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• CHAPTER IX •

THE CELLAR

I

If you had suggested to anyone in 1783, at the end of the American War of Independence, that New York would one day be the greatest city in the world, you would possibly have been marked out as a fool. New York’s prospects in 1783 were not promising. It had housed more Loyalists than any other city, so the war had had an unhappy effect on its standing within the new republic. In 1790, its population was just ten thousand. Philadelphia, Boston, and even Charleston were all busier ports.

The state of New York had just one important advantage—an opening to the west through the Appalachian Mountains, the chain that runs in rough parallel to the Atlantic Ocean. It is hard to believe that those soft and rolling mountains, often little more than big hills, could ever have constituted a formidable barrier to movement, but in fact they afforded almost no usable passes along the whole of their twenty-five-hundred-mile length and were such an obstruction to trade and communications that many people believed that the pioneers living beyond the mountains would eventually, of practical necessity, form a separate nation. For farmers it was cheaper to ship their produce downriver to New Orleans, via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, then by sea around Florida and up the Atlantic seaboard to Charleston or one of the other eastern ports—a distance of three thousand miles or more—than it was to haul it three hundred miles overland across the mountains.

But in 1810, DeWitt Clinton, then mayor of New York City and soon to become governor of the state, produced an idea that many thought was possibly mad but certainly delusional. He proposed building a canal across the state to Lake Erie, connecting New York City with the Great Lakes and the rich farmlands beyond. People called it Clinton’s Folly, and not surprisingly. The canal would have to be dug with picks and shovels, to a width of forty feet, through 363 miles of rough wilderness. It would need eighty-three locks, each ninety feet long, to manage all the changes of elevation. Along some stretches the slope would have to average no more than one inch per mile. No canal of even close to this degree of challenge had ever been attempted anywhere in the settled world, much less in a wilderness.

And here was the thing. America didn’t have a single native-born engineer who had ever worked on a canal. Thomas Jefferson, who normally venerated ambition, thought the whole idea insane. “It is a splendid project, and may be executed a century hence,” he allowed after reviewing the plans, but added at once: “It is little short of madness to think of it at this day.” President James Madison refused to give federal aid, at least partly motivated by a desire to keep the center of commercial gravity farther south and away from that old Loyalist stronghold.

So New York’s options were to go alone or go without. Despite the costs, risks, and almost total absence of necessary skills, it decided to fund the project itself. Four men—Charles Broadhead, James Geddes, Nathan Roberts, and Benjamin Wright—were appointed to get the work done. Three of them were judges; the fourth was a schoolteacher. None had ever even seen a canal, much less tried to build one. All they had in common was some experience of surveying. Yet somehow through reading, consultation, and inspired experimentation, they managed to design and supervise the greatest engineering project the New World had ever seen. They became the first people in history to learn how to build a canal by building a canal.

Early on, it became apparent that one problem threatened the viability of the whole enterprise—a lack of hydraulic cement. Half a million bushels of hydraulic cement (a bushel is thirty-two U.S. quarts or about thirty-five liters, so half a million bushels is a lot) were needed to make the canal watertight. If water seeped away on any section, it would be a disaster for the whole canal, so clearly it was a problem that had to be fixed. Unfortunately, no one knew how to overcome it.

A young canal employee named Canvass White volunteered to travel to England at his own expense to see what he could learn. For nearly a year White walked the length and breadth of Britain—two thousand miles in all—studying canals and learning all he could about how they were built and kept together, with a particular eye on waterproofing. By chance, it turned out that Parker’s Roman cement—which, as we have seen, played a central role in the downfall of William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey because of its lack of strength as a building material—worked unexpectedly well as a hydraulic cement, where it needed only to be used as a water-resistant mortar. Its inventor, the Reverend Mr. Parker of Gravesend, didn’t grow rich from this, unfortunately, as he sold his patent within a year of taking it out, and then, rather ironically, emigrated to America, where he soon died. His cement, however, did very well till it was superseded by superior varieties in the 1820s, and gave Canvass White hope to suppose that he might come up with something similar using American materials.

Returning home, and now armed with some knowledge of the scientific principles of adhesion, White experimented with various native ingredients and quickly formulated a compound that worked even better than Parker’s Roman cement. It was a great moment in American technological history—indeed, it could be said to be the beginning of American technological history—and it deserved to make White rich and celebrated. In fact, it did neither. White’s patents entitled him to a royalty of four cents on each bushel sold—a small enough sum as it was—but the manufacturers declined to share their profits. He pressed his claims through the courts but was unable to enforce any judgments that went his way. The result was a long slide into penury.

