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New introduction to the 2004 edition of

Rivington's Building Construction

Major Percy Smith

With a new introduction by Lawrance Hurst

Rivington’s Notes on Building Construction was the first comprehensive publication on building construction in the UK. Before the first Part was issued in 1875, students and practitioners would have had to rely on books such as Tredgold and various editions of Nicholson, which were mainly concerned with timber and did not really detail the construction of buildings, or the separate volumes for each material and each trade included in Weale’s Rudimentary series. The first edition of volume 1 of Charles Mitchell’s Building Construction and Drawing did not appear till 1888, 13 years after Part 1 of Rivington’s Notes, and we had to wait until 1938 for McKay.

The arrangements for constructing buildings changed during the nineteenth century. In pre-Victorian times there were craftsmen main contractors who employed craftsmen sub-contactors for the other trades, and they all knew what was required by way of detail; hence architects and surveyors merely needed to draw their intent, generally on small scale plans and elevations. Details were only required for work that was out of the ordinary. This situation changed when work was entrusted to general contractors such as Cubitt, Lucas Brothers, Kelk and the like, who needed detail drawings, perhaps not for the traditional trades, but certainly for the new materials and methods of construction that were being adopted. Drawings were also required for pricing to prepare tenders, for the foremen who coordinated and supervised the work, for ordering materials, and for items fabricated off site. This introduced a requirement for textbooks on building construction to use in the preparation of drawings and also to prepare for the examinations being set on that subject by the Department of Science and Art at South Kensington.

The Science and Art Department of the Privy Council Committee on Education, based at South Kensington, responsible for the South Kensington Museum (now the V & A), the Natural History Museum and provincial museums, needed these textbooks for the schools it subsidised to use as a basis for the examinations it set.

The Royal Engineers had been associated with the Department since the 1850s and a detachment was based there. This detachment assisted with design work on the South Kensington Estate of the Commissioners of the 1851 Exhibition, and provided the architects for the South Kensington Museums, the 1862 Exhibition, the RHS Gardens and the Royal Albert Hall. They provided other specialists too, such as Sergeant Spackman, the expert photographer. It is therefore not surprising that the Royal Engineers’ School was asked by the Department to write a manual for the course in building construction.

This duty fell to Major Percy Guillemard Lewellin Smith, the recently appointed Instructor in Estimating and Construction at the School of Military Engineering at Chatham, but for some reason, perhaps because the books were a commercial venture, they were published anonymously. This has happily been remedied on the title pages of this facsimile edition: ‘it is far and away the best book of the kind which has ever been brought out’, as confirmed by the glowing obituaries following his death in 1893. Praise for the series came quickly from the technical press and from more general quarters, of which an example is the Scotsman’s review of the first volume ‘All throughout the illustrations are excellent; they are never overcrowded with details, and are always clear and well defined. As a mere book it is a credit to the publishers, as a scientific manual it reflects great credit upon the unknown writer.’

Initially the publishers were Rivingtons, who were purchased by Longmans in 1890. Longmans continued the venture, and published the first edition of Part 4 in 1891, as well as continuing to reprint and update the series until the 1930s, although these volumes are always known as Rivington’s.

The text of Parts 1 and 2 – Elementary and Advanced – were initially aligned with the syllabus for the examinations set by the Science and Art Department, with the elementary aspects of the various trades in the first volume and the advanced aspects in the second volume. Thus brickwork and carpentry were split between these two volumes, the chapters in the second continuing on from those in the first. Whilst this may have suited the teaching of building construction and drawing, and enabled the students to purchase each of the volumes as their studies progressed, it was soon realised that that arrangement was not at all convenient for use as the reference books that practitioners required and that the students would need by their sides following qualification. The content of these volumes was therefore gradually rearranged to group the chapters concerned with each trade together. This reordering was complete in the editions published in 1904 that Donhead has chosen for this facsimile edition.

The introductions to the volumes include the then current syllabus for the examinations set by the Department, and appendices to the first two volumes repeat examination papers. These papers show that drawing in pencil and in ink was the primary method of demonstrating competence, supplemented by freehand sketching. Drawings were to be on a single sheet of paper, thus teaching economy of paper as well as how to fit a number of items on that single sheet without loss of clarity. Written answers were clearly secondary. As might be expected the exams were no sinecure. The successful Honours student was required to have passed the earlier stages and have qualified in the Board’s examination in architecture before he was allowed to take the initial paper; success in that resulted in him being summoned to South Kensington for two days of up to seven hours in which he had to complete the whole design of a building for a specified purpose, and also provide an estimate of cost.

In the 1904 editions masonry and brickwork are included in the first volume, together with carpentry and roof coverings, and an introduction to steel and iron girders. The second volume includes foundations, excavation and shoring, joinery including stairs, fireproof floors, plastering, decorating and glazing, and also plumbing, heating and ventilating, and electric and gas lighting, as well as introductions to materials and to stresses in structures. The third volume is devoted to all the materials used in building – what they are, how they are made and their properties as perceived and understood at that date. Thus this facsimile reprint provides all the information anyone is likely to need about the construction of buildings a century ago.

Donhead have sensibly left the fourth volume on the shelf, for it is all about the calculations needed for building structures. This aspect of work was developing so quickly at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early years of the twentieth century that Part IV was revised eight times in twenty years, and any one edition is thus no more than a snapshot of the rapidly changing scene. A facsimile would therefore be of much less use than the other Parts, which are a permanent record of the materials and details that will be found in late Victorian and Edwardian construction. The increasing emphasis on conservation and on the sustainability which is achieved by the reuse of existing buildings with minimal alteration make the production of this facsimile particularly appropriate at this time.

Lawrance Hurst, BSc, FCGI, CEng, FICE, FISructE, FBEng

Hurst, Pierce & Malcolm, founded by his father in 1910, is a small practice of consulting engineers for structural work connected with buildings, new and old, in most material. Lawrance joined Hurst, Pierce & Malcolm in 1968 where he was a partner and is now retained as a consultant. He prefers old buildings and has been fortunate to have been concerned with the Royal Albert Hall, the Nelson Monument, the London Custom House and Finsbury Barracks, as well as a number of less prominent, but equally important and interesting old buildings. He has written papers and lectured on nineteenth-century concrete and cements, fireproof flooring, early iron and steel in buildings and the history of party wall legislation. He in convenor or the Institution of Structural Engineers History Study Group and chairs the Institution of Civil Engineers Archives Panel.

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