cantiana vol. 136 in 2015 and online, my conclusion was that they were a fashion. Firstly, that despite immigration from the Netherlands from the 13th century to the 60,000 in-comers in 1940, houses with curvilinear gables were mostly built from the fourth quarter of the 16th century to the first half of the 18th century1. Secondly, many brick curvilinear gables were additions to earlier houses (often timber-framed) with straight gables2. Thirdly, Dr E Edwards showed that immigrants would not have been in a position to build new houses until many years after their arrival3.
I have since made several excursions into East Anglia to compile datasets to compare Kent’s 180 dated houses with Norfolk’s 210. Both counties have the highest concentration of buildings with curvilinear gables, which differ from those across the North Sea.
Having photographed numerous houses with a reliable date, I noticed that the dates generally followed the period of houses with curvilinear gables. By reliable, I mean those houses with a date engraved in a stone lintel (see Figures 3a, 3b, 4a and 4b) or by brick in the main wall (see Figure 7).
On holiday in a Yorkshire village during May 2018, I noticed three farmhouses and ten cottages in the area with straight gables that had a date cut into the stone door lintels. All except two had 17th-century dates.
Was this a coincidence, or was there a connection with curvilinear gabled houses that were mostly 17th and 18th century? With this research question in mind,
I started a new investigation of which the following is a pilot, and I hope others will take it further.
Manor Houses of England 1908 by P.H. Ditchfield has drawings of houses with inbuilt dates of 1580, 1614 and 1692. In Vernacular Architecture by R.W. Brunskill, drawings show 1712 in a brick wall,
1677 and 1700 in-door lintels and date plaques (possibly not integral) of 1598 to 1795. All these dates fall in the period of curvilinear gables.
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Fig 1: Graph showing rise and fall of curvilinear gables
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Fig 2: Graph showing author’s research of dated houses noted around England, reflects the chart in Fig 1
Walking the dog daily around my home town of Broadstairs, I had built up a list of houses with an inbuilt date which made the walks more enjoyable and led me up and down all the roads and paths in the town. On my annual visit to Corsham in Wiltshire, I likewise covered every road in that town to note dated houses to compare with Broadstairs.
For further comparison, I made trips to Sandwich in Kent to note houses with a date built-in. I emphasise ‘built-in’ because houses with a date painted on or on a modern tablet or plaque were ignored as being invalid for the purposes of the project. Sandwich seems prone to this: one house has a relatively modern weather vane with the date, another has 1517 in modern style scratched on the door lintel, another ‘c1450’ painted on, but these, whilst possibly being correct, were ignored as only a date in the construction of the house was noted as below.
The practice of builders including a date in the construction of a house was noted, and like curvilinear gables, it was believed to be a fashion that waxes and wanes. Periods of greater house building would be expected to match the increase of inbuilt dated houses but does not. Why not, if not fashion – possibly times of austerity?
Consideration is given to factors that may have increased or reduced the number of houses being built in any period. These are: the economic situation in the country thus affecting demand, the Brick Tax (1784–1850), Window Tax (1696–1851) and Hearth Tax (1662–1689) and external factors such as foreign wars, the Civil Wars in the 1640s, the turmoil of the second half of the 17th-century including the Fire of London.
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Fig 3a: Example of Yorkshire date stone – Askrigg 1687
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Fig 3b: Example of Yorkshire date stone – Carperby 1772
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Fig 4a: Example of Corsham date stone – Church Street 1723 Bottom right
Fig 4b: Example of Corsham date stone – Church Road 1703.
They seem to have had little effect, although I only know of two houses dated to the 1640s. There was a noted economic boom after the 1660 restoration of Charles
II. The dated houses and curvilinear gables peak around 1700, but other building booms have produced no dated houses. Then, both curvilinear gabled and dated houses seem to virtually disappear, giving a surprisingly uniform gap until a Victorian resurgence in both curvilinear gables and houses with in-built dates – see chart comparing the three towns below.
The re-emergence of houses with built-in dates coincides with the re-emergence of curvilinear gables in the second half of the 19th-century (occasioned by the repeal of the above-mentioned brick and window taxes possibly and the Victorian love of ornamentation) peaking in the fourth quarter of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century then quite rapidly disappearing again. Victorian dates appear to be most common on schools and council buildings, and as Edwards has noted, on railway housing and better-quality terraces and semis5, a number noticeable in Sandwich. However, in Corsham they are mostly on detached houses.
Two dates only are found on houses in the 1920s and 1930s in the three towns surveyed.
After World War II, a building boom occurred to replace the thousands of houses lost to bombing. However, in the three towns surveyed, evidence of houses with dates built-in is minimal; no dated houses appear from 1945 in Broadstairs until 1998, on the sidewall of a bungalow at a small estate entrance. None appear in Sandwich (an estate has a metal plaque on a boundary wall of 1948) and none in Corsham except on four extensions from 1964 to 2012.
Notes on the three towns surveyed
Corsham, Wiltshire. A market town just south of the London to Bath Roman road. Wealth derived from wool, Bath stone on which the tow stands, and several military bases during the 20th century. Corsham
Court and the Methuen Estate survive. The railway arrived in 1841, but the station closed in 1966. The survey included Pickwick (from where Dickens papers were named), which is now joined to Corsham.
Sandwich, Kent. A once busy port and one of the Cinque ports, now silted up and two miles inland. Largely unaltered being “the completest medieval town in England”, the cattle market surviving until the mid-20th century, a local shopping centre serving surrounding rural villages. The railway arrived in 1881. The survey excluded the remote private Sandwich Bay estate.
Broadstairs, Kent. A former fishing and minor shipbuilding village subordinate to the village of St Peters, a mile inland. It became a resort in the 19th century, boosted by stays by connections with Charles Dickens and the arrival of the railway in 1863. It survived the depression of nearby resorts of Margate and
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Fig 5a: Example of Sandwich date stone – 1756 showing recess including parish boundary Middle
Fig 5b: Example of Sandwich date from 1601 in timber
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Fig 6a: Example of Broadstairs date stone – Stone Farm, Lanthorne Road, 1710 plus list of owners
Ramsgate and became an all-year-round destination for holiday homes, day-trippers and film sets. The survey includes St Peters (now all one conurbation) but excludes the private estate towards Kingsgate.
The study of houses displaying the various dating methods discussed now needs be expanded to other towns. However, the results from three quite different towns are, to the author’s mind, remarkably alike and would indicate, like curvilinear gables, a fashion that comes and goes.
This would make a thought-provoking exercise for any KAS member interested in historic buildings and could easily be carried out to compare and record against the results achieved thus far.
References
1 D. G. Taylor ‘The Dutch and Flemish Gables of England’ unpublished Chapter 2 page 6.
2 D. G. Taylor ‘A Survey of Dutch and Flemish Gables in Kent’ Archaeologia Cantiana 2015 p.274.
3 Dr E. Edwards, 2002 ‘Interpretations of the Influence of the Immigrant Population in Kent in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, Archaeologia Cantiana, CXXII, 275-292.
4 With graph design help from Ian Hinton, Chairman Norfolk Historic Buildings Group.
5 Dr E. Edwards in correspondence August 2019.
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Fig 6b: Example of Broadstairs date stone to added porch with date of 1682
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Fig 7: House in Omer Avenue Margate showing inbuilt date of 1652 of brick in flint
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Fig 8: House on Broadstairs seafront showing AD 1896 in terracotta
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Fig 9: New Street Sandwich ‘Built AD 1905’ over a shop