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John Claudius Loudon

John Claudius Loudon, born in 1783, was one of those early nineteenth century Titans for whom work was a hobby, or an obsession. Largely self-educated, he was primarily a horticulturist and landscape gardener, producing encyclopaedias on Gardening, Agriculture and Plants before he began one on Architecture in 1832; this was published in 1833 with 1,100 tightly-printed pages and over 2,000 drawings. It was not all his own work for he had help from many contributors, among them Charles Barry, John Dobson, Charles Fowler, Edward Lamb and Francis Thompson, and others of less fame, but mostly of sufficient standing to appear in Colvin’s Biographical Dictionary. Nevertheless it was still a stupendous achievement, and it was supplemented in 1846 by a second edition, brought out by his widow, with nearly 200 more pages and over 300 more illustrations.

By 1800 Brown and Repton and Payne Knight had made it almost imperative for a gentleman’s house and its surroundings to be designed as one. Even in remote Shropshire, Archdeacon Plymley was recommending that gentlemen’s estates should be embellished with the decent and tasteful farmhouses and cottages of their tenants and labourers scattered throughout their land. Several publications had dwelt on the charm of old buildings and at Ampthill and Blaize Castle, for example, groups of picturesque cottages had appeared. But although much had been done, much remained to do; and in one novel Jane Austen could admire the ‘neat’ cottages of Northamptonshire and in another lament the ‘inward and outward wretchedness’ of some in Surrey.

The early nineteenth century in Britain was a period first of the agricultural prosperity of the Napoleonic Wars and also of the unprecedented wealth engendered by the developing Industrial Revolution. Brown and Repton had designed houses and gardens for aristocrats; Loudon, who had made a fortune at farming and had then lost it in unhappy investments, chose a different path. He realised that the advent of a large class of men with social pretensions and of ample, but not enormous, wealth had created a market for publications which would help them to establish themselves as country gentlemen of taste. He was not the first to do that, but his predecessors had generally produced slim volumes, more elegant than informative. With his remarkable capacity for work and with a fluent pen he gave his encyclopaedias to the public. This one brought together nearly all that could be said upon the subject and had a great success.

Loudon’s first stated intention was to see decent accommodation provided for the ‘great mass of mankind’; by which he meant, as his designs show, those living in the countryside. He troubled little about architectural styles, reproducing designs in all styles ranging from Greek to Gothic to Swiss Alpine; and he advised would-be architects to design in whichever was the style that contemporary or local ‘prejudice’ chanced to favour. For the same reason he commanded the use of stone or brick or earth according to local practice and resources. He was, however, concerned that gentlemen should take into their own hands the building of labourers’ cottages on their estates, for leaving it to their tenant farmers to do so usually produced ‘wretched hovels’.

The book is replete with instructions upon every aspect of building and furnishing cottages, farmhouses and what he calls ‘villas’, many of which were big enough to be country houses. But Loudon was not just a builder, he had his own views about the purpose of architecture and the relationship between function and style. Theorists of aesthetics generally end up discovering that what they prefer is ‘The Beautiful’. Loudon eschewed that form of self-indulgence. A building, he claimed, was to be judged primarily by its fitness for the end in view and by the clear architectural expression of that end; or as Keats put it, ‘Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty’. The dictum is not always easy to follow, and since he was writing for a large audience he was sometimes inclined to stretch a point. For example, he published a design – he did not necessarily commend it – in which a lobby-entrance house had been ‘improved’ by adding to the elevation a large functionless gable.

There was nothing noticeably original in his designs of cottages and farmhouses and farm-layouts. Model cottages and farms had been built many years before he published, but what he did was to provide a great number of examples for would-be builders to choose from. In one way he may seem to have been behind the times, for many of his cottage designs, and even one or two farmhouse designs from Scotland were of one storey, when one-and-a-half storey cottages were standard among enlightened builders. That may perhaps reflect his Lowland Scots background, for he also has designs for cottages with what he calls a ‘bed-closet’, a small windowless area curtained and partitioned off from the rest of the room; a contrivance common in the Middle Ages at all social levels and surviving in Glasgow tenements for example, into our own days.

What distinguishes his encyclopaedia from earlier productions is not only the range of information which he conveys, but also his anxiety to introduce his readers to new building techniques and to the latest practical applications of advances in human knowledge; all with the intention of improving the comforts of home for the lowliest and thereby, as he hoped, raising the standards of society as a whole. He advocated cavity walls, for their economy and their ability to keep out the wet, over a hundred years before they became common. He was publishing designs for water-closets a full generation before they were standard even in urban houses; for steam threshing-machines on farms; for gas-lighting in villas; for iron furniture in inns; even for under-floor heating from a common furnace for a row of cottages. Of course, none of these could have been provided at a cost which ordinary men could afford if made by hand and individually; water-closets, steam threshing-machines. gas-lighting, iron furniture, could benefit wide classes only through mass-production. All of Loudon’s designs, and indeed his optimism about future social and moral standards, were based upon the success of large-scale capitalist production in agriculture and industry, which both created a market and, in part at least, satisfied it. He wrote for country dwellers, but for country dwellers served by an urban industrial society. His book fully deserved its success, for it was written by a man not only of talent and energy, but, as importantly, a man wholly in sympathy with the changing age in which he lived.

Eric Mercer
Shrewsbury, Shropshire, September 1999

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