If you visit a stately home, the guidebook will probably tell you a little bit about the history of its construction. However, it may not give you an actual date, just enough to suggest a decade or longer. What about local houses here in St Leonard’s --- when were they built? For a few in the neighbourhood, there may be records to show when the first residents moved in to a newly completed building.
However, earlier this year, after writing in the Neighbourhood News about the stones in our local walls, a local resident contacted me. Could I help him find when his house was built? Such a request seemed a little unusual; however, I expressed a willingness to co-operate and after a little research and (I admit, some slight guesswork) we assigned a reasonable date, plus or minus 5 years. Other information had been lost over nearly two centuries. Maps didn’t help – nobody was producing updated Exeter street maps every few years! So what is known about houses in St Leonards’s round about the time that Queen Victoria came to the throne?
The suburb of Exeter saw a lot of houses being built in the first half of the nineteenth century (mainly 1820 onwards). The late Professor Hoskins, living locally in his retirement, an expert on the history of Exeter and Devon, claimed that some of our houses were built for retired naval officers who were unwilling to retire to fashionable Torquay because of the risk of a French attack on the bay. (The government built the Palmerston Forts around Plymouth in response to such a threat, and a sub-plot in Jules Verne’s French novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea” is about attacking British naval vessels.) That wasn’t the only reason for Exeter expanding towards Heavitree at that time; wealthy local people wanted to escape the overcrowded city, yet be quite close by. So our neighbourhood grew and many houses were being built in the years up to 1850. The house which sparked the investigation was one of the earlier ones.
According to Professor Hoskins, and another guide to the buildings in Exeter, the opening of substantial brickworks in Polsloe in the 1820s meant that houses in the city were being built with brick from then on. The grand terraces of Southernhay had been built with brick at the end of the eighteenth century, and it was assumed in the literature that this was a signal for the end of using stone for new buildings. However, when I spoke to friends living in 19th century houses, they told me that their houses were stone-built, and covered with stucco (rendering). One of the houses that I enquired about had stone walls for the lower storeys, and brick ones for the top. All this suggests that the tradition of building with stone didn’t stop with the widespread availability of bricks; stone was being widely used as a building material for another generation --- for the masons building houses, change did not happen overnight, despite the suggestions in the guidebooks. Unfortunately, the housebuilders didn’t record how and why they had used particular materials.
We may never know when the first brick-built houses in St Leonard’s were completed, but If you live in a 19th century house in the neighbourhood, and know when it was built and what is under the render, please contact me via the editor.
David Smith
