Painting a Victorian house

In the United Kingdom  a Victorian house generally means any house built during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901). During the Industrial Revolution, successive housing booms resulted in the building of many millions of Victorian houses which are now a defining feature of most British towns and cities.

In the UK, Victorian houses follow a wide range of architectural styles. Starting from the early classicisminherited from Regency architecture, the Italianate style gained influence in the 1820 and 1850s, and the Gothic Revival style became prevalent by the 1880s. Later in the Victorian era, the Queen Anne style and the Arts and Crafts movement increased in influence, resulting in the transition to styles typically seen in Edwardian houses. Victorian houses are also found in many former British colonies where the style might be adapted to local building materials or customs, for example in Sydney, Australia and Melaka, Malaysia.

Early in the Victorian era, up to the 1840s houses were still influenced by the classicism of Regency styles. However the simplicity of Regency classicism fell out of favour as affluence increased and by the 1850s the Italianate style influenced domestic architecture which now incorporated varying quantities of stucco. From the 1850s domestic buildings also became increasingly influenced by the Gothic Revival, incorporating features such as pointed, projecting porches, bay windows, and grey slate

Typical featuresEdit

In addition to general architectural influences, this progressive change in style resulted from several other factors. In the 1850s, the abolition of tax on glass and bricks made these items cheaper yet a suitable material and the coming of the railway allowed them to be manufactured elsewhere, at low cost and to standard sizes and methods, and brought to site. 

• Sash windows but with larger panes of glass, from the 1850s, than the characteristic 6 plus 6 smaller panes seen in Georgian and Regency architecture.
• Victorian houses were generally built in terraces or as detached houses.
• Building materials were brick or local stone. Bricks were made in factories some distance away, to standard sizes, rather than the earlier practice of digging clay locally and making bricks on site.
• The majority of houses were roofed with slate, quarried mainly in Wales and carried by rail. The clay tiles used in some houses would be available locally.

A lot of these lovely houses have been ruined by pebbledash 

Pebbledash is the modern version of a house rendering process that dates from Roman times. So when did we start covering our homes with it, and is it beautiful or beastly?

Due to a lack of tradesmen within the construction industry during the postwar years pebbledash enjoyed a burst of popularity as a means of covering up shoddy workmanship and probably why some of the remaining eroded examples in our suburbs and council estates now look so forlorn and drab.

The modern variety is a mixture of sand, cement and pebbles applied to the exterior as an alternative to professional render, supposedly to protect from the vagaries of the great British climate.

A colourful solution appeared in the seventies called Canterbury spar known as grit in the trade but cheap, quick and easy to apply over the top of that dull mud coloured finish by semi-skilled operatives with a decidedly poor quality of adhesion this delivered all the right ingredients to provide damp problems and a very cold exterior wall plus a gravel finish to the foot path.

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Our Pebble Dash Repair Is The Affordable Way To Add Value To Your Home And Make It Look Like New.

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Wall and Roof Coating Ltd are market leaders in the field of restoration concerned with the inevitable deterioration of Pebble Dash and Tyrolean external wall renders With age both Pebble Dash and Tyrolean suffer with penetrating damp causing a delaminating process from the substrate beneath the surface of the outdoor wall and very often severe internal damp problems.The total removal of Pebbeledash can be an expensive and destructive exercise whereas hammer testing for loss of key followed by careful restoration of those particular areas with a match to existing profile can provide a suitable substrate for Plasperseal resin bonding