London furniture 1966 - 1714

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2001 by Adam Bowett

Earlier this year a rather tired English walnut writing cabinet of about 1700 was sold for thirty thousand pounds at a provincial auction (Pls. II and IV). (1) This was not a huge price, but most writing cabinets of this type fetch half that sum, and in this case the high price had nothing to do with the usual mantra of the collectors of walnut furniture -- color, patina, and condition. Rather, it was the maker's label pasted inside a drawer that made this piece exceptional (P1. IVa). It revealed that the cabinet was the work of John Guilbaud, a cabinetmaker living and working in Long Acre, London, between 1693 and 1712. Maker's labels of any date are rare on English furniture, but this was a particularly early one and made this writing cabinet one of only three labeled examples of its type known. (2)

The writing cabinet is one of the star attractions in an exhibition now at the Geffrye Museum in London that charts the extraordinary rise of the London furniture industry in the half century after the Great Fire of London in 1666. New techniques and materials combined with the latest Continental fashions transformed the formerly obscure and parochial London furniture trade into a world-class industry.

The Great Fire marks the beginning of London as a modern city both in terms of physical appearance and commercial culture and psychology. The fire began in the early morning of September 2, 1666, in a baker's shop in Pudding Lane. (3) It raged out of control for four days, reducing eighty percent of the city to ashes (see P1. III). A total of 13,200 houses and at least 87 parish churches were destroyed and 100,000 people were made homeless, although few were killed. The loss in house rents alone was estimated at [pounds sterling]600,000 a year.

Before the fire, London was essentially a medieval city. Narrow streets were lined with timber framed buildings of which the upper stories leaned out over the thoroughfares. Workshops and warehouses crowded against dwellings, and both drainage and sanitation were rudimentary. Disease as well as fire was a perpetual hazard. By 1665 the Great Plague had claimed the lives of sixty-eight thousand Londoners, and was the most virulent of many epidemics that periodically swept the city. (4)

Expediency dictated that the medieval street plan be retained, but the template for new housing was established by the 1667 Rebuilding Act. This stipulated that all new houses be built of brick to one of four standard patterns, based on the width of the street on which they stood. Principal streets were allowed houses of four stories. Streets and lanes "of note" were allowed three-story buildings, and lanes were allowed only two-story buildings. The height of rooms, the thickness of walls, and the area of windows were also regulated. (5)

The standardization of plan and elevation meant that the interior accommodations varied little from house to house. Typically, there was a front and back room on each floor, sometimes with "closets" en suite. Except in the largest houses, the front door was placed to one side, opening into a hallway with the stair toward the back. Principal reception rooms tended to be on the second floor, with the ground floor and basement reserved for business, kitchen, and services. Upper floors contained bedrooms for the family and garrets for servants.

Household inventories suggest that the similarities between one house and the next also extended to their contents, for the same types of furnishings recur repeatedly. This is especially true for fashionable goods such as long clocks, oval dining tables, cane chairs, cabinets, writing cabinets, and the archetypal post-Restoration ensemble of table (see P1. I), pair of stands, and matching looking glass. Most of these objects simply did riot exist before 1660, yet by 1680 few well-off Londoners were without them. While this transformation cannot be attributed to the fire alone, it did create an opportunity for wholesale refurnishing on a scale never seen before or since.

The speed of rebuilding was extraordinary. Huge quantities of timber, brick, tiles, and glass flooded into the Port of London, and within four years six thousand new houses had been built. The demand for skilled labor was intense, and workmen came from every part of England and abroad. Over the next thirty years London rapidly outgrew its former boundaries with more than one hundred thousand new citizens filling its streets (see Fig. 1). (6) The street plan was still haphazard, but the houses were built in regular symmetrical terraces according to the Rebuilding Act. One of the most striking features of the new cityscape was the very large ratio of window to wall, making the manufacture of window glass one of London's fastest growing industries.

The city's rapid recovery from the fire was in part due to the extraordinary vigor of the post-Restoration economy driven by overseas trade. In the first half of the seventeenth century London's merchants had been taught hard lessons in cutthroat commerce by their Dutch rivals. The Navigation Act of 1660 excluded all foreign ships from trade between England and its colonies in North America and the West Indies, while the Staple Act of 1663 stipulated that all trade between those colonies and the Continent had to pass through England. The success of these policies is evident from the statistical record. In 1664, 88 ships left London for the Americas. In 1686 the figure was 247 ships. (7)