The manufacturers, meantime, grew rich making what was now the best hydraulic cement in the world. Thanks in large part to White’s invention, the canal opened early, in 1825, after just eight years of construction. It was a triumph from the start. So many boats used it—thirteen thousand in the first year—that at night their running lights looked like swarms of fireflies on the water, according to one captivated witness. With the canal, the cost of shipping a ton of flour from Buffalo to New York City fell from $120 a ton to $6 a ton, and the carrying time was reduced from three weeks to just over one. The effect on New York’s fortunes was breathtaking. Its share of national exports leaped from less than 10 percent in 1800 to over 60 percent by the middle of the century; in the same period, even more dazzlingly, its population went from ten thousand to well over half a million.

Probably no manufactured product in history—certainly none of greater obscurity—has done more to change a city’s fortunes than Canvass White’s hydraulic cement. The Erie Canal secured the economic primacy not only of New York within the United States but also, very possibly, of the United States within the world. Without the Erie Canal, Canada would have been ideally positioned to become the powerhouse of North America, with the St. Lawrence River serving as the conduit to the Great Lakes and the rich lands beyond.

So the great unsung Canvass White didn’t just make New York rich; more profoundly, he helped make America. In 1834, exhausted by his legal battles and suffering from some serious but unspecified malady—probably consumption—he traveled to St. Augustine, Florida, in the hope of restoring his health; unfortunately, he died there soon after arriving. He was already forgotten by history and so poor that his wife could barely afford to bury him. And that is probably the last time you will ever hear his name.

I mention all this here because we have descended to the cellar, an unfinished and basic space in the Old Rectory, as in most English houses of the period. Originally, the cellar served primarily as a coal store. Today it holds the boiler, idle suitcases, out-of-season sporting equipment, and many sealed cardboard boxes that are almost never opened but are always carefully transferred from house to house with every move in the belief that one day someone might want some baby clothes that have been kept in a box for twenty-five years. It isn’t a very congenial space, but it does have the compensating virtue of providing some sense of the superstructure of the house—the things that hold it up and keep it together, which is the subject of this chapter. The reason I have prefaced it all with the story of the Erie Canal is to make the point that building materials are more important and even, dare I say, interesting than you might think. They certainly help make history in ways that don’t often get mentioned in books.

Indeed, the history of early America is really a history of coping with shortages of building materials. For a country famed for being rich in natural resources, America along the eastern seaboard proved to be appallingly deficient in many basic commodities necessary to an independent civilization. One of those commodities was limestone, as the first colonists discovered to their dismay. In England, you could build a reasonably secure house with wattle and daub—essentially a framework of mud and sticks—if it was sufficiently bound with lime. But in America there was no lime (or at least none found before 1690), so the colonists used dried mud, which proved to be woefully lacking in sturdiness. During the first century of colonization, it was a rare house that lasted more than ten years. This was the period of the Little Ice Age, when a century or so of bitterly cold winters and howling storms battered the temperate world. A hurricane in 1634 blew away—literally just lifted up and carried off—half the houses of Massachusetts. Barely had people rebuilt when a second storm of similar intensity blew in, “overturning sundry howses, uncovering [i.e., unroofing] diverse others,” in the words of one diarist who lived through it. Even decent building stone was not available in many areas. When George Washington wanted to pave his loggia at Mount Vernon with simple flagstones, he had to send to England for them.

The one thing America had in quantity was wood. When Europeans arrived, the New World was a continent containing an estimated 950 million acres of woodland—enough to seem effectively infinite. But in fact the woods were not quite as boundless as they first appeared, particularly as the newcomers moved inland. Beyond the mountains of the eastern seaboard, Indians had already cleared large expanses and burned much of the forest undergrowth to make hunting easier. In Ohio, early settlers were astonished to find that the woods were more like English parks than primeval forests, and roomy enough to allow the driving of carriages through the trees. Indians created these parks for the benefit of bison, which they effectively harvested.

The colonists positively devoured wood. They used it to build houses, barns, wagons, boats, fences, furniture, and every possible sort of daily utensil from buckets to spoons. They burned it in copious amounts for warmth and for cooking. According to the historian of early American life Carl Bridenbaugh, the average colonial house required fifteen to twenty cords of firewood a year, enough to deplete local supplies quickly in most places. Bridenbaugh mentions one village on Long Island where every stick of wood to every horizon was exhausted in just fourteen years, and there must have been many others like it.

