The House by the Thames (10 page)

‘Façade' is, however, the word. These new houses were not really as different from the old ones as at first they seemed. Although the classic terrace house that evolved then appeared to be a brick building, it still contained a great deal of timber both in its structure and in its internal finishing. Partitions between rooms and round the staircase were often still entirely of wood; at intervals even in the brick walls bond timbers were laid, to stabilize the whole structure while the lime-mortar slowly dried and also to provide fixings for panelling, lintels, etc. in the old way. After the 1707 and 1709 Acts exterior wooden eaves and cornices were not officially to be allowed, and the wooden sash windows, with their internal shutters, were supposed to be set back four inches from the outer brick, which meant that the brick walls had in theory to be thicker. But in practice these further stipulations were only implemented gradually, and in any case did not strictly apply to houses outside the confines of the City. Number 49 Bankside, built not long after these Acts, shows even today all the internal signs of having been hand-crafted to fit the site in the medieval way.

For all the talk about classic proportion and harmony, most of the new houses occupied the same sort of space as the medieval or Tudor houses they replaced. Much has been written about the logistics of London estate development, but it seems that the system of long, narrow land-holdings, running back from the street in strips, had fixed itself in the London psyche well before the Georgian speculative builders came along to maximise the financial potential of such plots. So ancient custom lay behind the house-frontages of sixteen, eighteen or twenty feet which now became arbitrarily established (according to the house's social status) as the basic unit of measurement from which all the other ‘harmonious proportions' were calculated. But in the case of number 49 the identification with the former building on the site is closer and more intricate than this. For it was built in the actual footprint of the Cardinal's Hat, re-using not only the footings but the two deep Elizabethan cellars, front and back, with their timbered and vaulted roofs and stone-flagged floors, where Fritter and his predecessors stored their barrels. Some of the central chimney stack may have been used as well.

The house as it was built c.1710 stands today with its frontage only slightly modified by a later addition of stucco and new window and door cornices. What appears to be the front door, with a fanlight in the style of the time as if to light a passageway behind, opens onto Bankside. It is set to one side, in a way that was to become general for houses of that class, with one window alongside, two on the first floor and two on the second in the approved ‘harmonious' manner. But, when it was built, was this door really the principal entry? For it leads not into the standard hallway/passage, with a room to one side and stairs at the end, of later Georgian houses. Instead, it opens directly into a pleasant panelled room, with a window-seat overlooking the river and a fireplace set diagonally in the far corner. We might almost be in the parlour-bar of Fritter's tavern.

So which way is number 49 really orientated? The front façade is only sixteen foot wide, but the house goes back much further. The nearest thing to a hallway is beyond a doorway at the far end of the front room, in the middle of the house. Here, quite out of sight from the Bankside door and facing sideways to it anyway, the square, dog-leg staircase rises in an open well, with its original newel-posts and oak treads intact. It also descends from the same point into the cellars. The corner-set flue backs up against this staircase, and naturally this pattern continues on the upper floors and also down below. Here is the central nexus of the building around which the rest of the house is deployed. This was a not uncommon pattern in late seventeenth- and very early eighteenth-century town houses, but in most of them an internal side passage leading to this centre from the door at the front gave an appearance of new urban logic to what was, in essence, a traditional, rural-type structure.
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With 49, however, these vernacular origins are much clearer. For down Cardinal Cap Alley at the side of the house, roughly at its mid-point, are the remains of another substantial entry, now blocked up, with a gridded light above it. If you could get in here, you would step directly into the central lobby with the staircase facing you and a room opening off on either side. Here in the by-lane, I suggest, was the main door of the inn, allowing people to come and go both from Bankside and from the gardens and lanes behind. And here too, I think, when the house was remodelled and given a brick face-lift, did the old entry survive and for a long time was probably more used than the cosmetic Bankside door which led straight into a room. The entrance in the centre of the house would obviously have been more convenient for deliveries (unlike later Georgian houses, 49 never had a basement area with its own service-stairs) and also more convenient for servants, children and anyone else coming into the house to run directly up those wide, creaking stairs with their hint of a ship's ladder. Some timbering apparent in the wall where the stairs go down to the cellars, and in the main beams of the cellar itself, suggest days far more distant than those of Queen Anne. What we have here in 49, surrounded by wood and airy spaces, with Fritter's cavernous storehouse below, is only the simulacrum of an eighteenth-century terrace house with its front on the street. The benign ghost that co-exists on the same site is that of a much older structure, built sideways on, with its gable-end to Bankside.
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Although owning a few houses had long been a popular way of securing an income, especially for respectable widows, the logistics of this meant that the majority of Londoners had always been tenants paying an annual rent. This system in fact continued well into the twentieth century and ran right through society: it should not be taken as indication that the tenants were necessarily of any lower social status than the landlords, nor that the landlords themselves were wealthy. It is clear, however, that the people who lived in 49 Bankside when it was newly rebuilt were not among London's poor. I do not know if the property-owning Bruce sisters lived there themselves, nor whether either of them had acquired a different name through marriage; none of the Poor Rate and Land Rate records for St Saviour's parish have survived from before the year 1748. (Such records are the main source for information on pre-Census populations. The very fact of being liable to pay one or both of these rates indicates a social and financial status above that of ordinary working people.)

We know that the gentlemanly Oldner family lived near to 49. There was also, quite early in the century, an Edmund Shallett living nearby whose father, Arthur, had been a founder of the Baptist chapel and school in Zoar Street: references crop up elsewhere to ‘Shallett's chapel'. In the 1740s the Shalletts acquired another house by renting it from William Oldner, nephew and heir of Sir Richard, and this house was to become 46 Bankside. Another family, who came to own several houses in that part of Bankside besides the one they lived in and remained there for much of the century, were the Astells or Astills, boat-builders. A further substantial inhabitant for a time was a John Cator, who was to be an executor for Henry Thrale, the brewery owner, and whose descendants were to lay out the Cator estate in Greenwich.

