20^th December

As I said, both Boss Builder and Sebastian were the worse for wear on Monday and didn’t show up. Boss Builder explained yesterday, looking not so much contrite as a tad embarrassed, that ‘we work very hard – then comes the day we drink very hard. And we forget to stop.’ So when Sebastian arrived yesterday to take a kanga hammer to the concrete floor, pounding out a trench across the entire house for the steel frame to lie in, I feared for the state of his already fragile head. But he did it. Two deep trenches, in fact, one on either side of the feeble spine wall.

Today there are four of them (Poles, not trenches). Bartek and Sebastian, Karol and a new face. Starszek, who has an open expression and dusty cementy hands. He clearly thinks me hilarious because when we met I was wearing a cosy hat on a day that evidently didn’t merit it. They are putting up the Acrow props, six on each side of the trench to hold up the floor above. Then the spine wall will come down, maybe tomorrow.

Meanwhile, this is what I learned at school today a.k.a. The British Library. All building control stemmed from the London Building Act of 1774, which was a typically rapid Parliamentary response to the Great Fire of 1666. It listed all manner of specifications designed to reduce the spread of fire and, incidentally, was the document that introduced the concept of dividing houses into four ‘rates’ according to their value and size – even instructing who was supposed to live in which.

First was for the nobility, at a rental value of £850 per annum, with a floor space of 900 square feet.

Second was for merchants, who would pay £300-850 for space between 500 and 900 square feet.

Third was for clerks, paying £150-300 for 350-500 square feet.

Fourth was for mechanics, paying up to £150 for nothing more than 350 square feet.

But this was in Georgian times, and although the rates remained, the room sizes had grown somewhat a century later. The 1774 Act was so stringent (I must look it out) that it gave rise to what were called Pattern Books. A developer would give his builder a rough sketch of the house he was to throw up, and the builder would follow the precepts in one of the common pattern books. Like Lego, perhaps? Tomorrow I hope to look at The Builder’s Companion, which was one of these, its hard cover ripped off, the useful pages tucked into a back pocket much as a pencil is these days tucked behind an ear. Incidentally, 160 years ago, builders were called operatives just as they were in 1955.

Finally I turned to the 1859 compendium of the weekly journal The Builder, which as you might expect carried multiple advertisements for all things technical and wondrous and too good to be true. But it also printed long discursive articles, some of them deeply anti-worker because one of the big building companies was facing a strike: (how dare they demand a nine-hour day? Do they think they can be paid for nine hours what they get for ten? And what will that do to capital? Why, they’ll all lose their jobs, because houses will get so expensive no one will want any anymore and they’ll all be out of a job altogether. They are holding the public to ransom… (oh, all right. My words, not theirs).

(It made me think of my poles who twice at least have done a few more than nine hours. And usually do nine.)

It also warned of an outbreak of deaths of diarrhoeal diseases in Kentish Town, even though by this time the foul Fleet River swept down to the Thames through in a pipe underground. No. This was because of fetid standing water in pools by houses, in their back gardens (even of the better classes) and left to gather in holes where gravel had been dug. Something must be done.

I found no reference to the Kentish Town/Christ Church Estate, so I shall have to go back and leaf through the 1860 volume.