Huge additional acreages were cleared for fields and pastures, and even roadways resulted in literally widespread clearances. Highways in colonial America tended to be inordinately wide—165 feet across was not unusual—to provide safety from ambush and room to drive and graze herds of animals en route to market. By 1810, barely a quarter of Connecticut’s original woods remained. Farther west, Michigan’s seemingly inexhaustible stock of white pine—170 billion board feet of it when the first colonists arrived—shrank by 95 percent in just a century. Much American wood was exported to Europe, particularly in the form of shingles and weatherboards.* As Jane Jacobs notes in The Economy of Cities, a lot of American wood fueled the Great Fire of London.

One common assumption is that the early settlers built log cabins. They didn’t. They didn’t know how. Log cabins were introduced by Scandinavian immigrants in the late eighteenth century, at which point they did rapidly catch on. Although log cabins were comparatively straightforward productions—that was of course their appeal—there was some complexity to them, too. Where the logs locked in place at the corners, the builders could use any of several types of notches—V notch, saddle notch, diamond notch, square notch, full dovetail, half dovetail, and so on—and these, it turns out, had curiously particular geographical affinities that no one has ever been able to entirely explain. Saddle notching, for instance, was the preferred method in the Deep South, central Wisconsin, and southern Michigan but was found almost nowhere else. Residents of New York State, meanwhile, overwhelmingly went for a method of notching called false corner-timbering, but they abandoned that style almost completely when they moved on. A history of American migration can be plotted—in fact has been plotted—by working out which notches appeared where, and whole careers have been spent trying to account for the different distribution patterns.

When you consider how quickly the American colonists scythed their way through the towering forests that greeted them upon arrival, it is hardly surprising that a shortage of timber was a chronic and worrisome problem in the much more confined and crowded landscape of England. Legend and fairy tales may have left us with an ineradicable popular image of medieval England being a land of dark and brooding forests, but in fact there weren’t many trees for the likes of Robin Hood and his merry men to hide behind. As long ago as 1086, at the time of the Domesday Book, just 15 percent of the English countryside was wooded.

Throughout history Britons have used and needed a lot of wood. A typical farmhouse of the fifteenth century contained the wood of 330 oak trees. Ships used even more. Nelson’s flagship, Victory, consumed probably three thousand mature oaks—the equivalent of a good-sized woodland. Oak was also used in large quantities in industrial processes. Oak bark, mixed with dog feces, was used in the tanning of leather. Ink was made from oak galls, a kind of flesh wound in trees created by a parasitic wasp. But the real consumer of wood was the charcoal industry. By the time of Henry VIII, producing sufficient charcoal for the iron industry required nearly 200 square miles of forest annually, and by the late eighteenth century that figure had grown to 540 square miles a year, or about one-seventh of the total woodland in the country.

Most woodlands were managed through coppicing—cutting them back, then letting them grow out again—so it wasn’t as if great swaths were being clear-felled every year. In fact, the charcoal industry, far from being a culprit, was responsible for a great deal of woodland maintenance—though what it preserved, it must be said, tended to be characterless, small-rise woods rather than mighty sun-pierced stands of forest primeval. Even with careful management, the demand for wood was so relentlessly upward that by the 1500s Britain was using timber faster than it could replenish it, and by 1600 wood for building was in desperately short supply. The half-timbered houses that we associate with this period in England are a reflection not of an abundance of timber, but a paucity of it. They were the owners’ way of showing that they could afford a scarce resource.

Only necessity finally made people turn to stone. England had the most wonderful building stone in the world, but the English took forever to discover it. For nearly a thousand years, from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the age of Chaucer, wood was the almost invariable building material of England. Only the most important buildings—cathedrals, palaces, castles, churches—were accorded stone. When the Normans came to England, there wasn’t a single stone house in the country. This was slightly remarkable, because just underneath nearly everyone’s feet was sublime building stone thanks to the existence of a great belt of hard-wearing oolitic limestones (that is, ones containing lots of spherical ooliths, or grains), running in a broad arc across the body of the country, from Dorset on the south coast to the Cleveland Hills of Yorkshire in the north. This is known as the Jurassic belt, and all the most famous building stones of England, from Purbeck marble and the white stone of Portland to the honeyed blocks of Bath and the Cotswolds, are found within its sweep. These immensely ancient stones, squeezed out of prehistoric seas, are what give so much of the British landscape its soft and timeless feel. In fact, timelessness with respect to English buildings is a distinct illusion.

The reason stone wasn’t used more was that it was expensive—expensive to extract because of the labor involved, and expensive to move because of its enormous weight. Hauling a cartload of stone ten or twelve miles could easily double its cost, so medieval stone didn’t travel far, which is why there are such appealing and specific regional differences of stone use and architectural style throughout Britain. A good-sized stone building—a Cistercian monastery, say—might require forty thousand cartloads of stone to build. A stone building was awesome not just because it was massive but because it was massively stony. The stone itself was a statement of power, wealth, and splendor.

