Earls Court Living
Structure
The design of the London town house itself was pretty constant. The main structure was a rectangular box, built in stock-brick, and topped with a roof of Welsh slates. The roof was either concealed behind a brick parapet or built in the form of a mansard with dormer windows. A timber frame formed the internal construction of all but the larger houses. The joists supporting the floors which ran between the front and back walls were wood. So was the framework of the internal partition walls from the ground floor upwards. Brick walls were only used internally at basement level or to support a stone wall-hung staircase, or to give added structural support in particularly large houses.
The average sized house was about 20 feet wide and 30 feet deep, with three or four storeys above a basement. Internally the layout was surprisingly uniform. The successful pattern had been devised in the 18th century and builders stuck to it.
The earliest pre-Georgian terraced houses had just one room to each floor. So if the frontage was 24 feet wide, the house was usually 24 feet deep. In Georgian times, the standard design of a terraced house changed to the double pile house, meaning the house was two rooms deep on each floor.
