Walls - Topic Home

Introduction

	In the medieval period timber was the predominant structural material for walls. The walls usually comprised a framework of hardwood beams and columns with an infill of wattle and daub. To weatherproof the panels they were painted every year or so with limewash. In some areas, possibly where timber was in short supply, other materials were used to form the external walls. Earth and straw (cob), chalk, rubble and slate were just a few.
	Towards the end of the 17th century timber buildings became more and more scarce in our towns and cities. This was partly because of the increasing cost of timber but more due to the risk of fire. By 1700 most new houses (apart from the rural poor) were built in some form of masonry. A typical town house from the early 1700s is shown on the left. It's constructed from hand made bricks (painted much later) and is built in the classical style, a style which became almost universal for fashionable houses throughout the rest of the century.
	During the Georgian period (which followed Queen Anne) the external walls of houses were built in brick or stone. The growth of canals meant that, for the first time, building materials could be transported relatively cheaply. A number of manufacturers produced pattern books and trade catalogues showing all manner of goods such as fireplaces, wall panelling, doors and windows which could be delivered throughout the country. Even so, the walls of most houses still tended to be built in local materials. The better quality houses followed strict rules of proportion and the window sizes, spacing, and of course the windows themselves all played an important part in determining the overall order of the facade.
	During the late Georgian period and throughout much of the Victorian period the poorer classes lived in dreadful housing. Much of this has long since been demolished. Towards the end of the Victorian period increased awareness of the relationship between health and housing eventually resulted in legislation which improved the quality of working class housing. A typical 'by-law' house would have three bedrooms, a cold water supply and a WC. Bathrooms were provided in better quality houses. Most of the houses were built privately for rent - there was virtually no social housing. Most houses were built in brickwork with solid walls, i.e. non-cavity.
	By the 1920s government legislation required local authorities to provide council housing and large estates were built on the outskirts of many large towns. These were sometimes in the form of 'garden cities'. The housing was generally spacious, well built and at low density. It was, however, not cheap and many could not afford the rents. Poor quality, privately owned, dwellings for rent still housed a large proportion of the population. By this time most external walls were built in cavity construction. This offered benefits in terms of thermal insulation and damp resistance compared to earlier solid walls.
	Throughout the UK the suburbs were expanding quickly. Volume house builders churned out thousands of houses, for the first time, with few regional differences. Houses in Manchester or Newcastle were virtually the same as houses in Bristol or London. Although the external walls might differ in the type of brick, or the roof might be slate as opposed to tiles, the style of the houses no longer reflected local tradition. A typical semi-detached or detached house of the 1930s would boast a small kitchen, a dining room and lounge, with two double bedrooms, a single bedroom and a bathroom upstairs. The vast majority of houses were built in brick although rendering was still common. A few houses were built in the modernist style - the brick walls were rendered with a smooth sand/cement finish to emulate the concrete walls which featured in the designs of many modernist architects.
	During the Second World War huge numbers of houses were destroyed by bombing. This, together with the increased expectations of the population after the war, resulted in a house building programme the like of which had not been seen before. Many of the available resources were concentrated on social housing; council housing as it was then known. The houses were mostly traditionally built as shown in the left-hand photograph. They did not differ much from their pre-war counterparts - brick and brick, or brick and block cavity walls, formed the main walls of the house. However, it soon became clear that traditionally built houses could not provide the numbers of homes required. There were shortages in traditional materials and traditional skills. This led to a 15 year period of system building that produced houses built from concrete frames, concrete panels and even steel. Many of these houses are still with us today although many have been demolished due to a number of problems not foreseen at the time of their construction.
	By the 1960s most low rise housing had returned to more traditional methods. Cavity walls were, once again, the main structural element of a house. Although there were a number of attempts in the late 1960s and 1970s to re-introduce system-building methods for housing, they only had a limited impact. Many of the systems were based, not on concrete, but on lightweight timber-framing. Modern versions of these are still popular today although they only account for small share of the housing market.
	In the 1980s and 1990s the volume housebuilders built thousands of fairly anonymous estates throughout the country. Many of them are built in styles which hark back to lost traditions or evoke earlier styles. Mock Elizabethan, Georgian and even Victorian houses can be seen wherever one travels. Nearly all these houses have cavity walls with brick externally (or cast stone) and lightweight block internally. Most of them will also contain additional insulation. The rest of this 'site' explains the construction and evolution of walls in much more detail.