Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

@Devin wrote:

. . . here was the view of the interlocking rear gable of 9 Aungier Street featured a few posts back . . .

Where do you start with trying to unravel that?

I didn’t know it retained it’s original staircase! that suggests that much of the interior may be intact despite the total re-facing of the facades, front and back, in 19th century brick.

Presumably, for that central section of the rear roof profile to have survived, a central beam running front to back under the central valley gutter must survive and the steepness on those inner roof pitches suggests that the roof joists here may also be original, so the big question is goint to be; are the roof ridges, corresponding to the two rear gables, in the original position, or have taller gables been cropped?

If the house follows the Jervis St. and Manor St. examples, the ridges are probably in their original position, but the outer gable profiles will have been altered to a shallower pitch, effectively expanding the top floor accommodation with knock-on consequences for the location of top floor windows.

Again, if the original roof profile followed the twin Billy precedents, the side roof joists would originally have swept down to second floor joist level. If this was in fact the case, as seems likely, it ought to be possible to establish evidence of this from identifying a change in the brickwork to the party walls on either side and there might even be a built-up gable profile here, behind the internal plaster, where sections of transverse roof would probably have buttressed the chimney stacks and offered head room internally within the core of what would then have been an attic storey.

The grouping of a pair of gables towards the centre of the elevations at 30 Jervis St. and probably also 42 Manor St., presumably reflected the need to maintain circulation headroom in a broad, double gabled, attic storey.

What that little quarter gable was doing on the left (adjoining no. 10), god knows! There’s evidence of shared gables between pairs of houses, (we speculated earlier on the Parnel St. pair), but surely this would be a later feature!

On the dating issue, if no. 9 Aungier Street was originally a close-coupled twin Dutch gabled house, similar to 30 Jervis Street, a 1680s date would present certain difficulties, given certain ‘origin of the species’ theories that may have been put forward! . . . . but we’ll wriggle off that particular hook when the time comes 😉