Domestically, stone was hardly used at all until the eighteenth century, but then it caught on fast, even for simple buildings like cottages. Unfortunately, large areas outside the limestone belt had no local stone, and this included the most important and building-hungry place of all: London. The environs of London did, however, hold huge reserves of iron-rich clay, and so the city rediscovered an ancient building material: brick. Bricks have been around for at least six thousand years, though in Britain they date only from Roman times, and Roman bricks were not actually very good. For all their other building skills, the Romans lacked the ability to fire bricks in a way that would allow big ones to be baked all the way through, so they made thinner bricks which were more like tiles. After the Romans departed, bricks fell out of use in England for the better part of a thousand years.

Bricks began to appear in some English buildings by about 1300, but for the next two hundred years native skills were so lacking that it remained usual to bring in Dutch brickmakers and bricklayers when building a brick house. As a home-produced building material, brick came into its own in the time of the Tudors. Many of the great brick buildings like Hampton Court Palace date from this period. Bricks had one great advantage: they could frequently be made on-site. The moats and ponds that we associate with Tudor manor houses often denote where clay was dug out to be made into brick. But bricks had drawbacks, too. To create a decent brick, the brickmaker had to get every stage exactly right. He had first to mix carefully two or more types of clay to ensure the right consistency to prevent warping and shrinkage when fired. The prepared clay was then formed into brick shapes in molds, which had to be air-dried for two weeks. Finally, the bricks were stacked and fired in an oven. If any of these stages was flawed—if the moisture content was too high or the heat of the kiln not exactly right—the result was imperfect bricks. And imperfect bricks were common. So bricks in medieval and Renaissance Britain had a high prestige value. They were novel and stylish and generally only appeared in the smartest and most important structures.

Perhaps the greatest demonstration of the difficulty of making bricks—or possibly just the greatest demonstration of single-minded futility—was in the 1810s when Sydney Smith, the well-known wit and cleric, decided to make his own bricks for the rectory he was building for himself at Foston le Clay in Yorkshire. He was said to have unsuccessfully fired 150,000 bricks before finally conceding that he probably wasn’t going to get the hang of it.

The golden age of English brick was the century from 1660 to 1760. “Nowhere in the world can more beautiful brickwork be seen than in the best English examples of this age,” Ronald Brunskill and Alec Clifton-Taylor write in their definitive book, English Brickwork. A big part of the beauty of bricks of this period was their subtle lack of uniformity. Because it was impossible to make really uniform ones, bricks were of a lovely range of hues—from pinkish red to deepest plum. Minerals in the clay give bricks their color, and the predominance of iron in most soil types accounts for the disproportionate weighting toward red. The classic London yellow stock bricks, as they are known, take their color from the presence of chalk in the soil. White bricks (which aren’t actually white at all, but a creamy yellow) have a high lime content.

Bricks had to be laid in a staggered pattern so that the vertical joins didn’t form continuous straight lines (which would weaken the structure), and a range of styles arose, all fundamentally dictated by considerations of strength, but also by a pleasant impulse to provide variety and beauty. English bond is a style in which one row is made up entirely of stretchers (the long side of bricks) and the next is made only of headers (the end side). In Flemish bond, headers alternate with stretchers from brick to brick. Flemish bond is much more popular than English, not because it is stronger, but because it is more economical since every facade has more long faces than short ones, and thus requires fewer bricks. But there were many other patterns—Chinese bond, Dearne’s bond, English garden-wall bond, cross bond, rat-trap bond, monk bond, flying bond, and so on—each signifying a different configuration of headers and stretchers. These elemental patterns could be additionally enhanced by making some of the bricks stick out slightly, like little steps (a practice known as corbelling), or by inserting different colored bricks to form a diamond pattern, known as a diaper. (The relationship between a pattern of bricks and a baby’s undergarment is that the baby garment was originally made from linen threads woven in a diamond pattern.)

Brick remained an eminently respectable material for the smartest homes right up into the Regency period, but then there suddenly arose a cold distaste for it, especially for red brick. “There is something harsh in the transition” from stone to brick, mused Isaac Ware in his highly influential Complete Body of Architecture (1756). Red brick, he went on, was “fiery and disagreeable to the eye … and most improper in the country”—the very place it was mostly being put to use.

