Louth housing 1821-51: numbers, ownership and standards.

House Numbers in Louth

It is always worth seeking confirmation of the accuracy of nineteenth century census returns from other sources. All of the censuses gave the number of houses, including unoccupied houses and (from 1821) houses under construction. From 1841 it is usually possible to identify streets and we have the names of householders, which can be compared with the names in the rating lists.

Terminology

In the censuses buildings in which people lived were always considered to be houses. Difficulties sometimes arose in deciding what constituted a house,¹ but these related mainly to larger towns than Louth. In general nineteenth century usage “house” meant what it means today. Lawyers and estate agents often used an alternative: “messuage”. Another alternative, “tenement”, was in fairly common use both for small houses and for parts of houses let separately from the remainder.

In the rating lists the normal term was “house”. Often this this was used in combination eg “house and shop”; but this usage was not consistent in that some known shopkeepers are recorded as merely occupying houses.² “Messuage” was not used in the rating lists. “Tenement” became an important statutory term in the phrase “small tenement” but in the rating lists the word was used only rarely, generally appearing to mean a subordinate house occupied by an employee of the ratepayer.³

References to parts of buildings as dwellings are more specific: in R1823 we find Frances Cooper in a “garret” valued at 10s contrasting with Miss Cartwright occupying “chambers over Lees’s shop” valued at £7,⁴ and R1838 shows John Elvin, a gardener, occupying part of Fanthorpe Hall.⁵ Most of the references to “chambers” represented living accommodation provided for employees.

Thus by aggregating houses, houses with shops etc and tenements it is possible to derive overall house numbers from the rating lists with little uncertainty. It is not possible to identify in the rating lists either lodging houses or other houses that were shared on a long term basis by two or more families.

Demolition and New Building

Comparisons of the rating lists show increasing numbers of houses, but the growth in house numbers is likely to have been smaller than the number of new houses built. Though there is no evidence of large scale demolition for redevelopment in the first half of the nineteenth century, some of the older houses must have reached the stage where repairs, particularly the renewal of thatched roofs was uneconomic. In all of the rating lists there were a few cases where houses are shown as empty and without an earlier valuation; these indicated new, possibly incomplete houses. House numbers in the rating lists are given in table 1 below. The numbers may not be totally accurate, since some records are imprecise.⁶

The Censuses

The censuses gave the number of houses in the town as well as the population. The figures from the various census summaries are given in table 1, from which it appears that up to 1851 the average number of persons per house did not vary greatly; but there was a peak of 4.94 persons per inhabited house in 1821, a year when the percentage of unoccupied houses was noticeably lower than in the other census years (cf the small number of empty houses recorded in R1823).⁷

TABLE 1 POPULATION AND HOUSES IN LOUTH
Census	Population	Houses
		Inhab	Uninhab	Building	Total	Uninhab & Building%	Persons per inhab house
1801	4,236	893	57	No record	950	6.0%	4.74
1811	4,728	976	59	No record	1,035	5.7%	4.84
1821	6,012	1,217	38	6	1261	3.0%	4.94
R1823		1,318	25	No record	1,343	1.8%
1831	6,927	1,438	95	7	1,540	8.2%	4.82
R1838		1,711	99	No record	1,810	5.5%
1841	8,848	1,863	96	28	1,987	4.8%	4.75
1851	10,467	2,209	129	41	2,379	5.4%	4.74
R1851		2,230	144	No record	2,374	6.5%
The population figures do not include the inmates of the prison and poor house/workhouse. An uncertain number of the houses recorded as “empty” in the rating lists were still under construction.

The census figures show an annual average increase of 28 between 1821 and 1831. The 1821 census was conducted on 28 May 1821. R1823 was based on work carried out in late 1822. So, if the census figure of 1,261 houses was correct, one would expect to see an R1823 total of about 1,300. The actual total, 1,343, may perhaps suggest a degree of under-recording in the census; but the discrepancy is not great enough to be conclusive. The 1841 figure corresponds reasonably well with R1838 and the 1851 figure is very close to that of R1851.

The census figures shows that by national standards Louth houses were not greatly overcrowded. In the worst year, 1821, Louth’s inhabited houses accommodated on average 4.94 people; this compares with 5.26 people for Lincolnshire as a whole and 5.75 for England and Wales. But even five people is a lot, if the house has the floor area smaller than that of a modern double garage, as some had.

The increase in population and houses 1801–1821 brought no new streets and probably very little redevelopment; mainly the new buildings filled in gaps in existing streets and used back land behind existing frontages. Gurnham 2015 describes the growth of the housing areas and gives a vivid account of the insanitary condition of some.⁸

Owner-Occupation of Houses

Table 2 deals with the owner-occupation of houses (including those partly used for commercial purposes). The numbers are slightly below those in table 1, because empty buildings necessarily have to be excluded. Table 2 shows that in the period 1823–1838 there was a decline in the number of owner–occupied houses and a sharp decline in the percentage that they represented in the value of the total housing stock. In the period 1838–1851 numbers increased slightly but the percentage decline continued, though at a slower rate.

