Watching the tornado coverage from London made me think of how those houses would likely have been flattened had they been constructed out of wood.
I grew up in North London in a house exactly like those in Kensal Green - your typical London terraced house. Several years later, my Mum and Dad had a house built in Cumbria out of brick while I had one built in Maryland out of wood with a bit of brick stuck to it to make it look like it was made of brick.
I can understand why in this great land, you couldn’t have a McMansion if it was actually brick built - cost prohibitive here, but why in the UK are there no big houses built like they do here out of 2x4s and plywood.
Is timber relatively more expensive over there? Are there code issues?
My mate - old school friend, lusted long after the only timber built house in town (and the lady of the house if truth be known)
Eventually he bought it but then could never insure it and had no luck selling it. They had to tear it down and rebuild with brick in the end.
As far as London specifically goes, very strict regulations about building construction were brought in in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London. I am not 100% sure but I think they are still on the books. I believe the Globe Theatre (a replica of the original from Shakespeare’s time) needed special dispensation for its wooden and thatch construction, indeed it is the first thatched building in London since the Fire.
Away from the City there are certainly timber buildings. There’s one just round the corner from me that is entirely of timber construction – it was originally a farm shed but is now a dwelling.
Yep, to get a mortgage it has to be traditional, long-lasting construction. Otherwise you have to pay cash to buy it. I was interested in a house once that was quite cheap but the estate agent killed that interest by telling me that I would have to pay cash because mortgage lenders disliked the type of concrete used to make it.
Then of course there’s the traditional half-timbered construction.
As for why it’s not done now… well, I always just assumed that breeze-block construction is cheaper. That’s how all modern cheap-n-cheerful shoebox estates are built, and I’m 99% sure they are built as cheap as humanly possible…
I know that timber buildings exist in the UK. My point is that all the new home construction I have seen is with breeze block and brick and all the homes I have ever been in are brick built.
There are such things as new timber-framed houses being built; as far as I can tell - they don’t seem to be any cheaper than brick - I think it’s the land that costs the money here.
So in a British timber framed house, is the exterior clad with plywood and then siding? I have never seen siding in the UK. Or, like here (sometimes) do they put a brick veneer over the plywood.
Surely a wood house is cheaper to build than a brick one. You can slap up and enclose under roof a 2000 sq ft house in a couple of weeks.
I don’t think there’s any standard, since they’re not hugely popular.
The ones I have seen arrived on site as a large collection of prefabbed frames that were fixed together on a concrete base, then clad externally with weatherboarding, given a tile or slate roof, insulated with foam blocks and finished internally with plasterboard.
It may be something to do with economies of scale - if there aren’t many house builders that specialise in timber buildings, then they can name their price; bricks and bricklayers, OTOH, are everywhere.
It may also be that there are more or different building regulations that apply. All I know is that I have seen a number of detailed ‘build your own house’ documentaries that followed people who decided they wanted a timber framed house, and they were all comparable to the price of constructing a similar building in brick/blocks.
It’s partly that British house buyers and builders are very conservative. Anything that isn’t breeze-block and brick can be looked on with suspicion, and what timber-framed new houses there are are almost always clad in brick, so they don’t look any different to regular houses. But in the small but growing self-build sector, timber frame is a popular choice, for speed of build as much as cost saving.
Building from brick was, and is, a use of local materials. Before the 19th century, large proportions of our natural forests had been destroyed, and this continued. There’s no sustainable source within the UK to build large quantities of timber buildings. On the other hand, there’s a lot of clay. Hence the London Brick Company and similar.
Don’t forget to look at the roofs, too - in locations able to get easy access to slate, this will be the roofing of choice. In other areas, tiles are the common option.
I’m convinced that they’re both also idiots. I see the big lego-box estates, and wonder that if I huff and I puff, those £200k family homes actually are built out of anything substantial.
Timber framed houses aren’t at all uncommon in the UK. Most people probably don’t realise just how common they are because they don’t look any different from anything else.
