Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

BUCKDEN’S BUILDINGS 101 93, High Street made. The bricks of the window arches, the brick band or string course of two or three courses, and the cornice details were all made from gauged bricks, specially made and rubbed to fit tightly together; they were often a brighter red colour. The mortar courses are improved with a line called a ‘penny roll’ or with tuck pointing using lime putty. Most eighteenth-century houses have a symmetrical plan with a central entrance doorway, but there are a number of buildings in Buckden with side passages or archways or asymmetric facades. In the later eighteenth century, yellow brick was preferred in deference to the Palladian taste; the Old Vicarage is clearly a model of this, the original vicarage, described in 1648 as being 'of timber & covered with tile’, having been re-fronted in 1783 and thoroughly rebuilt in 1795; inside there is a remnant timber-framed wall. No. 93 High Street is unique in having stuccoed walls with rusticated quoins applied to the original yellow brick. The yellow brick is made from a purer clay excavated below the subsoil of the local clays, and may have come from a St Ives brickyard. The white brick of Cambridgeshire and the fens was becoming popular. In looking through the account books of Edward Gale of Buckden, we find he was supplying thousands of bricks to the Northern Railway from 1843, and to other villages for cottages. Improvement and new brick buildings within the township of Buckden continued, but the easy transportation of building materials brought to an end the use of local building materials, so that slate roofs replaced thatch. Some pantiles and plain tiles became a preferred alternative. As a footnote it must be said that timber frame still remained the most economical building method in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Timber-framed walls were sometimes built between brick gable walls or a single brick facade and as internal partition walls. The plastered timber-frame was sometimes lined out to simulate stone masonry, or limewashed a terracotta red to simulate brickwork. The timber- frame of outbuildings was usually clad in weather boards: these were elm planks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, graded so that the largest were at the bottom. Later, in the nineteenth century, tarred pine boards were used. Some outbuildings such as granaries were plastered internally to seal the walls from vermin. Dairies were plastered and limewashed. Select Bibliography Brunskill, R.W. Brick Building in Britain, 1990 Brunskill, R.W. Timber Building in Britain, 1985 Harvey, J. Medieval Craftsmen, 1975 Pacey, A. Medieval Architectural Drawing, 2008 Parissien, S The Georgian House, 1994 Saltzman, L.P. Building in England Down to 1540 1952 Surveys Department of the Environment Lists of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest , 1983 Pevsner, N. The Buildings of England: Bedfordshire and the County of Huntingdon and Peterborough, 1968 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments Huntingdonshire, 1926 The Victoria History of the Counties of England A History of Huntingdonshire, Volume II, 1932