Early 19th-century houses are similar to those of the 18th century, but with some new features. For instance, the outside walls are nearly always covered with plaster and painted. Some houses have big bay windows, and some have a glazed door leading from a ground-floor room into the garden or from an upper room on to a balcony. The'roofs of the smaller houses are low-pitched and have very deep eaves. Those of larger houses are low or even flat, and are hidden by parapets.
We say that houses of this kind are in the `Regency' style because when some of them were built the king, George III, was ill, and his son, who later became George IV, was acting as Regent.
One of the most famous Regency architects was John Nash. He is best known for the fine streets and terraces which he designed for London. We can still see some of them, or parts of them-Carlton House Terrace, for instance, which overlooks the Mall, and the rows of houses which we still call the Nash terraces around- Regent's Park. Building of a very different kind which he designed for the Prince Regent is the Pavilion at Brighton.
There are large numbers of typical i 8th- and early 19thcentury houses in such seaside towns as Brighton and Weymouth. Such places were growing fast at that time because people were becoming interested in sea-bathing and seaside holidays. There are a great many, too, at Cheltenham and other spas, where people went to `take the waters' for their health, and in London suburbs such as Brixton, which were villages outside the city a hundred and fifty years ago.
But in the factory and mining-towns of the north and midlands there are hundreds of houses of a very different kind. Manufacturers were beginning to use more and more machinery to produce goods which had before been made by hand, so large numbers of people had to be compressed into areas in which coal for driving the machines was easy to get. Rows and rows of dull, box-like, uncomfortable little houses, packed close together in alleys and courts, were built for them to live in.
Many people hated the new industrial towns, and that caused them to take a great deal of interest in buildings which had survived from earlier times, particularly the Middle Ages. Even during the i 8th century wealthy men had sometimes had a sham Gothic ruin built in their parks, or had decorated a room in what they thought was the Gothic manner. Now, in Queen Victoria's time, architects began to design new mansions in a mock Gothic style, with turrets and gables, battlements and pointed windows, for their well-to-do clients.
In all our big cities, too, there are public and commercial buildings which were erected in the 19th century in an imitation Gothic style. In London the most important example is the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament), which was rebuilt between 1840 and 186o, after the original Gothic building had been burnt down. Then there are the Prudential Assurance Company's office in Holborn, and the Law Courts in the Strand.
Soon small dwelling houses, also, were being built in a cheaper version of the same style. We can see thousands of them all over Britain, some standing alone and some in terraces.
The `Gothic revival' did not appeal to everyone. Many architects, in opposition to it, erected buildings that were even more strictly Classical than those of the previous two centuries had been. Government offices, such as the Home Office, the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office in Whitehall, London, are examples of 19th-century Renaissance architecture.
In some towns public buildings were erected which, on the outside, were almost exact reproductions of Greek and Roman buildings.
The `battle of the styles' as it is sometimes called, continued for a long time. Some architects designed in both Gothic and Classic, or a mixture of both, according to what their clients wanted. But all buildings had to have the characteristics of some style of the past. ATo one attempted to design something new with a character of its own which really expressed the 19th century.
As time went on people tended to build public and government buildings in the Classic style and churches and schools in the Gothic.