Suddenly stone became the only acceptable material for the surface of a building. In the Georgian period stone was so fashionable that owners would go to almost any lengths to disguise the nature of their house if it wasn’t stone at all. Apsley House, at Hyde Park Corner in London, was built of brick but then encased in Bath stone when brick suddenly became unfashionable.

America played an indirect and unexpected role in brick’s falling fortunes. The loss of tax revenue from the American colonies after the American War of Independence, as well as the cost of paying for that war, meant that the British government urgently needed funds, and in 1784 it introduced a stiff brick tax. Manufacturers made bricks larger to reduce the impact of the tax, but these were so awkward to work with that the effect was to depress sales further. To counter this decline in revenue, the government raised the brick tax twice more, in 1794 and 1803. Brick went into a headlong retreat. Bricks were out of fashion and people couldn’t afford them anyway.

The problem was that a lot of the buildings already in existence were inescapably of brick. In Britain a simple expedient was to give the houses a kind of permanent facial by applying a creamy layer of stucco—a kind of exterior plaster compounded from lime, water, and cement, from the Old German stukki, or “covering”—over the original brick surface. As the stucco dried, lines could be neatly incised to make it look like blocks of stone. The Regency architect John Nash became especially associated with stucco, as a famous line of doggerel records:

But isn’t our Nash … a very great master?

He found us all brick and he leaves us all plaster!

Nash is yet another of the people in this story who rather came from out of nowhere, and his climb to greatness could not easily have been predicted. He grew up in grinding poverty in South London and was not a particularly imposing figure to behold. He had “a face like a monkey’s,” in the startlingly cruel description of a contemporary, and none of the breeding that could help smooth the way to success. But somehow he managed to land a plum traineeship in the office of Sir Robert Taylor, one of the leading architects of the day.

After completing his apprenticeship, he embarked on a career that showed more enterprise than triumphs, at least in its early days. In 1778, as a career-starting speculation he designed and built two groups of houses in Bloomsbury, which were among the very first (if not the very first) in London to be covered in stucco. Unfortunately, the world was not yet ready for stucco-clad houses, and they didn’t sell. (One of them remained empty for twelve years.) Such a setback would have been challenging enough in propitious circumstances, but in fact Nash’s private life was simultaneously unraveling in a rather spectacular manner. His young wife turned out to be not quite the catch he had hoped for. She ran up stupendous, unpayable bills at dressmakers and milliners all over London, and twice he found himself arrested for debt. Worse, he discovered that while he was extricating himself from these legal difficulties, she had been engaged in energetic frolics with others, including one of his oldest friends, and that the two children of his marriage were not in all likelihood his (and indeed may each have had a different father).

Bankrupted and presumably just a touch glum, Nash shed his wife and children—what became of them is unknown—and moved to Wales, where he built a new, less ambitious career and seemed poised to play out his life as a moderately successful architect of provincial town halls and other municipal structures.

And so his life passed for some years. But in 1797, at the clearly advanced age of forty-six, he returned to London, married a much younger woman, became a close friend of the Prince of Wales—the future King George IV—and embarked on one of the most important and influential architectural careers anyone has ever had. What accounted for these sudden changes has always been a mystery. The rumor, widely circulated, was that his new wife was the prince regent’s mistress and that Nash was merely a convenient cover. It is a not unreasonable presumption, for she was a real beauty and time had not made Nash any handsomer. He was, in his own words, a “thick, squat, dwarf figure, with round head, snub nose and little eyes.” But as an architect he was a wizard, and almost at once he began to produce a string of exceptionally bold and confident buildings. At Brighton he transformed a staid existing property known as the Marine Pavilion into the colorful domed fireworks of a building known as the Brighton Pavilion. But the real changes were in London.

No one, other than perhaps the Luftwaffe, has done more to change the look of London than John Nash did over the next thirty years. He created Regent’s Park and Regent Street and a good many of the streets and terraces around, which gave London a rather grand and imperial look that it had not had before. He built Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus. He created Buckingham Palace out of the lesser Buckingham House. He planned, though he did not live long enough to build, Trafalgar Square. And he covered almost every bit of everything he built with stucco.

