The Big Smoke

This incredible newish blog looks at a different London song every day. Today, it's 'The Battle Of All Saints Road' by B.A.D. Bookmark now.

I liked James Ward's reminiscing as he revisited the old family home at Worcester Park. 'And while engaging in self-indulgent nostalgia is fun in and of itself, the thing I am really trying to get my head around is the idea that everywhere contains these stories. Every house you walk past in the street has hundreds of stories to tell. Every bus stop, every table in a cafe, every fork, every knife.'

Big Smoke alumni Stephen Emms has posted the penultimate entry in his excellent ongoing London weekly serial, Happiness Is An Option.

Spitalfields Life waxes lyrical about the first mince pies of the season.

We moved house last month. This was partly to get away from the guy who lived in the basement, a Booker-nominated novelists with carefully nurtured and oh-so-artistic neuroses that would manifest themselves in a series of particularly unpleasant ways. And it was partly because we had the opportunity to move into a real house, one with its own entrance and internal staircase, the sort of house your parents live in and a defining moment in my London life, exemplifying the transition into adulthood.

‘This is a real London house,’ my Mum said when she saw it. At first I thought she was just being nice because she knows the way to my heart, but it turns out that she was quite right – it is a real London house, measurably as much as spiritually.

In ‘London: The Unique City’, his classic book about London design and architecture, Steen Eiler Rasmussen writes about houses just like mine: ‘From railroads intersecting the suburbs of London we see interminable rows of these swarthy little houses with all their protruding little kitchen-wings.' He includes a picture and plan of one of these houses, reproduced above. It looks a lot like mine.

There is a reason for this 'interminable' consistency in London housing, and like most things in the country, it is to do with class. Rasmussen tells us that in London, because the class system ensured people of the same social strata would invariably live alongside each other and away from people of different classes, it is ‘possible to standardise domestic houses: as people living in the same street have the same requirements all the houses can be absolutely uniform.’

But this is what intrigues me about my street – all the houses aren’t uniform. At one end there are grand five storey double-fronted detached houses, which would have been for the very rich and at the other there are two-storey workmen's terraces, with every possible permutation in between. In fact, it is entirely atypical of Rasmussen's standardised London street, because here there would have been unavoidable mixing of the different social classes.

From somewhere, I’d picked up the notion that this curious mix was because the street was originally constructed by Victorian building companies as a way of showcasing their different house designs during London's rapid expansion in the middle of the nineteenth century: developers would then come down and look at a range of different types of houses – three-storey semi-detached, four-storey terraces – and choose which one they wanted when constructing new streets in the growing suburbs.

Sadly, it seems I made this up. When I put my theory to somebody at the local historical society, they told me: ‘This is the first I’ve heard of a suggestion that these houses were built as exemplars of different housing styles. The street was built over quite a long period and differences in style are probably because of changing markets. The largest houses were built first – at the end of the 1850s, early 1860s. They were designed for the middle classes with living in servants. In the later 1860s, after the coming of the railway to Herne Hill, the area began to attract the skilled working classes. This was the market for which the later and smaller houses were designed.’

Oh well, it was a nice idea.

Incredibly, Rasmussen also knew the exact width of of my new house - 16 foot 6 inches. He writes, ‘the common little house is only sixteen feet six inches broad. It has probably been the ordinary size of a site since the Middle Ages… but it is difficult to get information as to how typical houses were built in former days.’ After reading this, I went home and measured the front of my house and he was right. Now everywhere I look in London, from Brixton to Holloway, I see 16 foot 6 inch house fronts. Try it for yourself.

So why is this? For an answer, I turned to English Heritage’s new photographic collection ‘Lost London’, in which Philip Davies explains why London’s houses of a certain era are all exactly the same size. He writes of ‘a secret ingredient which conferred an innate harmony on the city, and which influenced everything from the layout of an entire neighbourhood to the size of a window pane – the Imperial system of measures.’

Davies’s continues. ‘Neighbourhoods were laid out by surveyors who used acres, furlongs, rods and chains – measurements which had been in common usage for marking out arable land since the ninth century. An acre was the length of a furlong (660ft) and its width was one chain (66ft). For shorter lengths a perch, a pole or a rod were used. There were four rods to one chain and a London workman’s house had a frontage of one rod – 16 ft 6 in – so entire districts were created based on endogenous proportional relationships.’

For those who find London’s overall sense of scale overwhelming, this internal and very visible consistency might at least provide some comfort.

My favourite thing about my new house, though, is not the comforting sense of conformity it provides, but the small metal-covered hole it has on the doorstep. This is a coal hole. Rasmussen says, ‘Through little round covers the coal can be shot into the vault, so that the coal dust is not brought into the house.’ I had never noticed London’s coal holes until I was introduced to one – not literally – by Matt Brown of Londonist, and I’ve since discovered there is a rich source of coal hole coverage out there on the internet – check out Faded London or Jane’s London for extensive examples. Aren't they cute? Now I really do have London on my doorstep.