So comprehensive and yet so lacking, so controlling and yet so silent: A history of building regulations (part I)

I am currently working on a high-risk building and it occurred to me recently – as I was working my way through a lengthy compliance statement for the gateway two application – just how extensive our building regulations are. This sounds like nonsense – of course they are comprehensive and detailed – and none of this is surprising to anyone who designs buildings. However, I have rarely considered them altogether; and, when I did, noticed that they seem both comprehensive, and yet rather lacking.

They will happily, for example, dictate the diameter of a handrail, but are strangely silent on most aspects of electrical safety. This led me to consider further: what led to regulations being both so controlling, and so silent? What prompted certain rules, focuses and moments of change?

I had – perhaps slightly naive – hopes of discovering that great scientific minds had been commissioned to consider the matter comprehensively.

For another (extracurricular) project I have been exploring the history of the England and Wales’ building regulations, and the more I read the more I have come to realise not only how accidental the development of our building regulations seemingly are, but just how much these rules have shaped the appearance of our towns and cities. This is especially the case in London which is (as far as we know) the first place to have building regulations, and has always tended to have the strictest ones.

I thought it was worth taking the next two or three columns to explore this in more detail.

The Building Safety Act, as the most recent change to our building laws, is causing incredible upheaval within the industry, and yet seems just as reactionary as the rest of our regulatory history. We should all be more aware of the mistakes we have already made in order that we don’t repeat them.

We begin, like almost all stories relating to housing, with nuisance neighbours. Henry FitzElwyne’s Assize of Buildings of Allaying Contentions as to Assizes of Buildings in London in 1189, the first formal building regulations discovered to date, granted the right for individuals to have someone else’s construction halted until the mayor could rule on a dispute.

Further regulations are recorded in 1212, 1276 and 1466 – all again in London, and all concerned with practical aspects concerned with the proximity of neighbours – such as the banning of thatch to prevent spread of fire, and the minimum height of ground floors. Comparable controls were enacted in other large towns – Bristol in the late 14th century, Salisbury 1431, and Worcester in 1467. Our first regulations were very much concerned with controlling the impact of our neighbours on our own property.

The next big step in regulations was catalysed by the Great Fire of London in 1666, leading to various byelaw consolidation in the London Building Act of 1774, all primarily focused on preventing another fire of this magnitude. This is the act that shaped the aesthetic of Georgian London, allowing little ornamentation because of the risk of fire spread; dictating that party and external walls must be of non-combustible materials, mandating parapet walls on party wall lines, and enforcing wall thicknesses related to a standard schedule of rates.

Builders and developers published standard plans, proto Approved Documents if you will, that were compliant with these regulations such as Peter Nicholson’s The New and Improved Practical Builder in 1823. Most houses in London for the next 200 years would roughly follow these pattern books.

However, the 1774 act only applied to London and left much discretion to the open market. The type of building work might be dictated but ventilation, sanitation, proximity of housing and so forth was all uncontrolled.

The rapid urbanisation resulting from the Industrial Revolution therefore began to lead to overcrowded housing in cities across the country with inadequate sewerage, ventilation and water provision. This led in turn to significant public health and welfare problems which only began to be tackled by the formation of local health boards in the 1830s.

Also in the 1830s a series of reports by the Poor Law Commission into the conditions of the poor began to promote the extension of building acts to improve public health. Between 1800 and 1845 almost 400 local improvement acts relating to building and sanitary controls would be approved in England and Wales.

However both the policing of these acts – and the principle of national legislation – met with stiff opposition, particularly from landlords, who noted that the provisions of the acts would threaten their property rights and increase housing costs which would be passed on to renters.

It took until 1875 for the Public Health Act to pass, granting powers to local authorities to frame bylaws for promoting public health and preventing fires. Two years later the Local Government Board released model byelaws and, by 1882 1,500 sets of byelaws had been approved across England and Wales.

The byelaws that began to shape British cities were carefully considered, but not in response to utopian thought. They were reactionary legislation to public crises driven by vast social change

It was a response to specific public health catastrophes, but so prolific was construction during this period that, despite a century of “slum clearances”, terraced houses built to these byelaws still made up over 15% of the UK’s housing stock in 2011. 

Virtually all the UK’s cities expanded drastically during this period. Manchester, for instance, was a town of around 10,000 people in 1717, but had risen to over two million people by the outbreak of the First World War; and London had increased from around 700,000 in 1774 to around seven million in 1914.

The acts of 1774, 1875 and the byelaws that began to shape British cities were carefully considered, but not in response to utopian thought. They were reactionary legislation to public crises driven by vast social change.

Of course 1914 ushered in a new type of social upheaval, one with arguably as much impact on British cities as the Great Fire of 1666, but I will begin that story next month!