These people were worlds away from the fashionably idle society of the newly built quarter of St James's. But it is equally certain that they were far from being what their contemporary Daniel Defoe called ‘the mechanick part of mankind … the meer labouring people who depend on their hands.' The popular history of our own egalitarian time has perpetrated a misleading two-nations or upstairs-downstairs view of past societies, as if to be rich or poor in eighteenth-century London were the only alternatives. But in reality, more than any Continental city at that time, London was characterised by a large and constantly increasing class of what Defoe called ‘the middling sort, who live well.' These were not people with money behind them, but those in some sort of trade or who owned small-scale manufacturies – most enterprises were small then, by later standards, usually employing no more than half a dozen people. Although they probably did not get their hands dirty or callused, ‘the middling sort' had to work hard and keep their wits about them to maintain the position to which they had risen.

But their wives did not need to labour, either at some money-earning occupation of their own or at the heavy work within their own homes. In fact Continental visitors were surprised at what relatively easy lives such married women had compared with the French or German housewife. London was famous as a town of shops, so that by the eighteenth century the London housewife no longer needed to spin, brew or make her own bread, or candles, as her counterpart had done in previous generations. She would, however, have been likely to undergo numerous child-births (even the illustrious Mrs Thrale, in the big Bankside brewery later in the century, was almost constantly pregnant) and she would have had the children that survived round her feet a good deal. She would have stitched many of their clothes and would have taught them herself, at any rate while they were small. The upper-middle-class Victorian habit of segregating the children at the top of the house with a Nurse in charge lay far in the future, and servants in a house like 49 had too much physical labour to be able to baby-mind effectively as well. Of course the children of ‘the middling sort' needed to acquire literacy, and manners and, unlike the offspring of humble people, the boys would not have been expected to join their fathers in the shop or workshop until they were of a suitable age to be formally apprenticed. It is no doubt significant of a general ease of living, as well as of the prudence of the self-made businessman, that the eighteenth-century English had the reputation of being kinder to their children than were their Continental counterparts and of taking more trouble with them.

It is difficult to generalise because ‘the middling sort' were such a large, catch-all group, ranging from prosperous craftsmen and master-watermen to well-to-do merchants, but essentially the people who lived in 49 when its handsome panelling was new were not needy. They could afford to keep a servant or two, although these were usually very young girls who might require a good deal of supervision and teaching by example. The employers could read and write and had the spare energy to take an interest in the world at large – the first daily newspaper started in 1702. They attended church or chapel; they had few but relatively expensive clothes of good cloth; they could entertain guests elegantly, if they wished, in their first-floor room with its view of St Paul's. They weren't, perhaps, quite gentlefolk (though the old appellation ‘gentleman' for a member of the landed upper classes was being more and more widely applied to anyone who looked and sounded the part) but they might reasonably expect, if business continued to prosper, that their sons or grandsons might be gentlefolk. Meanwhile, it was reckoned that on an income of no more than £50 a year (which was about three to five times that of a labouring man) a small family could live, with care, in genteel comfort – though many ‘middling people' had a considerably higher income than that.

Our popular image of eighteenth-century interiors is largely derived from the surviving grand houses of the time, and should be treated with caution. It is nevertheless true that general levels of both comfort and gentility in London were steadily increasing. Just as, in the seventeenth century, pewter had replaced the old wooden trenchers and chairs had replaced the oak benches and stools, so now blue and white ‘Oriental' pottery – much of it made along the river in Lambeth – became more widely used, and chairs became more comfortable with new paddings. Small ‘Turkey' carpets now covered bare boards. It would seem from this – though I have not seen the point expressly made – that those age-old household nuisances, rats and fleas, had at last been banished from well-run homes, though constant vigilance was no doubt still required to protect the nice new furnishings. In addition to the heavy old cupboards, lacquered cabinets appeared, and cane work from India and small marquetry tables; silver tankards and bowls were more widely distributed, so were mirrors and prints. A clock became a standard feature of a comfortable home, as did tea-pots, tea-caddies and delicate cups for the new expensive habit of ‘taking tay'. Candles, earlier carried around in single candlesticks, could now be stuck in fixed wall-sconces, often with a mirror behind them to reflect more light.

But sheer space in a family house was still quite restricted, as compared with later English middle-class norms: living rooms frequently contained beds that folded away for the day into cupboards or were tipped up and disguised as bookcases. In 49, the one or two servants may have slept in the attic, which at that date was a small room tucked away behind the cornice so as not to spoil the house's ‘rational proportions'. (The present larger attic is a twentieth-century addition.) But there cannot have been anything of a subterranean ‘below-stairs' life in this house in the eighteenth or much of the nineteenth century: its cellars, built long before for storage not for habitation, were penetrated by little air or daylight, and artificial light was not then a feasible option. I am not even sure that, in the eighteenth century, the cellar at the front had the narrow, gridded opening in the pavement above that appears in early twentieth-century photos. (This was covered in again by the 1950s.) It is most likely, given Bankside's vulnerability to flooding up to the late nineteenth century, that the front cellar had no opening to daylight at all and therefore could never have functioned as the classic Georgian or Victorian kitchen.

I believe that the kitchen was where it had probably been in the days of the inn: in the back room on the ground floor which opened onto the yard and garden. The front room, on the opposite side of the central lobby and stairs, may have served as a family dining room – although, within a generation or two, it had probably become a place of male resort, where the master of the house and his associates smoked and talked and where paperwork was done. In any case, it was customary in the eighteenth century for meals to be taken in the best room in the house, usually (as in 49) the first-floor front room, even when this room also served as a bedchamber.