II

Brick might have been permanently marginalized as a domestic building material but for one important, unexpected consideration: pollution. By the early Victorian era coal was being burned in England in positively prodigious quantities. A typical middle-class family could burn a ton a month, and nineteenth-century Britain suddenly had lots of middle-class families. By 1842, Britain was using two-thirds of all the coal produced in the Western world. In London the result was a near-impenetrable gloom through much of the year. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories the detective has to strike a match—in daytime—to read something written on a London wall. So hard was it to find one’s way that people not infrequently walked into walls or tumbled into unseen voids. In one famous incident, seven people in a row fell into the Thames, one after the other. In 1854, when Joseph Paxton suggested building an eleven-mile-long “Grand Girdle Railway” to link all the principal railway termini in London, he proposed to build it under glass so that passengers would be insulated from London’s unwholesome air. It was more desirable evidently to be inside with the thick smoke of trains than outside with the thick smoke of everything else.*

Coal was hard on practically everything—on clothes, paintings, plants, furniture, books, buildings, and respiratory systems. During weeks of really bad fog, the number of recorded deaths in London could easily increase by a thousand. Even pets and animals at the Smithfield meat market died in disproportionately increased numbers.

Coal smoke was particularly hard on stone buildings. Structures that looked radiant when new often deteriorated with alarming swiftness. Portland stone took on a disturbing piebald appearance, assuming a brilliant whiteness on every face that was exposed to winds and rain, but becoming a filthy black under every sill, lintel, and sheltered corner. At Buckingham Palace, Nash employed Bath stone because he thought it would wear better; he was wrong. Almost immediately it began to crumble. A new architect, Edward Blore, was brought in to fix the building. He enclosed Nash’s courtyard with a new frontage built out of Caen stone. It, too, began to fall apart almost at once. Most alarming of all were the new Houses of Parliament, where the stone began to blacken and develop shocking pits and gouges, as if raked with gunfire, even while the building was going up. Desperate remedies were attempted to halt the deterioration. Various combinations of gums, resins, linseed oil, and beeswax were painted onto the surface, but these either did nothing or produced new and even more alarming stains.

Just two materials seemed to be impervious to the insult of corrosive acids. One was a remarkable artificial stone known as Coade stone (named after Eleanor Coade, who owned the factory that made it). Coade stone was immensely popular and was used by every leading architect from about 1760 to 1830. It was practically indestructible and could be shaped into any kind of ornamental object—friezes, arabesques, capitals, modillions, or any other decorative thing that would normally be carved. The best known Coade object is the large lion on Westminster Bridge near the Houses of Parliament, but Coade stone can be found all over—at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, the Tower of London, on the tomb of Captain Bligh in the churchyard of St. Mary-at-Lambeth, London.

Coade stone looks and feels exactly like worked stone, and weathers as hard as the hardest stone, but it isn’t stone at all. It is, surprisingly, a ceramic. Ceramics are baked clay. Depending on the type of clay and how intensely they are fired, they yield one of three different materials: earthenware, stoneware, or porcelain. Coade stone is a type of stoneware, but an especially hard and durable type. Most Coade stone is so resistant to weather and pollution that it looks almost brand-new even after nearly two and a half centuries of exposure to the elements.

Considering its ubiquity and remarkable characteristics, surprisingly little is known about Coade stone and its eponymous maker. Where and when it was invented, how Eleanor Coade became involved with it, and why the firm came to a sudden end sometime in the late 1830s are all matters that have failed to excite much scholarly interest. Coade receives only half a dozen paragraphs in the Dictionary of National Biography, and the only full-scale history of her and her firm was a work self-published by the historian Alison Kelly in 1999.

What can be said for certain is that Eleanor Coade was the daughter of a failed businessman from Exeter, who came to London in about 1760 and ran a successful business selling linens. Toward the end of the decade she met one Daniel Pincot, who was already engaged in the manufacture of artificial stone. They opened a factory on the south side of the Thames about where Waterloo Station stands today and began producing an unusually high-grade material. Coade is often credited as its inventor, but it seems more likely that Pincot had the method and she the money. In any case, Pincot left the firm after just two years and was heard from no more. Eleanor Coade ran the business very successfully for fifty-two years until her death at the age of eighty-eight in 1821—an especially remarkable achievement for a woman in the eighteenth century. She never married. Whether she was sweet and beloved or a raging harridan we have no idea. All that can be said is that the Coade company’s sales dwindled without her. Eventually, the firm went under, but so quietly that no one is sure now when exactly it ceased production.

The back streets of Victorian London, as illustrated by Gustave Doré (photo credit 9.1)

There is an enduring myth that the secret of Coade stone died with Eleanor Coade. In fact, the process has been reproduced experimentally on at least two occasions. Nothing is stopping people from making it commercially now. The only reason it isn’t made is that nobody bothers.

