The world of Basilica Fields is more than a railway… Basilica Fields includes and represents a part of the East End of London across a broad spectrum of geography, commerce, life… a window into a world that is beyond memory. Just the other day, probably sometime next week, a discussion took place about the interior of the late 19th century hovels which spread across the East End like jam on butter…. smeared onto the face of the world. Neither of the authors could recall much knowledge of how the rooms were arranged or the approximate sizes of the buildings which were “home” (or “Des Res”) to thousands of those who spent most if not all of their lives in the dismal sprawl of this part of London.
So why were we discussing such a subject…. and how does that discussion relate to the Quirky corner of Basilica Fields?
The sketches of the The Rookery and of Angel Yard depict row upon row upon row of dreary houses, many of those houses are not much better than slums and soon to be swept away. Those rows occupy a significant area of the proposed scenes and having dimensions of a representative, typical, building will be of great value when setting out the miniature real estate.
In best Quirky tradition this post offers an opportunity for readers to help with some questions and thoughts. What might have been the size of a terraced house, for a labourer, in the East End? How many rooms downstairs and upstairs? What would be the size of the yard and how big might be the requisite out-house?
Photos, drawings, pointers… what do you have that can help us in this quest?
regards, Graham
April 17, 2012 at 4:21 pm
Graham,
An interesting subject my friend, firstly try this for size http://www.1900s.org.uk/index.htm
There’s loads of info on this site of which I have not seen all of it yet.
I have worked on some old victorian terraces in the past and very basically they haven’t been much more than 12ft wide with 9ft storey ht. with two up two down, scullery and outside toilet, and the coal bunker if lucky.
I don’t doubt that there were smaller hovels in the rookeries of the East End all now long gone.
I can help with more accurate info regarding building consruction and such like from the references I have on my shelves and in my grey matter if you should need it, so feel free to ask.
This is inspiring and pushing me to get on with my own project not too far away round the bend in the Thames.
Great stuff.
ATB, Col
April 17, 2012 at 4:39 pm
Thank you for responding…. and just two minutes after posting!
First question – of many I suspect – there has been a suggestion that the ground floor was “open” from front to back…. how common would that have been? If the ground floor was “open” then what was the arrangement upstairs?
Next…what was the orientation of the staircase?
And… how many windows? of what size? sash or hinged?
Finally – which rooms would have had fireplaces and hence how many chimney stacks / pots?
By the way, I understand that one or two of the dwellings were occupied by your and my ancestors…
April 17, 2012 at 5:55 pm
Hi Graham
You will find much information on the history of the relevant area in the “Survey of London” which is available online at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx?pubid=361 which covers Artillery Passage and Artillery Lane – they are in Volume 27 which is Spitalfields and Mile End New Town. If you follow the links from there the Survey deals with various estates and streets in the area. Although there are not so many illustrations, there is for instance, a plan of the layout of Commercial Street (helpfully with a scale bar for reference) at:
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/image.aspx?compid=50178&filename=fig65.gif&pubid=361
Note that some older houses in the Artillery Lane area survive (such as No 3 Artillery Passage) whilst at least one, on the Tenter Ground estate, fell down within 40 year’s of its construction. I would guess that these would the kind of terraces you would be interested in.
The OS for 1873-5 also covers the area in some detail – see
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/image.aspx?compid=50192&filename=figure0361-005.gif&pubid=361
The size of individual buildings (terraced housing, backyards and so on) can be gleaned from it as a starting point.
The Builder magazine would also be useful. It’s available in the London Metropolitan Archives: vols 1 to 26 (18442 to 1868), vols 28-56 (1870 to 1889) and vols 62 to 63 (1892). There are indexes available as originally published by the magazine. See:
http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/84C9F4B4-87AD-4524-95E6-2E1EF39FA074/0/LH_LMA_builder.PDF
The London Metropolitan Archive also focuses on the built environment and in particular on 19thC expansion of the City. Some of the archive is now digital but only available if you go there.
An 1894 OS map of Spitalfields Rookery can be found at:
April 17, 2012 at 7:51 pm
Graham,
Not to sure about the “open” aspect on the ground floor, more a modern day approach but needs further investigation.
The conventional two up two down terraced cottage would have had a load bearing wall from ground floor to upper floor ceiling joists usually in line with the ridge. These joist would tie the wall plates together, on which the rafters are spiked, to stop the roof spreading and transfer the wieght of the roof down through the walls. The rafters were also tied into the flank or party walls by purlins under the rafters which stops the rafters sagging and twisting.
The load bearing wall dictated the layout of the rooms, the stairs in a lot of cases was right in front of the street door as you entered running up to the landing and on to the bedrooms.
Fireplaces were on the opposite wall to the stairs in each room the chimny breasts combining in the roof space into one stack, with seperate pots, which would also have been integral with the next door cottage, this being a mirror image in it’s layout.
Ground floor would have had a scullery at the back with butler sink and stove.
The bog at the bottom of the yard or built on the back of the property and a coal shed.
Bath night was a tin job in front of the back room fire or in the scullery.
Windows ? one per room probably might have been sliding box sashes but these would/are more expensive to make than conventional hung sashes.
we can suss out which from photo’s. I have sizes of doors windows etc. in my reference books.
ATB, Col.
April 28, 2012 at 5:43 pm
I think some of ther early Builder volumes were digitised a few years ago, while I was working for the company. I’m not sure how far they got or even if it was just the indexes. It might be worth a call. The magazine is now Building.
Jonathan David
May 20, 2012 at 5:22 pm
Hello, Although not strictly concerned with interiors a book you might find useful for modelling the townscape is Lost London published by English Heritage (2009, ISBN 978-0-9557949-8-8) which consists of photographs taken from c.1900-1950. It does cover the west as well as the east end but has many atomospheric photos of areas such as Shoreditch and Stepney (In a chapter captioned rather primly as ‘City of Dreadful Night’!). Quite a few of the buildings in what is now regarded as inner-London seemed to reflect pre-industrial styles of building that might otherwise be found in rural Essex or Kent at that stage, and can still be found in places as unlikely as Upminster and Hornchurch. Of course the countryside co-existed with the city on the borders of the urban area. I remember cows grazing at Beckton in the 1960s ! I am not of course talking about the large areas of terraced housing built after 1850, but much of that was built on what was previously countryside. Richard Price
May 27, 2012 at 9:53 pm
It’s a great book. Some of the photographs have been reproduced before, in the Tempus series, among others, but the size and quality of the images is fantastic. Although the East End is generally held to have contained the lowest of the low, it’s interesting to see how the poor were distributed throughout the whole of London, in some places almost on the doorstep of those several degrees higher of the social ladder than themselves.
The juxtaposition of old rustic housing with the post-1850 terraces produce some astonishing photographs, and it’s quite something to consider that the destruction and urbanisation of many areas of beautiful countryside in the following 50+ years was the direct result of the expansion of the very railways we have a soft spot for.