page_title: Architecture of London
section_title: The Georgian Terraced House
hierarchical_section_title: Architecture of London / Georgian architecture (1714–1811) / The Georgian Terraced House
caption_attribution_description: English: Spencer House (1752-4) by John Vardy. Spencer House was the home of the Earls of Spencer until 1895. This is the view from Green Park.
context_page_description: London is the largest and capital city of England and the United Kingdom. Founded as the ancient city of Londinium in the first century CE by the Romans as capital of the Roman province of Britannia, London has been an inhabited settlement almost continuously since. After the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century, the layout of the Roman settlement became the approximate blueprint of the Saxon and medieval city. This ancient core of London is known as the City of London with Westminster, the ancient centre of political power in London, lying to the west. Relatively few structures survive from London's medieval past due to the city's near-total destruction in the Great Fire of 1666, but notable survivors include the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, Guildhall, St James's Palace, Lambeth Palace and a handful of scattered Tudor survivals. After the Great Fire, London was transformed as it was rebuilt and greatly modernised under the direction of the Baroque architect Sir Christopher Wren, with the new Baroque St Paul's Cathedral as its centrepiece.
context_section_description: Residential houses of this era in London are distinctive for their sunken basement built on brick arch foundations, rusticated base storey, taller piano nobile reception floor and attic storey. They are generally built from buff (pale yellow) London Stock Brick to golden section proportions, often generously spanning triple bay frontages with 'implied' columns or pilasters and carefully proportioned and very large off-white sash windows, slate mansard roofs above an Attic pediment. They were grouped in formal garden squares, crescents and terraces with wide pavements supported on brick vaults on wide, straight public streets, often with private access to romantically landscaped gardens. Later encroachment of commercial properties has significantly reduced the apparent width of historic streets in many parts of London, where the original plans were comparable to in size or in excess of those found in Continental urban planning. The area of Spitalfields in East London has many extant early Georgian properties with some unusual continental features; Soho – particularly Meard Street and Westminster also preserve a large number of properties at an early stage of development of the style.
  
  A typical house was designed to accommodate a single family, with front and back rooms on each floor and a partial-width rear 'closet' wing projection. The ground floor was reserved for business, the tall piano nobile for formal entertaining, and upper storeys with family bedrooms all accessed from a stair positioned on the side party. Servants were accommodated in the below-ground kitchen and in attic rooms in the roof. Each of the distinctions in function was subtly indicated in the decorative scheme of the façade by the sequential height of openings, projecting cornices and restrained decorative mouldings such as round-headed arches and rustication at the base and diminishing columns, sculptural capitals, balustrades and friezes expressing the top.
   Features include:
  A tall panelled front door with an arched fanlight often flanked by columns and covered by a pedimented canopy is reached up a short walkway which extends from the street, arching over the basement cavity and protected from burglary by a run of wrought iron security railings.
  Sash windows which allow the window to be held open on corded lead weights to ventilate the room. Developed in Holland and first seen in the Royal Palaces, they became common in Georgian times; previously casement windows had been the norm. The sash box joinery and ovolo or astragal moulded window frames were designed to be as slim and unobtrusive as achievable, using the largest available sheets of glass in either a "6 over 6" or "6 over 9" pattern. Since the 1980s, these are often now painted in brilliant white; however this modern colour did not exist in the period: originally they were painted ivory off-white, pale yellow or other darker colours of the period.
  Window openings in the proportion of 1:2 or the golden section; the windows were headed by the Dutch style flat arch often made from gauged brickwork in the finest properties.
  The roof is often hidden by a parapet above an attic frieze. This was initially to reduce the spread of fire; however, in much of London, parapets were added to Georgian houses for aesthetic reasons alone. From the street, the building appears to have a flat roof, but from the rear one can see that there is a double pitched 'butterfly' roof.
  Elevational classical adornments such as rustication, pilasters, columns, medallions, friezes, cornices and false pediments often formed in timber, stucco or natural stone are obvious indicators of wealth and status; however, much care and restraint was exercised to avoid the excessive flamboyance of continental architecture, with a marked preference for severe simplicity, honesty of means and sparseness of ornament in line with Protestant and neo-Palladian thinking, best exemplified by the work of Scottish Enlightenment architect Robert Adams – a philosophy extended to interior furnishing by the Thomas Chippendale furniture.
  Suburban
caption: Spencer House (1756) John Vardy, the grandest surviving aristocratic townhouse from the Georgian period.
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