Coade stone could only ever be used for incidental decorative purposes. Fortunately, there was one venerable building material that also stood up to pollution very well: brick. Pollution was the making of modern brick, though several other timely factors helped. The development of canals made it economical to ship bricks over considerable distances. The invention of the Hoffmann kiln (named for Friedrich Hoffmann, its German inventor) allowed bricks to be produced continuously, and thus more cheaply, along a sort of production line. The removal of the brick tax in 1850 reduced costs further still. The biggest spur of all was simply Britain’s phenomenal growth in the nineteenth century—the growth of cities, of industry, of people needing housing. In the lifetime of Queen Victoria, London’s population went from one million to nearly seven million, and newly industrialized cities like Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford had growth rates greater still. Overall, the number of houses in Britain quadrupled in the century, and the new housing stock overwhelmingly was of brick, as were most of the mills, chimneys, railway stations, sewers, schools, churches, offices, and other new infrastructure that leaped into being in that frantically busy age. Brick was too versatile and economical to resist. It became the default building material of the Industrial Revolution.

According to one estimate, more bricks were laid in Britain in the Victorian period than in all of previous history together. The growth of London meant the spread of suburbs of more or less identical brick houses—mile after mile of “dreary repetitious mediocrity,” in Disraeli’s bleak description. The Hoffmann kiln had much to answer for here, since it introduced absolute uniformity of size, color, and appearance to bricks. Buildings made of the new-style bricks had much less subtlety and character than buildings of earlier eras, but they were much cheaper, and there has hardly ever been a time in the conduct of human affairs when cheapness didn’t triumph.

There was just one problem with brick that became increasingly apparent as the century wore on and building space grew constrained. Bricks are immensely heavy, and you can’t make really tall buildings with them—not that people didn’t try. The tallest brick building ever built was the sixteen-story Monadnock Building, a general-purpose office building erected in Chicago in 1893 and designed shortly before his death by the architect John Root of the famous firm of Burnham and Root. The Monadnock Building still stands, and is an extraordinary edifice. Such is its weight that the walls at street level are six feet thick, making the ground floor—normally the most welcoming part of a building—into a dark and forbidding vault.

The Monadnock Building would be exceptional anywhere, but it is particularly so in Chicago, where the Earth is essentially a large sponge. Chicago is built on mud flats: anything heavy deposited on Chicago soil wants to sink—and, in the early days, buildings pretty generally did sink. Most architects allowed for a foot or so of settling in Chicago’s soils. Sidewalks were built with a severe slant, running upward from the curb to the building. The hope was that as the building settled, the sidewalk would come down with it into a position of perfect horizontality. In practice, it seldom did.

To ameliorate the sinking problem, nineteenth-century architects developed a technique of constructing a “raft” on which the building could stand, rather as a surfer stands on a surfboard. The raft under the Monadnock Building extends eleven feet beyond the building in every direction, but even with the raft, the building sank almost two feet after construction—something you really don’t want a sixteen-story building to do. It is a testimony to the skills of John Root that the building still stands. Many others weren’t so fortunate. A government office block called the Federal Building, constructed at a staggering cost of $5 million in 1880, took on such a swift and dangerous pitch that it didn’t last two decades. Many other smaller buildings had similarly abbreviated lives.

What architects needed was some kind of lighter and more flexible building material, and for a long time it seemed that that would be the one Joseph Paxton first brought to large-scale fame with the Crystal Palace: iron.

As a building material, iron was of two types: cast iron and wrought iron. Cast iron (so called because it is cast in molds) was great at compression—supporting its own weight—but not so good under tension and tended to snap like a pencil when stressed horizontally. So it made excellent pillars, but not beams. Wrought iron, in contrast, was strong enough for horizontal duty but was more complicated, time-consuming, and expensive to manufacture since it had to be repeatedly folded and stirred while it was still molten. As well as making it comparatively strong, the folding and stirring made it ductile—that is, capable of being pulled, rather like taffy, and bent into shapes, which is why decorative objects like gates are made of wrought iron. Together they were used in large-scale construction and engineering projects all over the world.

Curiously, the one place iron never caught on except incidentally was in housing. (Just once, as far as is known, did anyone of note try to use it extensively in the construction of a house—recall from Chapter VII that the bibulous, erratic architectural adventurer James Wyatt built a cast-iron “Bastille” for George III.) Elsewhere, however, iron went from strength to strength—until, that is, it was realized that strength was not actually its most dependable quality. The disturbing fact was that iron sometimes failed spectacularly. Cast iron in particular tended to splinter or fracture if it wasn’t cast perfectly, and imperfections could be impossible to detect. That became tragically manifest in the winter of 1860 at a textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, one cold morning, nine hundred women, mostly Irish immigrants, were at work at their clattering machines when one of the cast-iron columns supporting the roof gave way. After a moment’s hesitation, the other columns in the row failed one by one, like buttons popping on a shirt. The terrified workers rushed for the exits, but before many could get out, the building collapsed with a roar that none who heard it would ever forget. As many as two hundred workers died, though remarkably no one bothered, then or afterward, to make a formal count. Hundreds more were injured. Many of those trapped inside were hideously incinerated as fires spread from broken lamps.

