Rules · Walls · Roofs · Doors & windows · Cities
Carry the front wall up as a parapet in front of the roof instead of eaves of timber (1707); set the window frames back four inches behind the face of the brick (1709), and later hide the sash boxes wholly in the reveals (1774).
The Acts were passed to stop fire spreading from house to house along wooden cornices and window frames. They gave the London house its look, the roof hidden behind a straight parapet and the windows set back in deep reveals, and the look spread to brick houses far from London that were bound by no Act.
Make the architrave round a door or window as wide as a sixth part of the opening’s breadth, and dress the openings of the principal floor more richly than those of the storeys above and below, with a frieze and cornice, and on the grandest a pediment.
architrave = ⅙ × width of the light
Break the architrave of a door or window with blocks of plain stone laid across it, alternately larger and smaller, and set a keystone in the middle of the head.
Bind the corners of a wall with dressed stones laid alternately long and short on each face, so that they bond into both walls and mark the angle of the building.
Mark the level of each floor on the front with a plain flat band of stone (a plat band), or with a moulded string course where the front is richer, so that the storeys can be read from outside.
Over a window in a brick front, turn a flat arch of soft red bricks rubbed and cut (gauged) to radiate from a centre below, laid with the finest joints, and give it a keystone of stone where the front is dressed in stone.
Glaze the sash windows in panes of equal size, three across: six over six on the ordinary storeys, six over nine on the tall windows of the principal floor, and three over three in the low windows of the attic.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The London Building Acts”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/london-building-acts. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.