Boxford, Suffolk

Sign of the times

It’s 1839 and you are building a new house (or perhaps refronting an old one) in the middle of Boxford, Suffolk. Queen Victoria came to throne two years ago and was popular at the beginning of her reign. So you decide to name the house after the young monarch: Victoria Cottage. Perhaps the building was completed at the beginning of the year, because as 1839 went on, Victoria’s popularity was dealt a blow when she was implicated in spreading false rumours about one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting. Or perhaps the house’s owner was staunchly patriotic. Who knows? Both the name, inscribed over the arches above the lower windows, and the date of construction, above the windows of the upper floor, remain. The inscriptions are certainly an individual touch and a far cry from the small house name signs or date stones more often seen on modest town houses.

The frontage is classically plain – the arches, round-topped windows, parapet, and Gothic glazing bars are all reminiscent of the late-Georgian period, but fashions were often slow to change in the provinces and, in style as in inscriptions, individual taste is often in play in domestic architecture. The bricks are the pale colour so often found in East Anglia and featuring also in the building in my previous post. Pale bricks, often called ‘whites’, but often pale yellow or cream in colour, are made with clay that contains more lime than usual, a feature of clays in many parts of eastern England. They can look very handsome, sometimes easy to mistake for stone when one is looking at a big country house from a distance, but here are unmistakably brick and none the worse for that.