Why are the windows in good England bricked up?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Old houses in Great Britain have one peculiarity: it often happens that there are window openings in a building, but the windows themselves are bricked up. It seems that the buildings are not abandoned and this is done almost haphazardly: for example, part of the house may be completely without daylight sources.

This oddity, meanwhile, has a reason …

… historically determined. And I somehow remember that we even went through this at school.

It may seem surprising, but at the end of the 7th century it became prohibitively expensive for the British to have windows in their houses. In 1696, the so-called "tax on windows" was adopted, which was imposed not only on the windows themselves, but also on any other (even small) openings in the building that functioned like a window. The principle on which the tax was collected was as follows: the more windows there are in the house, the more expensive it is to maintain.

The window tax was introduced to force the wealthy to pay higher prices for housing. Poor people who lived in small houses received lower wages. And if the house had less than 10 windows, then it was canceled altogether.

However, the adopted taxation also had significant drawbacks. Many poor people rented rooms in apartment buildings and had to pay extra to use the windows. But the rich acted differently: they began to brick the window openings in order to pay less. New buildings were also built with a limited number of windows to avoid paying tax.

Charles Dickens condemned the "window tax", saying that henceforth the poor in England were deprived of what nature gave them - fresh air and sunshine. The tax was canceled only in 1851; it existed for more than a century and a half.

The "window tax" in British history is not the only absurd move on the part of the government. In 1784, a tax on bricks was introduced in order for the country to raise the funds needed to continue the military campaign in the American colonies. It was supposed to pay for the number of bricks from which the house was built. To reduce wages, houses began to be built with non-standard, much larger bricks, and these buildings can still be seen in Leicestershire.

From 1662 to 1689 a tax was levied on the number of fireplaces in dwellings. Some people even refused to heat the premises in order not to pay tax.

Caricature: A family awaiting the abolition of the window tax.