Some Victorian (and indeed Georgian) streets have a certain something: a quality, a sense of completeness, and visual coherence.
This quality does not belong to an individual house or shopfront. Instead, it relates to how the different buildings look together and forms part of what it means to think of somewhere as a ‘street’, rather than just as a collection of dwellings.
When you try to put your finger on why some streets feel more cohesive than others and to see exactly where the quality and feeling come from, it becomes apparent that there’s a sort of ‘hidden’ pattern or rhythm that you’ve unconsciously registered along with, maybe, the design of the houses or shops themselves.
One reason why many Victorian terraces feel so special is that all the original railings, gates, uprights and finials have survived. This uniform ironwork gives these streets a particular quality that doesn’t belong only to the houses.
Where, however, the ironwork has been removed or replaced or simply allowed to decay over time, you can end up with a street that looks invisible – one that’s never quite resolved, whose rhythm is continually broken.
What’s important here is that these ‘bits of iron’ aren’t an afterthought: they were part of the architectural composition of the street. For Wrought Iron Railings, go to //donkeywellforge.co.uk/what-we-make/wrought-iron-railings
They were made to help tie an apparently disparate series of individual houses together and to give an otherwise loose and varied collection of buildings the visual rhythm of a single, unified building.
The most cohesive neighbourhoods are invariably the most expensively maintained, but this isn’t necessarily about money (not always, anyway). It’s about preserving enough of the original detail for the architect’s original intention to be legible.
In short, it’s largely down to the ironwork.
