Building is in my blood; my mother's family ran a Midlands building company for ninety-nine years having previously been itinerant craftsmen. I remember with huge affection childhood visits to the 'yard'.
My last employment before I retired was as Chief Executive of Lincoln Cathedral where I learnt something of stone masons and the way medieval cathedrals were built. Most recently, I have been exploring the history of British manufacturing and the places where it took place. This brought me close to the building of mills, factories and urban housing, over a period spanning three centuries or so.
I needed to try to understand how it was all built and indeed who built it.
This research is about Britain and so the story of early English Building is relevant background and a good place to start. It will be my next post.
My next point of call is Rome. Roman architecture stands out because of the variety of materials used and structures built, but most of all because modern building from the Renaissance onward looked to Rome for both theoretical and practical ideas.
I go on from there to look at traditional building materials: wood, stone and brick. Glass comes next, linking the old to the new.
This is very much a work in progress. I hope you will join me in my quest. I plan to post further blogs in the coming weeks.
I explore classes of building; churches and military buildings starting with castles; church building over ten centuries consumed more labour, money and materials than any other form of building.
The sixteenth century, the Tudor and Elizabethan eras, marked a change in attitude as the English become confident and developed a tendency to show off. So, I move on to the great Country Houses and Urban Houses for the Wealthy and Merchant and, later, Middle Classes. The individual blog pieces take urban building in particular further forward.
As the eighteenth century draws to a close I come to Industrial Buildings which run hand in hand with Urban Dwellings for the poor who fled to the towns from deplorable Rural Dwellings.
I then explore the contractors who first emerged in the nineteenth century. They run hand-in-hand with new building materials: Steel and Concrete and the exploration of non-traditional building methods and materials. In addition to houses, they did of course build hospitals, schools, civic buildings, places of entertainment and infrastructure for transporting the nation.
The image is of the interior of one of the oldest buildings in Britain, the Broch of Mousa on Shetland dating from 2,500 BCE.
