exposed. The timbers used were slight and straight but the construction was similar to that of earlier buildings, though the sparing use of timber gives a somewhat different visual effect.
Often these timbers came from demolished buildings, which were cut up to provide timbers of smaller scantlings for re-use, but by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the availability of imported softwood of uniform section and the manufacture of cheap machine – made nails, oak was no longer regarded as a necessity, and the elaborate joinery techniques of earlier timber-framed buildings were no longer required.
The walls, constructed of softwood, comprised studs of approximately the same section spaced about eighteen inches apart to form one continuous load-bearing wall. Sill-plates and wall-plates were used in a manner similar to box-frame construction with intermediate noggings introduced for greater stability. Window and door openings were simply formed in the studwork, an extra large or a double stud
being introduced at each side, with a large timber over them to form a lintel. As previously mentioned, joints were generally omitted, the timbers being nailed together. Houses using this method were quick and cheap to erect, particularly when clad with weatherboarding. Examples survive in ever-increasing numbers from the seventeenth century onwards, ranging in social stature from the small, detached farmhouse through many groups of semi-detached houses to the numerous rows of humble terraces. The majority are plain, but some have simple classical architectural details while others hide behind a brick facade. They can be found throughout the South-East – in Kent, Sussex and Surrey, principally in the Weald, and in a number of the London boroughs (24). They are also to be found in Essex, Suffolk and particularly Cambridgeshire, in the villages of Fen Ditton, Lode (25) and Swaffham Bulbeck, which has a number of terraces of single-storey cottages with attics, framed in softwood and plastered, built in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
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