This chapter deals with the architecture of your house and how it gives you clues to help you to date the property, including:

• clues about alterations to the building
• the house’s plan and the materials of construction
• roof shapes, gables and parapets
• chimneys
• date stones
• boundaries
• outbuildings.

KEEPING IT IN CONTEXT

First you need to look at your house within its surroundings. Where is it built? Settlements usually spread outwards from the centre of the town, city or village, so if your house is near the middle it’s likely to be older than houses on the outskirts unless, of course, the town has spread out far enough to encompass smaller, nearby villages. However, older properties are also more likely to have been rebuilt by a previous owner who either needed more space or wanted the property to look fashionable.

Look at the neighbouring houses too. Do they look similar? Are they from the same sort of date? Has the area been affected by the building of a railway or a bypass?

Simply looking at your house and the style in which it was built can help you give it a rough date. But there are some things you need to be wary about:

• Rebuilding or refacing – this may have been done in an architectural style that reflects an earlier or later date than that of the original building.
• Use of reclaimed materials – the building may have used material from an earlier property, though not necessarily from one that previously existed on the same site.
• ‘Retro’ styles were popular particularly in the nineteenth century, where different features from different periods were used in the same property. Towards the end of the century there was also a movement back to the original or ‘vernacular’ architecture of the particular region. The 1930s was also a period where mock-Tudor houses were built.

So it’s always a good idea to look at the physical evidence side-by-side with documentary evidence, such as deeds, plans and maps, to make sure your house really is as old (or as new!) as you think.

Major architectural periods and styles

As a rough rule of thumb (with dates rounded up), these are:

Alterations and additions

If you know that the house has been altered or built onto, think about why the changes were made. That can give you clues to the use of the house. This is particularly useful if your house used to be a shop, business or a pub – it means you’ll have more sources for potential leads to research its history.

Pointers that could show your house has been altered include:

• Bricks on different walls being a different colour, shape or size.
• Decorative patterns being cut off abruptly.
• A line (known as a ‘course’) of narrow stonework or brick just above the lintels of windows; this may suggest that another storey has been added to the original building.
• Changes in the roofline (roofs of different pitches suggest an extension or refacing).
• Blocked-up openings of former doors and windows.
• Steps down to the entrance – this can point to the floor being lowered to give extra height to rooms, which was fashionable in the mid-seventeenth century. As a rule of thumb the lower the storeys (i.e. low internal ceilings), the older the building; if the ceilings have been raised or the roofline altered, you may also see evidence at the gable ends of the building.
• A symmetrical front except for the chimneys. A symmetrical frontage suggests that it dates from the end of the seventeenth century or later; but if the chimney stacks aren’t also symmetrical it suggests that the house is older. Although it was relatively easy to change the front of the house, moving the chimney stacks was more difficult and tended not to be done.

PLAN OF THE HOUSE

The earliest rural houses were long houses – that is, houses where the rooms were arranged in a row without a corridor. High-status houses had two storeys; the ground floor was used for storage and the top floor had an external staircase which led to a hall with a fireplace and a ‘solar’ (private living room). Lower status houses were single storey, with one or two bays for the animals, one or two bays for the living quarters, and a loft above the living quarters for sleeping. During Tudor times the byre was moved to a separate building and the space tended to be remodelled as a kitchen.

Medieval hall houses usually had a large open hall that was two storeys high and could be several bays long. At one end, near the entrance doors (partitioned by a wooden screen – known as a ‘screens passage’) were the service rooms, i.e. kitchen, pantry (where food was stored) and buttery (where liquids were stored); at the other end there would be a raised dais or platform where people ate and then the parlour, with stairs to a solar or bedroom. During Tudor times fireplaces were inserted in the centre and there tended to be one room on one side of the chimney stack and two on the other; a floor was inserted at first-floor height so the hall became single-storey and there was more accommodation on the top floor.

In towns, because space was limited, houses tended to be narrow with the gable end on the street and the main part of the house running back from it. The first room might be the craftsman’s room or shop; behind that there would be a two-storey hall, and behind that would be store rooms. The kitchen would be at the other side of the courtyard, and the first floor rooms would be the living rooms and sleeping rooms. There might also be a cellar or undercroft, used for storage. As with the medieval hall houses, chimneys were inserted and the hall became single-storey to give additional accommodation.

By Georgian times houses tended to be built to a plan two rooms deep; the entrance hall led to the stairs (although in some houses the stairs were ‘hidden’ at the sides) and acted as a corridor leading to the kitchen, dining room and living rooms. Town houses were still long, but had an entrance hall acting as a corridor leading to the living rooms with stairs on one side of it.

Terraces developed during the eighteenth century, mainly for the well-to-do classes, but in the nineteenth century terraces were seen as working-class homes and were often built ‘back to back’.