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The design of a house for a merchant, 1724

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Extract

It is not the purpose of this short article to announce a new discovery or to draw new conclusions, but to make readily available a document of considerable significance to all concerned with the development of the eighteenth-century provincial town house.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1990

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References

Notes

1 Ref. 33746. I wish to thank the City Archivist for permission to publish the document and the staff of the Bristol Record Office for their assistance. I also wish to thank Dr Roger Leech and Mr J. T. Smith for their very helpful comments.

2 Downes, K., ‘The Kings Weston Book of Drawings’, Architectural History, 10 (1967), pp. 988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Ibid., catalogue 98, fig. 76.

4 Most recently by M. Craven, The Derby Townhouse (1987), p. 25.

5 D. Defoe, A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, 1724–6 (Everyman edn 1974), 11, p. 36.

6 Ison, W., The Georgian Buildings of Bristol (1952), pp. 16162.Google Scholar

7 K. Downes, op. cit., catalogue 95, not illustrated. One of these, a plot 50ft wide, was leased to John Hollidge, merchant, on 28 May 1725, the same day as the grant of the lease to Yate. This was probably for the southernmost plot, now part of the Arnolfini Arts Centre. The leases are in the Bristol Record Office — Ref. 04335(10).

8 W. Ison, op. cit., p. 162. Ison attributes Nos 68–70 to Strahan and No. 66 to William Halfpenny. Dan Cruickshank attributes all three to Strahan in A Guide to the Georgian Buildings of Britain & Ireland (1985), p. 191.

9 Ison, ibid., notes that the fronts were to be of freestone, with bricks permitted in some later grants.

10 The leases specifically excluded shops for smiths, workhouses for tallow chandlers or any other shops for tradesmen which were likely to ‘annoy the neighbouring Inhabitants by 111 smells, danger of fire or otherwise’.

11 K. Downes, op. cit., catalogue 96, fig. 77.

12 W. Ison, op. cit., p. 162.

13 J. T. Smith, ‘The Eighteenth Century English Background to Newfoundland Houses’, in S. O’Dea and G. L Pocius (eds), Dimensions of Canadian Architecture (1983), pp. 35–36. See also RCHME, Dorset, u, Pt2, (210) (1970), pp.214, 230.

14 R. Neve, The City and Country Purchaser (1726 (2nd edn); reprinted 1969), p. 160.

15 The use of timber in the chimneys for ‘mantlepeices or discharges’ was specifically prohibited by the terms of Hollidge’s lease; see n. 7.