Victorians were really good at engineering, so why did they build so many 3 & 4 storey houses on clay with only 1m foundations?

[JamBiscuitBun]

The qualities of clay can't have been new knowledge in Victorian times. And look at some of the large and beautiful things they built. Yet near me, there's row after row of 4 storey terraced houses with pretty serious subsidence issues because they have little-to-no useful foundation. Why is this?

I'm loving the criticism of build quality of houses that are 150 years old and still standing....

considering the number of buildings built in 1960's that need demolishing I think it's amazing, approx 50% of housing stock is more than 100 years old I would say 90% of that will still be ok in another 50 years, not so sure about modern builds look at scandals with high rises and cladding

Could be worse, could be one of the new builds I saw on Saturday that had cracked roof to floor!

Lots of Victorian houses didn’t stand the test of time - especially the poorly built working class houses that, either through slum clearance or falling into disrepair, are no longer here.

Basic building regs were introduced in the 1850s but it was the later Public Health Acts that introduced sanitation requirements and poorly constructed stopped back-to-backs being built. Model bye-laws were introduced in the1870s and 1880s that regulated things like foundations, fire protection etc, and gave rise to better regulated building.

The effects of shrink / swell of clay soils on foundations weren’t really recognised until the 1940s - London Clay is notoriously bad for this.

I’ll agree that Brunel was a genius - I worked on the investigation of one of his bridges and, either by accident or design, the bridge piers were perfectly spaced to ensure the foundations remained stable on soft soils.

Read "The ragged trousered philanthropist" and you'll get the idea of Victorian approach to house construction... it's pretty similar to now.

In reality, there is very little subsidence needing remedial works. I am a surveyor in an area with a huge amount of period properties with predominantly highly shrinkable subsoils, and see very little underpinning. Most issues are caused by differential movement between the original parts and newer additions.

My own house has no foundations at all, and we have never had any movement.

In England, it’s around 20% of housing stock that is over 100 years old: 3% is pre-1850, 8% is 1850-1899 and 8% is 1900-1919.

17% of housing stock is post 1990.

A number of possible reasons: the materials the Victorians used were more flexible (e.g. lime mortar, lime plaster) so could cope with a bit of movement better than modern mortars/plasters/renders. Building work was less regulated back then and I guess if no-one was putting in deep foundations then no-one expected it. Many of the speculative build houses were owned by a 'landlord' who might have been a company, investment organisation or a rich landowner. They were then rented out so they probably saw them more as a commodity that could be repaired or rebuilt with cheap labour when required. Nowadays, many people's home is their biggest asset where they have invested their life savings and borrowed extensively to fund so people feel much more exposed to the risk of what might happen to their property than a property owner with a 100 properties in their portfolio who is used to an ongoing programme of maintenance/repairs to their properties. Also, had the concept of deep foundations even been thought of in Victorian times? Maybe not.

Back then everything was done by hand, digging foundations by hand, building by hand, hod carrying by hand etc nowadays it’s done by machinery, even brick laying is going that way!

@WarningToTheCurious sorry I heard that somewhere and didn't fact check, I now have; the 50% point is actually approx 1964 -70 so its more like 50% is more than 50 years old,

this is interesting reading
files.bregroup.com/bretrust/The-Housing-Stock-of-the-United-Kingdom_Report_BRE-Trust.pdf

Yes, its about 55% that are pre-1965. Around 20% of England's total housing stock was built between 1945 and 1964 during the big post-war housebuilding boom.

Exactly.