CTGA Notes 2025 | ColchesterWalksTalks

Brief history of house construction for How to Read a House Walk June 2025

No houses from prehistory are still occupied in the UK. Most were made of wood, mud and straw and rotted away long ago. Only a few which were preserved underground by fluke conditions have been found. Usually post holes are the only indication of their existence. Where stone was available for building it would have been used and would have lasted but when the building went out of use, it was usually robbed away for use elsewhere. Only a few stone houses survive intact, having been preserved underground and none are now occupied.

In 43AD the Romans invaded and in 49AD the Roman city of Colchester was founded. House construction would have been mainly of wood with brick or stone foundations to the walls. Only the high status buildings used septaria, flint and/or ragstone for their construction due to the scarcity of stone here. With the decline of Roman Britain, bricks and the skills to make them disappeared and bricks stopped being made when they left in the 5th century.

The Roman street pattern of Colchester was a grid and streets were mainly compacted gravel or sand. They were lost or buried when the town was abandoned in 450AD. The current street pattern in Colchester city centre is a medieval grid laid out by Edward the Elder who kicked out the Danes in 917AD and then restored the town walls and laid out the new streets in 921AD. This grid, which is still here today, doesn’t line up with the Roman grid apart from in a few places, normally where it had to line up with the town gates left by the Romans. See my blog for more information https://www.colchesterwalksandtalks.com/post/a-colchester-street-puzzle-solved

When the Saxons arrived their houses were made of wood, mud and straw and had no foundations. They did eventually start to reuse the Roman brick and stone from the abandoned city but these were all used by the 13th century. Around the same time, horizontal wooden beams laid on the ground or trenches filled with rubble were introduced as wall foundations in larger houses. They also used stones dropped by the last age if they could find them. This meant the walls would not rot at the bottom and they would last a lot longer. A few houses still survive from this period in Essex but none are in Colchester.

A house back then would consist of a hall with a central fireplace, but no chimney so the smoke found its own way out. The master of the house and his family slept on a raised platform or sometimes a mezzanine floor at one end of the house. The beams for the house were made in a woodyard then taken to site and reassembled.

In the 13th century ships that had taken goods to the Netherlands were coming back empty. This was not good for business and also made the ships liable to capsize as they were top heavy so they brought back bricks made there as ballast and sold them here. Seeing a market, Flemish settlers in East Anglia reintroduced brick making in England.

They were normally made close to where they were to be used if suitable clay was available or further away if it wasn't. Bricks are heavy and were difficult to transport so it couldn't be too far away. They were made by hand and the size and quality varied a lot. A brick kiln would be built and then demolished when the job was finished.

In the 1380s brickmaking was regulated, at first by church guilds and later by specific guilds of tylers (or brickmakers). The word tile was often used for both bricks and tiles. Brick sizes varied up to 1571 when a standard of 9” by 4.5” by 2.25” was set although in practice the size still varied a lot.

Skills spread so by the 16th century bricks were a luxury item and only very high status buildings were completely made of them although they were also being incorporated or added to lesser status wooden buildings if the owner could afford some. Fireplaces and chimneys made of brick were introduced, removing the central fire pit and the smoke. They also allowed for upper floors to be added to halls to be used as bedrooms. Wooden extensions known as wings were added to the hall.

One wing would be private accommodation for the master and his family. The other would be a kitchen often with another brick fireplace and chimney along with quarters for servants. Bricks sometimes were also used to replace some of the panels between the timbers. They could be used to form the foundations to wooden wall to keep them of the ground and where possible. might be added under existing walls. Chimneys and fireplaces would be used as a symbol of wealth and status. The bigger the fireplace and the higher and bigger the chimney, the more wealthy the owner was.

Houses made of wood are often described as being "Half-timbered". This meant the logs were cut in half or at least cut down to a square inner section. The wooden beams of the house were cut to size at a woodyard. Al the beams marked to make the house easy to take to the site and assemble it. An early example of prefab buildings.

A box frame house were the more expensive sort. Others were cruck or A frames. When the person paying for the construction was wealthy, close studding would be used. This has the timber beams very close together and is a sign of wealth as beams were expensive.

The timbers were often left unpainted so they could weather naturally, while the panels in-between painted with pigmented limewash. The blackening of them is a natural aging effect. However, sometimes both the beams and panels were limewashed.

