Victorian Housebuilding

The Victorian suburbs that are such familiar elements of the British townscape were once building sites where armies of anonymous workmen converged to cover open land with streets of modest but comfortable houses. Despite their large scale and uniform appearance, most developments were built a few houses at a time by small firms operating on the narrowest of profit margins. Everyone on the building site had his place in the hierarchy of trades and the sequence of work, and each craftsman guarded his own tools and trade secrets, his only means of surviving in work that was dirty, strenuous and sometimes downright dangerous. In this lively investigation of the nineteenth-century building industry, Kit Wedd celebrates the achievement of the men who, plot by plot, translated surveyors' drawings and piles of bricks into streets of dwellings that are as desirable today as when they first appeared.

Kit Wedd is an architectural historian and works as a heritage advisor for an engineering consultancy. She has written many articles on historical conservation and interior decoration and is an active member of the Victorian Society. Her other books include The Victorian Society Book of the Victorian House, and The Victorian Bathroom Catalogue.