In the latest article in “Shoreham Unlisted”, his series of articles on the unsung heroes of Shoreham’s architecture, Richard Bingham takes a look inside a well-known Victorian terrace.
In the twentieth century, it became known as product differentiation. To catch the fickle eye of the consumer, companies would offer up subtle differences, obscure objects of desire.
But Victorian housebuilders had already well and truly mastered the art. Take the names of the four houses in this good-looking terrace on Western Road, Rothsay and Inversnaid, names that conjure up the Scottish Highlands, not an English town on the south coast.
But that’s no surprise. From the middle of the nineteenth century a cult of Scotland gathered pace. From the novels of Walter Scott to Queen Victoria’s sojourns at Balmoral and the stag paintings of Landseer, the Highlands were all the rage.
Hence the four Scots names engraved in Gothic lettering on the coloured glass above the doors of these four Shoreham houses. It was good marketing.
Decoration, decoration, decoration
If Scotland had become a bit old hat by the end of the century, the fenestration of these houses is bang up to date. For decades, it had been possible to manufacture very large windowpanes. Yet the glazing of these houses prefers nine smaller panes for the upper sections of each sash window.
This detail picked up on the Queen Anne style of architecture that was popular with advanced taste from the 1870s onwards. An historicist revival of a vernacular style, the hallmarks of Queen Anne included English red brick and white-painted sash windows with lots of panes.
The popularity of the Arts and Crafts movement is also in evidence on the Western Road terrace. As its name suggests, Arts and Crafts shrank away from soulless mass production, finding solace in the work of traditional craftsmen. (Think Eric Gill in Ditchling). Thus, on Western Road, a variety of finely turned woodwork decorates the edges of the roof gable and the covered porch.
If further status was needed, it is provided for by the way the stucco entablature above the windows imitate more expensive, classical stonework. This is a handsome house intended for a buyer looking to splash a little cash – and it knows it.
Best of all, however, are the plaster relief panels between the ground and first floors. These incorporate sunflowers and tendrils – the kind of curvaceous and leafy motives popularised by the contemporary Art Nouveau style. Among the undergrowth, however, are high relief portraits of people, their faces executed so well that one is tempted to believe they are portraits of individuals. We would be delighted to hear from anyone who knows who they might be.
A dizzying variety of decoration characterises these houses. The facades on Western Road are pastiches of wildly different styles – a little bit of Art Nouveau combined with a dash of Queen Anne, a slice of classical mixed with a dollop of Arts and Crafts. This was not something the purists could appreciate.
Indeed, it was precisely this kind of pick and mix historicism against which modernist architects reacted against. Adolf Loos’s 1910 dictum “ornament is crime” had exactly this type of architecture in its sights.
A Comfortable Family Home
The terrace conforms to the style of domestic architecture prevalent in Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century. The bay window is now square rather than semi-circular and extends over both storeys, culminating in a prominent roof gable. Just a few years later, that gable might have been half-timbered, not tile-hung.
The interior plan is also conventional. The front door opens onto a staircase hall that adjoins the hall of its neighbour (so-called ‘halls adjoining’). On the left the hall leads into three separate rooms: a high-ceilinged lounge, a dining room and a kitchen, although the original scullery has since been extended to create a modern kitchen-diner. In some houses of this type the middle room can be dark and unwelcoming, but here the south-facing side window admirably avoids this pitfall.
The land for Rothsay and Inversnaid was purchased for development by a Mr Tingley, who ran a building firm in Shoreham. A comparison with contemporary housebuilders is instructive.
If you walk down many Victorian streets, you will find housing that in terms of accommodation lacks variety. Long streets, for example, are composed solely of three-bedroomed properties.
In decorative detail, however, Victorian houses show immense variety. This is because builders could choose such decorative features from a range of pattern books. They used these details to segment the market in terms of income, aspiration and fashion. Perhaps that is why the yen for “period features” survived well into the twenty first century. At Rothsay, for example, the owners have discovered a fine fireplace, complete with Art Nouveau ceramic tiles.
The Cartel
In the Victorian period, there were also a plethora of small and medium sized building companies who, like Mr Tingley, would buy up land sufficient for just a handful of houses. They would build out these plots then move on, leaving other builders who had bought their own parcels of land to complete the rest of the street.
What a contrast to the situation we have today. Now, the new build speculative house market is dominated by just seven big firms. In 2017 the combined profits of Barrat, Persimmon, Wimpey, Bellway, Berkeley and Bovis totalled £4.4 billion.
Effectively, these companies comprise a cartel that have forced small and medium sized builders out of the market. Each of them offers a tiny range of standardised designs ready for mass production. From the Highlands of Scotland to the south coast of England, their new housing estates look exactly the same.
Oh, for Mr Tingley now!
Thanks to Geoff and Judith Adams for showing me round Rothsay and sharing the title deeds they have.
