The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

Landscape and townscape from AD 1500
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Rose Theatre and part of Shakespeare’s Globe has added a major new dimension to our
understanding of Elizabethan theatre. The debate over the preservation of the remains of the
Rose Theatre generated a lot of media attention and helped to give urban archaeology, especially
post medieval archaeology, a higher public profile (Orrell and Gurr 1989). At a later date, coaching
inns, with their high arches and courtyards, were another addition to the urban scene.
The ‘Great Rebuilding’ in the English countryside had its urban counterpart. The evolution
of urban housing styles closely paralleled those in the countryside, with modifications to allow
for more cramped sites. In many English county and market towns, the later sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries saw a move from timber frame with wattle and daub towards the use of
brick and stone. This reflected growing prosperity but also in some cases rebuilding in more
fireproof materials after major conflagrations. In Scotland, population pressure and shortage of
space on a physically cramped site led to the replacement of timber-frame houses by stone
tenements in Edinburgh during the early seventeenth century. Tenement housing was found in
Glasgow and Dundee too at this period, while flatted housing was also a feature of St Andrews
and other small Fife burghs where pressure on space was much less. It may reflect a different
housing tradition with an acceptance, in a generally poorer country, of lower housing standards.
As with the post medieval countryside, far more is known about the housing conditions of
wealthier urban dwellers than those in the poorest social groups. In the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, towns had distinctive social areas, with wealthier residents living in central locations
and much of the poorer population living in peripheral areas. At a smaller scale, occupational
groups were often located in distinct clusters. Urban housing continued in an essentially vernacular
style well into the seventeenth century, with buildings designed individually rather than as part of
larger schemes (Crossley 1990). Influences in urban planning began to reach England in the early
seventeenth century. Inigo Jones’ Covent Garden, a square with houses on three sides designed
with uniform facades, the first true urban residential square in Britain, was built from 1630, the
first of many such developments in London. New residential developments in the capital began
to spread westwards in the later seventeenth century: the Earl of Southampton laid out Bloomsbury
Square in 1661 and many others followed. Most of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury
squares in London were built piecemeal, although general building guidelines were imposed.
Progress continued through the eighteenth century, with Bedford Square, c.1775, being the best
preserved of London’s Georgian squares. Under the patronage of George IV, as regent and king,
John Nash designed or refashioned parks, palaces, squares and streets into a brilliant sequence
from Regent’s Park to Buckingham Palace. Regent’s Park itself was laid out as a garden suburb,
dotted with isolated villas.
Similar developments spread to provincial towns as landowners began to appreciate the
profitability of releasing land for speculative building. If work transformed much of the British
landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, leisure also made its contribution. Spa
centres such as Bath and Tunbridge Wells began to develop from the later seventeenth century
when continental ideas concerning the efficacy of taking spring water as a cure became popular,
creating new centres and adding a new function to existing ones. In the early eighteenth century,
Bath in particular became fashionable. The work of John Wood, father and son, from 1727
turned it into one of the finest towns in Europe. In Queen Square, started in 1729, the houses
were treated on a monumental scale, with whole sides designed with palace facades. Royal Circus,
begun in 1754, was the first circular space in British town planning. Royal Crescent, from c.1770,
made striking use of a hillside site (Figure 15.8). In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, dozens of squares and crescents were built in other British towns, though rarely on the
scale of Bath. The New Town of Edinburgh, begun in the 1750s, was an exception. The fragmented
pattern of freeholds around many towns sometimes defeated grandiose schemes. The crescent at