In the following decade iron’s standing suffered a further blow when a bridge over the Ashtabula River in Ohio collapsed as a passenger train crossed over it. Seventy-six people were killed. That accident was recalled with uncanny precision three years later, almost to the day, on the Tay Bridge in Scotland. As a train crossed it in bad weather, a section of the bridge gave way, hurling the carriages into the waters far below and killing almost an identical number of people as had died at Ashtabula. Those were the most notorious of the tragedies, but iron mishaps on a smaller scale were almost routine. Railway boilers made of cast iron sometimes exploded, and rails commonly worked loose or buckled under the strain of heavy loads or shifting weather, causing derailments. It was in fact iron’s shortcomings that in large part allowed the Erie Canal to remain successful as long as it did. Well into the railway age the canal continued to thrive, which is surprising on the face of it because it was frozen over and unusable for months each winter. Trains could run all year round and, as engines steadily improved, could theoretically carry more freight. In practice, however, iron rails just weren’t strong enough to support really heavy loads.

Something much stronger was needed, and that material was steel—which is just another kind of iron but with a different input of carbon. Steel was a superior material in every way, but it couldn’t be made in bulk because of the high volume of heat required. It was fine for things like swords and razors, but not for large-scale industrial products like beams and rails. In 1856, the problem was unexpectedly—and indeed improbably—solved by an English businessman who knew nothing at all of metallurgy but loved to tinker and experiment. His name was Henry Bessemer and he was already eminently successful from having invented a product known as bronze powder. This was used to apply a fake gilt finish to a wide range of materials. Victorians loved gilt finishes, so Bessemer’s powder made him rich and gave him the leisure to indulge his inventive instincts.

During the Crimean War, Bessemer decided he wanted to build heavy guns, but he could see that he needed a better material than cast or wrought iron, and so began experimenting with new methods of production. Having no real idea what he was doing, he blew air into molten pig iron to see what would happen. What should have happened, according to conventional predictions, was an almighty explosion, which is why no qualified person had tried such a foolhardy experiment before. The iron didn’t explode, however, but produced a flame of very high intensity, which burned out impurities and resulted in hard steel. Suddenly it was possible to make steel in bulk. Steel was the material the Industrial Revolution had been waiting for. Everything from railway lines to oceangoing ships to bridges could be built faster, stronger, and cheaper. Skyscrapers became possible, and so cityscapes were transformed. Railway engines became robust enough to pull mighty loads at speed across continents. Bessemer grew immensely rich and famous, and many towns in America (as many as thirteen, according to one source) named themselves Bessemer or Bessemer City in his honor.

Less than a decade after the Great Exhibition, iron as a structural material was finished—which makes it slightly odd that the most iconic structure of the entire century, about to rise over Paris, was made of that doomed material. I refer of course to the soaring wonder of the age known as the Eiffel Tower. Never in history has a structure been more technologically advanced, materially obsolescent, and gloriously pointless all at the same time. And for that remarkable story, it is necessary to go back upstairs and into a new room.

* Weatherboards became known as clapboards in America; no one knows why.

* One man more than any other fixed our visual image of what Victorian London was like: the French illustrator Gustave Doré (1833–1883), whose illustration of London back streets appears on this page. Doré’s illustrative dominance was a little unexpected because he spoke barely a word of English and actually didn’t spend much time in Britain. Doré’s private life was slightly bizarre in that he conducted a number of torrid affairs with actresses—Sarah Bernhardt was his most celebrated conquest—but lived with his mother and for the whole of his life slept in a room adjoining hers. Doré viewed himself as a great artist, but the rest of the world did not, and he had to settle for being an extremely successful illustrator for books and magazines. He was very popular in England—for many years there was a Doré Gallery in Mayfair that dealt exclusively in his works—and is best remembered now for his dark drawings of London life, particularly for the scenes of squalor along the back streets. It is interesting to reflect that a very large part of our visual impression of nineteenth-century London before photography is based on the drawings of an artist who worked from memory in a studio in Paris, and got much of it wrong. Blanchard Jerrold, the man who supplied the text for the drawings, was driven to despair by many of his inaccuracies. (If that name Jerrold seems vaguely familiar, he is the son of the Punch journalist who first called the Great Exhibition hall the “Crystal Palace.”)