Roger Leech’s book adopts a new approach to looking at housing from this period. It is not a guidebook to the surviving architecture from the period, in the sense of a Pevsner, nor does it just cover local well-known buildings and those by famous architects, and not even architecture as art. Instead, the book covers the local domestic architecture in an unusually wide spread, and utilising Bristol’s immense wealth of illustrative and other supporting information. He looks at the Bristol town house during the period c.1000 to c.1800. Bristol was, for most of this time, not just England’s second port, it was frequently also the largest provincial city. During this long period it was a wealthy trading centre with the benefit of economic and political ties with the capital and elsewhere, and thus in a fortunate position when it came to pursuing the latest architectural fashions.
The book looks at the development of the town, later city, then at tenement plots and life within them. For the later medieval period, the main urban house types, hallhouses and shophouses, are investigated. The changes in the principal rooms, their names and functions, are examined, as well as alterations in the layout of houses over the centuries. Second residences, garden houses and lodges, and villas, are all covered, as occasionally are allied structures such as inns and warehouses. The book also looks beyond the urban fringe to houses in surrounding villages that would later be incorporated into the suburbs, and also covers related forms on the far side of the Atlantic. Surveys undertaken in recent decades by the late RCHME as well as local archaeologists are used, as well as contemporary written accounts and probate inventories of identifiable buildings. Bristol’s rich, and possibly unique, collections of plans, drawings and photographs is extensively used, both in the main text and in the richly illustrated accompanying CD. These include watercolours, mostly of the 1820s, from the City Art Gallery collection, and photographs from the huge Reece Winstone collection.
This work will be invaluable to archaeologists as well as architectural and social historians, a ‘must buy’ for anyone working on buildings of this period. Hopefully this will encourage similar research in other provincial cities and towns, and not just in this region. It will be interesting to see how the results published here compare with other towns and regions in England and Wales.
The accompanying CD includes 1,526 additional illustrations and a 728-page selective inventory of recorded houses, as well as 1880s and modern OS coverage of the city centre and inner suburbs. Note that the reviewer’s copy of the CD was missing the final two illustrations.
John Bryant has been recording historic buildings in Bristol for four decades, and has latterly been the assistant manager at Bristol and Region Archaeological Services