Unsurprisingly, the owner–occupied houses were on average more valuable than the remainder. Most new houses were built as investments. For example R1851 shows 18 houses in George Street, all built recently, some probably incomplete. None was owner-occupied and there were six different owners.

TABLE 2 OWNER OCCUPATION OF HOUSES IN LOUTH
	*R1823*		R1838		R1851
Houses	Number	Total RV x 2	Number	Total RV	Number	Total RV
Occupied	1,318	13,510	1,711	17,819	2,230	17,886
Owner-occupied	239	5,864	217	5,538	264	5,152
Owner-occupied %	18.1%	43.4%	12.7%	31.1%	11.8%	28.8%
The rateable values for R1851 are the are the revised ones and consequently cannot be compared with those for R1838: see Valuation Notes.

Housing Standards

“Fraud apart, there is no law against letting a tumbledown house” dates from the 1860s;⁹ but it accurately represented the legal position earlier. Doubtless Louth had many tumbledown houses.

The rating lists do not distinguish between brick built houses and those of the traditional mud and stud construction.¹⁰ It is doubtful whether any of the latter were newly built in Louth in the nineteenth century, but in 1823 many must have survived from the eighteenth century and earlier.¹¹ As late as 1861 we hear that “the demolition of the old range of mud buildings in Eastgate this week has wonderfully altered the aspect of the street.” ¹² The rateable values of the demolished houses was the same as other houses farther down Eastgate that are known to have been built of brick; indeed many are still standing today.

Small brick houses were rarely built singly. There was no shortage of published examples of “model” cottages for the working classes, but most seemed to have design features that would not appeal to the commercial builder or investor. For example, in 1849 Henry Goddard, a Lincoln architect, produced a design for a pair of three bedroom cottages for agricultural labourers; the estimated cost of the pair (excluding privies and pigsties) was £200, without making any allowance for the cost of land.¹³ Goddard’s houses each had a gross internal floor area of well over 600 square feet, somewhat larger than many Louth cottages.¹⁴ Among the many examples in Loudon’s Encyclopaedia were a group of six houses built in the London area to surround a courtyard containing a well and a privy at a cost of £591 but this excluded the cost of the land and the builder’s profit margin. Four of the six houses had gross internal floor areas of almost 500 square feet, but the other two were very small: about 260 square feet with a single room on each floor. Another of Loudon’s plans showed a pair of agricultural cottages built for a charity in Kent at a cost (excluding privies and pigsties) of £115 for the two; their areas were approximately 400 square feet.¹⁵

There is little evidence of building costs in Louth; but a contract for building two cottages, possibly in Kidgate, gave a price of £110.¹⁶ Some houses were built on tiny plots: an advertisement in 1825 offered building plots off Padehole that were approximately 13 feet by 50 feet; but more typical was William Colam’s planning of the development of Trinity Lane, which was based on plots of about 20 feet by 100 feet.¹⁷ The cost of building land was not negligible. A partly unsuccessful auction sale of land mostly in and near Kidgate in 1855 showed bids of about £50 for plots of about 300 square yards, the best sale price being £100 for a plot of 944 square yards. But a plot of 890 square yards in a better part of town, in or near St Marys Lane, fetched £155. Building land in commercial areas did not fetch hugely greater prices eg 445 square yards with a frontage of 40 feet onto Eastgate was sold in 1860 for only £250.¹⁸

Louth as an “Open” Parish

The census returns showed more agricultural labourers living in Louth than could be accounted for by the agricultural land in the parish. The conventional wisdom at the time attributed this to Louth’s position as an “open” parish. It was suggested that in some “close” parishes the landowners did not allow the building of houses, and even demolished existing ones, lest the persons living in them should become paupers and a charge on the rates. This idea was widespread; in relation to Louth it surfaces in footnote (z) to the 1821 census report: “The population of Louth is said to have been increased by the demolition of cottages in neighbouring Parishes and the consequent residence of Agricultural labourers in the town.”

However the census figures for houses tell a different story: in each of the nine¹⁹ parishes that had a common boundary with Louth there were more houses in 1851 than in 1801 and each decennial census produced an increase in total numbers (185 houses in 1801 and 359 in 1851, ignoring any described as “building”). More attention might have been paid to simple economics: building cheap brick houses in Louth could show an investor a reasonably secure return on his investment, whereas to build houses in a small village would often be an unwise speculation, even if costs were saved by using mud and stud. Some village house building was undertaken by landowners who did not expect to make a profit from the house rents, but looked at enhancing the values of the farms that they owned.

From the point of view of the labourer one advantage of living in Louth must have been the opportunities for work as a general labourer when agricultural work was not available. Also it must be remembered that for working class families what mattered was total family income, and living in a town gave wives better chances of employment.

Louth’s Housing