THE WALKING CITY: 1790–1855
Robert and James Adam first used the term terrace to describe their design of Adelphi Terrace (1769) (FIGURE 3 ). The four-story Adelphi was one of the first block-long rows to go up in London; the Adam brothers designed the joined units to suggest the block-long façade of a grand town palace articulated with pedimented and projecting end pavilions and a central projecting unit. Another row is Bedford Square (1775–80), which remains the most complete and best preserved of London’s Georgian squares. Each unit is three bays wide, three-and-a-half stories tall, with a basement below. While only the grandest of terraces were clad with such decorative elements as full-height columns and pilasters or central pavilions, even simplified and lower-cost rows maintained the proportions of the elegant Palladian façades: high, clearly articulated basements, tall first stories, and reduced second (and sometimes third) stories; the whole capped by a significant cornice and a low-pitched gable roof, often with dormer windows to light the garret space. In these buildings the standard floor plan consisted of a two-room-deep main block with entryway and stairhall at one side, and a narrow rear extension housing the kitchen (if it was not in the basement of the main block), a wash house, and extra bedrooms. Soon such dwellings were being built to house all levels of British society. Those for working people were modest, narrow two-story units built along the lesser streets, courts, mews, and alleys, as well as in the newly industrializing areas of the city. Those for the middle-class were fairly regularized twoand three-story rows often laid out around planted and gated squares, though somewhat removed from the most fashionable areas. And those for the affluent were the luxurious large-scale terrace houses sited in planned developments encircling wider expanses of green space, such as Bloomsbury Square, Bedford Square, and Regents Park.3 London’s Building Act of 1774 consolidated the many code reforms that had been enacted in the century since the Great Fire of 1666, and established four “rates” of houses, of different sizes, cost, and structural requirements. The finest and highest rated was a house valued at more than £850 and having more than 900 square feet. The lowest was one valued at less than £150 and having only 350 square feet. Building laws mandated specific requirements for foundations and party walls for each class of house and outlawed any projecting exterior woodwork. The code was also intended to regulate the homebuilding market, according to architectural historian John Summerson: the real importance of this system was not so much that it facilitated the enforcement of a structural code but that it confirmed a degree of 11