As to the economies, well i just drew plans, i didn’t care much about the costs involved so i’m really not sure. However timber framed houses do get built with insulation in the cavity when block/brick construction often just leave an air gap. That coupled with the fact that the inner leaf probably isn’t a huge proportion of the overall cost means there is probably little to pick between them in terms of cost.
It is very rare for the external leaf to be anything other than brick or blockwork though. It is purely a weather proofing leaf though, timber frames take all the floor/roof loading and the brickwork simply stands there to fight off the elements.
As to exactly why this is i’d only WAG on tradition. We’ve been building houses here for hundreds of years before the america’s were discovered and of course originally houses were built out of stone. I’m thinking that house buyers would have perceived timber buildings as poor imitations of their stone built ancestors whereas brick seem a little closer to home.
Now i’m really going out on a WAG here but is it possible that tradition for wooden built houses in the states was born due to early settlers finding it easier to mill timber than to fire clay bricks or quarry stone?
Once something starts off one way it’s a lot easier to just go with the flow than to try to change things!
I always assumed it was something to do with the wet weather, but I have nothing to base this on.
I think a lot of it (in London, at least) is to keep with the style of surrounding buildings, many of which are quite old and from a time when timber might have been harder to obtain.
Another issue might be planning permission. Councils tend to be very conservative in granting this, and in many cases demand that the building exterior is “in keeping with surrounding buildings”. In the case of work my parents are currently having done, which included beechwood cladding, the council denied them permission because the cladding wasn’t the same as the hideous breeze-block houses surrounding their place. :smack:
Based on what I have seen of my friend’s house that he is in the process of gutting, and the many tedious middle-class conversations I am having now that I have embarked on my first house purchase, the typical UK house nowadays consists of a breeze-block box with a brick outside skin and heavy timber cross-bracing, lined and divided up into dwelling spaces using plaster-coated cardboard. Larger houses may have one or more of the internal walls also made of breeze-block. Angles may not be exactly 90 degrees under any circumstances, and some voids in the building must contain copies of The Sun, crisp packets, drink cans, etc.
As to why the brits stick to this, who knows. For those thinking common sense rules housebuilding, I give you the sash window a.k.a. Expensive Annoying Piece of Shit. Personally I think the key differences between the US and UK are age expectations, size, and density. Something like 50% of the nations housing stock is a century or more old, hence the expectation that the things should be rock-solid, whereas I get the impression that in the US houses are knocked down and rebuilt much more frequently. US houses are also vast compared to UK ones, and might be unaffordable in brick. Finally, in areas where thousands of family dwellings are crammed together either adjoining or with only a few feet between them, regs might require more fire-resistant houses.
Having said all that, if I were to move to Tornado Alley, I’d want a proper European house. In Germany and the Netherlands they also go for masonry walls and the like, but scorn the gimcrack British method of using joists and boards for floors/ceilings and pour them out of concrete instead. The house my sin-laws live in looks like a normal UK terraced house, but is built like a nuclear bunker. A friend of mine loved in an apartment building in Stockholm where the attic had an arched brick ceiling. It did my head in because we went up in the lift to what looked like a cellar. :eek:
The idea that UK houses through the ages were mostly built from brick is misleading.
For centuries, the houses of the lower classes, the overwhelming majority of the population, were mostly mud with a binding of twigs etc.
This situation persisted in the countryside longer than in the cities, so that by the 18thC brick dwellings were becoming more commonplace.
The mud constructed housing has obviously fallen apart, and it was quite normal every generation to rebuild an entire village a shirt distance from the older one.
When you look at many villages you find they actually tended to shift around a centre, until they became more structurally substantial.
The result of this is that there is a large amount of village archeology about, many of our connecting rural roads take turns and twists based on the former locations of villages, and when such places are premantently temporary, its not hard for them to be cleared, such as during the sheep clearances, or for many other reasons, one fairly well known one I can think of is Wharram Percy in Yorkshire.
It wasn’t really until the industrial revolution that brick housing for the masses really took off.
So out of many hundred of years, you have perhaps two centuries of brick housing as being the norm, and then mostly in certain regions and types of settlement.
