New old pic of our house

[jocelyn plummer]

The house elevation is fantastic without the glass house-- if you need an orangery/greenhouse I would find somewhere else to put one, like along a sunny wall further down the garden. You deserve to be well pleased with the whole project.

 

[Pford75]

Nigel - thanks for your thoughtful comments. You may well be right.

This is one of the joys of any old building, deciphering the history of the place and following the life of the building.

Jocelyn - Thankyou....I can assure you that the interior still has some way to go.....but when it's there, another PPUK gathering may be required.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

I bought the book shortly after it was published. You could try http://www.bookfinder.com for a second hand copy. These types of books can get quite rare/expensive. I had to pay an arm and a leg recently (well over £100) for a similar volume covering the North West. Failing that, Norwich library should have a copy I guess.

About 5 years ago, the secondhand bookshops in Norwich were overflowing* with copies - I think it had been reprinted and then almost immediately remaindered. It still turns up frequently enough for £20 to be the average price (and about what it's worth)

*A slight exaggeration, but it wasn't at all hard to find

 

[Nigel Watts]

About 5 years ago, the secondhand bookshops in Norwich were overflowing* with copies - I think it had been reprinted and then almost immediately remaindered. It still turns up frequently enough for £20 to be the average price (and about what it's worth)

*A slight exaggeration, but it wasn't at all hard to find

My understanding is that the publishers wanted to cover the entire country but I think only three volumes were ever released. They are fascinating though, not least for the descriptions and photos of long lost houses. I bought this volume mainly because of my interest in my home county of Essex. The pictures of some of the wonderful houses which were lost in the eastward expansion of London's suburbs are heartbreaking.

John Martin Robinson's A guide to the country houses of the north-west published by Constable in 1991 is in an identical format and is said in the blurb to be a companion volume to one covering Ireland. Its about twice as fat as the East Anglia volume, took me a while to find, and set me back something in the region of £160. It covers Cumberland, Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmorland and the Isle of Man.

 

[Gareth Hughes]

About 5 years ago, the secondhand bookshops in Norwich were overflowing* with copies - I think it had been reprinted and then almost immediately remaindered. It still turns up frequently enough for £20 to be the average price (and about what it's worth)

*A slight exaggeration, but it wasn't at all hard to find

My understanding is that the publishers wanted to cover the entire country but I think only three volumes were ever released. They are fascinating though, not least for the descriptions and photos of long lost houses. I bought this volume mainly because of my interest in my home county of Essex. The pictures of some of the wonderful houses which were lost in the eastward expansion of London's suburbs are heartbreaking.

John Martin Robinson's A guide to the country houses of the north-west published by Constable in 1991 is in an identical format and is said in the blurb to be a companion volume to one covering Ireland. Its about twice as fat as the East Anglia volume, took me a while to find, and set me back something in the region of £160. It covers Cumberland, Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmorland and the Isle of Man.

The NW one is probably the best as JMR is that increasingly rare thing, a readable architectural historian. There is an Irish volume which is a Good Thing given the relative dearth of literature on Irish country house architecture (compared with English ones). And there's a volume for some of the English bits of the Welsh Marches.

I don't think the series sold particularly well from the start, though. The treatment of each house is too brief for the specialist, the photos are often murky snapshots, and the subject matter is probably a bit too esoteric for generalists. Pevsner is better (though quite frequently a house in Burkes and Savills will be missed by Pev, and less frequently, vice versa)

 

[Gareth Hughes]

My interpretation is that the entire garden front is the 1856 "wing" referred to and the annex is very probably, as you suggest, early to mid 20th C. This would square with the odd looking fenestration, which had earlier struck me as early to mid Victorian. This kind of late Regency looking style lingered well into the Victorian era, especially in the provinces. My original home town of Colchester was still building late Georgian/Regency looking townhouses well into the 1860s. My current house in London, of 1840, still looks very Regency.

Provinces? Pah!
Norfolk houses of the 1840s, showing the good taste of the Regency lingering in the face of the dreary Victorian moth...
View attachment 2View attachment 1

 

[Nigel Watts]

I don't think the series sold particularly well from the start, though. The treatment of each house is too brief for the specialist, the photos are often murky snapshots, and the subject matter is probably a bit too esoteric for generalists. Pevsner is better (though quite frequently a house in Burkes and Savills will be missed by Pev, and less frequently, vice versa)

As someone interested in both architecture and family history, the format is a winner for me. As for "murky snapshots" that's often as good as it gets for lost houses. I am desperate for a good quality reproduceable photo of Wincham Hall in Cheshire, for example (a large but undistinguised 19th C brick mansion which became a girls school in 1900, was largely demolished in the 1940s, and whose remaining fragment is a hotel - of interest because it was built by a family I am researching and want to write a short book about). Robinson lists it but does not illustrate it. Grubby postcards of it come up on e-bay occasionally and sell for surprisingly large sums. I was outbid the last time.

 

[AMc]

Am I right in thinking that (leaving aside LBC), building regs would be unlikely to allow a construction with that much glass due to heat loss?

Wouldn't it lose more heat in winter than passive solar gain produced?

Once upon a time conservatories were encouraged by relaxed building controls on the basis that they provided a useful thermal buffer to minimise heat loss from the adjacent heated living space and extra usable space during spring, summer and autumn. The basic premise being an unheated but air tight conservatory would hold partially warmed air, slow the rate of loss from the wall it was built onto as well as accumulating solar gain during the day, even in winter.

Then every beggar stuck one on as a cheap extension, put in a electric oil fired radiator, followed by full central heating and sat in their single glazed, polycarbonate roofed lean-to's all year around with the blinds closed. So the rules were changed

You're unlikely to get building control approval for an extension with glazing equal to more than 25% of it's footprint if it forms part of the heated living space.

You would be allowed to reconstruct the single glazed structure (or double if you wanted) providing you maintain exterior grade doors and windows between the house and the vinery/orangerie/conservatory and don't fit a permanent heating system. It would make a lovely summer room/green house, but it would be expensive to rebuild.

You could also gain approval including heating by demonstrating (via an SAP study) that the overall energy efficiency of your whole house would be better including the glass room than a comparable extension built to 2006 regs. That can be achieved by 'over insulating' elsewhere and switching to a 'green' heating system. This is what we did to get approval to rebuild our vinery and include it in the living accommodation. The main component was switching an oil fired boiler for an air source heat pump, but there were other things, like specifying high performance double glazing, double the normal amounts of roof and wall insulation etc. Obviously this would be massively disruptive unless you were already planning a back to the bricks renovation (which doesn't seem very likely in your case).

Our vinery is a wooden replacement for a Victorian one that was beyond sensible repair after 20+ years of neglect. To give you an idea of costs excluding the foundations, brick dwarf wall and floor I had quotes from £30-50-80K in douglas fir, aluminium and oak. It's 4m wide, 8m long and rises from 2m to 4m where it meets the wall. We decided to build it without a specialist - the joinery in softwood cost £6K, the roof vents, motors and controller were another £1K, the glass was £3.5, another £1K for the roofing system, then there was decoration and carpenters to construct it + blood, sweat and tears on my part. All in all I'm pretty pleased with our vinery as it nears completion esp. the temperature driven electric skylights that have been keeping the summer heat under control since they were commissioned last week. It's not a project for the slim pocketed or fainthearted.

Lovely house by the way and I have to agree with several other people here that I'm not convinced it would be an enhancement. Ours was there already so it was no decision to rebuild again.