Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

@GrahamH wrote:

. . . . but is it a single plot? It is depicted above as being of Mornington or Ely House-esque proportions, where two gables could comfortably be sited. Nonetheless, the few bays say it all about the narrowness of the house. Accurate scaling wasn’t exactly on the top of Barker’s agenda one imagines.

I understand that point, but most of the houses he depicts are of Mornington House scale, and I’m inclined to take that as a graphic devise, a bit like the three fingers on Disney cartoon characters. Having said that, the scale of the houses do tail off slightly towards the margins of the development and this particular house is located in one of these marginal locations, [equating to Holles Street, more or less].

I think there is particular credence to the depiction of a, two/three bay, twin Billy in a slightly more marginal location like this, very much like the location of the modest scaled twin Billys that we know [or some of us know] existed on Newmarket, or James St.

The bigger ‘Billys’ on Barker’s map include a few five bay, single gabled, mansions that equate well with the legendary giant ‘Billy’ on Marrowbone Lane, or the Ward house on Ward’s Hill off Newmarket, which Peter Walsh has speculated may have been a truncated example of something very similar.