During the Tudor period the city of London became very crowded,
dirty and smelly. Houses were built very close together and
did not have running water or drains; people used to go to
the toilet in buckets and empty them into the street!
Houses were usually made of timber and wattle and daub, although
people who could afford it used brick and tiles. The upper
storeys of houses were bigger than the ground floor and would
overhang.
The Tudor style of house has been popular ever since. If you
see a house with black beams on white walls it is a Tudor
style house. The one shown was not built in Tudor times; it
was built in the 1930’s, so it is called a ‘mock
Tudor’ house. In the Tudor period the beams would have
been brown and the walls probably would not have been white
as people did not paint them. Rather they would have been
the colour of the local soil as that is what the daub was
made from.
Glass was first used in houses at this time. It was very expensive
and difficult to make big pieces of glass so the panes were
tiny and held together with lead in a criss-cross pattern,
or ‘lattice’. Windows were ‘casement’
windows, windows on a hinge that opened outwards.
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