In 1625 the standard height of a brick increased to 3”. After the great fire of London in 1666, Charles II ruled that all new buildings in London must be of fire retardant material and encouraged the use of bricks. The Tylers' Guild in London did not have enough members to do the work, so they relaxed the admission regulations and trained people from the provinces to make bricks. After this there was an explosion in the industry and many hundreds of new brick makers and builders set up business around England as itinerant brickmakers, travelling from place to place as they were needed and by the 18th century bricks were being used in the houses of the rich middle class.

In the 18th century, timber framed house were no longer considered to be fashionable. They just showed the owner was too poor to rebuild in brick. When stucco and stone finishes became fashionable, many houses had their timbers plastered over to hide the wooden frame. Where they could afford some bricks, but not a complete rebuild in them, they would put a fake brick front of the house to hide the wooden house behind.

In 1784 George III introduced the Brick Tax to pay for the American War of Independence. It was charged on bricks before they were fired in the kiln. To show a brick had been taxed, the brick mould would have the word 'excise' on it which which left an imprint on the brick. Bricks were originally taxed at 2s 6d per thousand. This was increased to 4s per thousand in 1794 and to 5s per thousand in 1797. Sometimes much larger bricks were made to reduce number needed so in 1801 an upper size limit of 10” by 5” by 3” was set with tax being double on bricks bigger than this. This maximum size applied to the mould so the finished bricks were smaller due to shrinkage while they were in the kiln.

The brick tax was raised for a final time in 1805 to 5s 10d per thousand bricks. The tax raised the price of bricks so many brickworks went out of business. Also the use and quality of bricks in construction went down because of this and the tax was finally abolished in 1850 as it was seen as a detriment to industrial development.

In the 1820s mechanisation of brickworks was introduced. There were lots of local brickworks making many thousands of bricks per day. A smaller workforce was needed than was required to produce them by the old hand craft system. As a result they became much cheaper and their use started to spread to lower class houses. Industrial scale brickworks and transport of them over long distances by canal and then railway accelerated their use and made them much more widespread. In 1840 a standard size of 9" by 4.5" by 3.5" was widely adopted.

By 1850 the majority of brickmakers used mechanised brick production and the small country brickyards, unable to invest in machinery, were either bought out or driven to closure, and itinerant brickmakers could not compete with these big factories. By 1914 there were probably no more than fifty travelling brick makers in the British Isles (including the whole of Ireland). Prior to World War Two, this had dwindled to half a dozen and today there is apparently only one left as all other brick manufacture is now carried out in established permanent brickworks. There is still small one at Marks Tey.

In the 19th & 20th centuries, many of the surviving timber framed houses were restored and their timbers exposed again. The practice of painting the beams black and the panels white, in part to emphasise the intricate patterns of the timber frame, became established.

In the late 1960s the metric brick was introduced measuring 215mm by 102.5mm by 65mm. This is slightly smaller than the 1840s standard, but imperial sized bricks and hybrid ones are available still in a variety of sizes as are stock bricks of all periods recovered from demolished buildings. It is also noted that the thickness of the mortar used to bond bricks together gets thinner through time as brick quality improves.

Since the early 20th century concrete with steel or sometimes wooden frames, or blocks of various materials, all still usually clad, still clad with brick has been used. Houses are also often prefabricated off site.

Recently, for ancient timber house, fashions have changed again, and now some of these houses have had the paint removed from their beams to reveal the natural colour of the weathered wood, while the panels are limewashed in soft earth tones. There are some modern timber frame house, which were built from the late 19th century onwards ,and are known as "mock Tudor", have also followed these changes in fashion. These buildings can be differentiated from ancient examples as the often have a lot of brick in them and often only on the first floor. In the earlier 19th century ones, the wooden is often crudely cut, finished and painted compared to their ancient counterparts. Also, the wood is not always structural but is just stuck on to the masonry as decoration.

There are lots of resources available to explore the subject further and include details on how to date buildings by their roofs, chimneys, door, widows and other features. However it should noted that all these can be changed over time so may not be original.

Websites

National Library of Scotland Old OS Maps

Kelly's Directories (Bit tricky to use)

Colchester CC Planning Map

Colchester Local List interactive map (Click on the magnifying glass to activate it)

Rightmove (Use to look inside house for sale or rent and to get floorplans)

Rightmove Sold Prices (Look at details for houses sold in the last few decades)

Essex Records Office (Indexes are on line. You will need to visit to see actual records)

Search "old maps of Colchester" for a variety of sites containing them

Tymperleys

Books

Tracing the History of Houses - Trevor Yorke