Original Version
This is designed as a simple walk to look at local houses within a few minutes of the school gates and without having to cross any major roads. Indeed, a great deal can be examined closely without having to cross any roads at all.
Start at the school gates in Church Street
The School Site in 1914
Opposite the school are some buildings which have not altered much since 1914. One building is completely new. This Walk will help you to sort out the old from the new. You will also find buildings which have not been altered much. They may have new shop fronts, windows changed, or extra floors added, but the actual buildings are still much the same.
The Walk may be very short, but it contains a lot of changes. Our job is to find what has happened to the local buildings in the last hundred years.
Stoke Newington Church Street from the gates of William Patten School
The picture shows the end of the Fresh Foods restoration buildings and some of the earlier blocks further down the road. They have the curved window heads and old style sash windows. These are the typical Church Street buildings with little alteration over the years. The shop fronts have been changed and painted different colours. The brickwork of the corner building has been rendered with sand and cement and painted white, but the buildings themselves have been little altered
Burning Bricks and Tiles
Milne's Land Utilization map of 1800, made when London was expanding beyond its walls, shows a ring of brickfields surrounding London. Wherever the ground was suitable, builders dug the clay on their sites and made it into bricks to build their houses. Brickearth, which is a sort of loess and covered parts of London, made the bright red bricks used in Queen Anne houses. Clay and chalk from the Thames estuary made the yellow-grey London Stock bricks. Other clays from different areas made yellows and reds, engineering blues, oranges and whites. There are hundreds of different colours, weights and strengths, made in different parts of the country, brought to this area by canal, railway and now by lorry. In local houses we have clays from all directions.
Bricks and Building Forms
All openings in brick walls need some way of keeping up the bricks above the openings. This may be an arch, or a flat lintel of some kind.
Fig. A. A brick wall with and without a lintel.
Fig. B. The setting out of a brick arch with wedge-shaped bricks.
Fig. C. The setting out of a rough brick arch. These are normal bricks and the wedges are formed with mortar.
Fig. D. A ferro-concrete lintel, the modern solution to the problem. Some builders use steel lintels and wooden ones used to be common.
Fig. E. A relieving arch used to carry the weight round to the sides of the door or window opening, so that hardly any weight falls on the lintel.
Fig. F. A section through the modern cavity wall in Fig. D. There is an outer skin of brick, a cavity for heat insulation and an inner wall of thermal concrete blocks. The damp proof course carries any moisture which has penetrated the outside skin out through the gaps shown above the lintel in Fig. D.
Comment on the above
This view of the High Street is much as it has been for a century but the shop fronts have been changed considerably. The buildings are in yellow/grey London Stock bricks, with red brick window heads and brick aprons below the windows. It is not clear if the keystones in the window heads are in stone or plaster. These brick lintels were specially moulded at the brickyards and brought to the building sites in wooden boxes. The bricks were wedge shaped and pressed sideways on each other. They all wanted to fall down at the same but they pressed against each other and could not do so. If one brick had been removed the whole row would have fallen.
Brick lintels
Bricks and Building Forms
All openings in brick walls need some way of keeping up the bricks above the openings. This may be an arch, or a flat lintel of some kind. Above are different forms of flat lintels.
Fig. A. A brick wall with and without a lintel.
Fig. B. The setting out of a brick arch with wedge-shaped bricks.
Fig. C. The setting out of a rough brick arch. These are normal bricks and the wedges are formed with mortar.
Fig. D. A ferro-concrete lintel is the modern solution to the problem. Some builders use steel lintels and wooden ones used to be common, but these were often attacked by dry rot were.
Lintels are designed to support the bricks above windows,
doorways and other openings.
The Completely New Building.
It is obvious that this building is new. The bricks are new and everything is still bright. It is also built completely differently.
How did the new building come about?
After Stoke Newington Church Street was declared a Conservation Area, the Timber Yard became valuable building land. It was sold off and a new, curving road was built. It was this curve which suggested the shape of the new building. All the rest is careful thought.
The original houses in Lancell Street
The houses on the other side of the road have been demolished to extend the William Patten School site.
Wlliam Patten Primary School from Lancell Street
The Kersley Road and Church Street corner
This house had three storeys originally but a fourth storey has been added behind a slate Mansard Roof. These roofs are built of timber and slate and are light in weight. A brick extension would have been heavy, perhaps causing problems with the foundations, expensive, and would have taken much longer to build. Today the slates are backed with heat insulation of some sort. When Mansard invented the design for King Louis the Fourteenth, the wind whistled through the slates. As only the servant lived up there, it did not matter to Louis.
New Houses in Kersley Road
These new houses have curved window heads, echoing he shape of the Ruskin houses we shall see nearby. The houses have sash windows, again like other local houses. They are attempts by the architect to make his new houses blend into the older ones, without pretending to be old. The slate roofs have a gentle slope and have Velux windows let into them to light the top floors in some way. It is not clear from the street exactly what is going on on he top floor.
The road slopes down slightly, so the architect has built each pair of houses level, but a few inches below the next pair. On steep slopes this can make the house look like saw teeth.
Dumont Road
Dumont Road 2
Dumont Road corner house 1136.jpg
TAKE ANOTHER PICTURE TO SHOW THE BACK ADDITION AND EXPLAIN WHY BACK ADDITIONS WERE INTRODUCED. USE BYE LAW HOUSES IN M7P THIS TO BE A STANDARD TEXT IN ALL SCHOOL WALKS.
This end view of the terrace is interesting because the front roof is shorter than the rear one. The architect may have decided to make his rear rooms slightly longer that the front ones and placed his chimneys to suit. Either that or the rear rooms have slightly lower ceilings.
Dynevor Road Plasterwork
These two houses have been carefully redecorated and almost all of the original features have been preserved. The houses have sash windows, with a top and bottom ‘light’. The window heads have a delicate curve, typical of Ruskin houses. Why are the top window panes in front of the bottom ones?
Inside the windows are the original protective shutters, painted white. Others further down the road have been left with bare wood, or perhaps they were painted once and have been stripped. These shutters fold back during the day. At night they are opened out and locked with long steel bars. Obviously they give protection against burglars, but why do they not reach the top of the windows?
Dynevor Road plasterwork detail
The plasterwork is elaborate, round pillars at the doors and windows and foliate capitals. This type of capital, decorated with flowers and fruit was first introduced by John Ruskin about 1860 and can be used to date the houses. There the plasterers were experimenting with decorative forms and they let their imaginations run free.
William Patten Primary School from
FIND A PICTURE OF THE SCHOOL FROM THIS
P
POSITION BEFORE THE ROOF PLAYGROUND WAS ADDED.
Plan of the Proposed Enlargement to William Patten School in 1971.
After a lot of protests, the plan was called off and the houses were saved. By looking round, you can work out which houses would have been demolished and which ones saved.
The school was enlarged in a different way. Those changes are a different story and for them there will be another search, this time within the school.
LINK TO LETTERS OF PROTEST 1971
LINK TO THE ENLARGEMENT OF THE SCHOOL c AD 2000