Chapter 3: The House that Fagg built

Front door and plaque

What did the construction of this elaborate building cost? The earliest valuation of the house that we have comes from 1852, when it was sold at auction to Samuel Gutsell for £900 (see chapter 6, below). This was a substantial price, particularly for a property that was by this time quite used and shop-soiled. It is comparable, for instance, to the price of ‘substantial terrace dwellings’ in Bath in the late eighteenth century.22 Yet the signs are that Exmouth House had in fact cost much more than this to build. For one thing, there is the initial cost of the land: no record survives of this, but in the later stages of the Napoleonic Wars land costs usually represented 15-25% of the selling price of houses, and in this case the cost would have reflected the fact that the house is double-fronted, thus occupying an abnormally large site.23 There would also have been a fee for the architect if (as Brett’s comment suggests) the house was architect-designed. As for the structure itself, no expense seems to have been spared, as will have become apparent from the description that has already been given - the elaborate preparation of the site, with its extensive rear wall and purpose-built well; the solid cellar and the very thick walls to take the sliding sash shutters, which must have occupied bricklayers for many weeks; the joinery involved in the sash windows, shutters, staircase and other features, which must have entailed similar outlay on carpentry; the ornamental balcony with its cast-iron frontage; even the elaborate roof. It must all have cost a very great deal, and clues as to how much are provided by sources like Richard Elsam’s The Practical Builder’s Perpetual Price-Book (1825), which has already been referred to. The prices that Fagg must have paid mount up inexorably.24 A skilled bricklayer, as already noted, was paid 5 shillings a day; bricks came at between 5 and 16 shillings per hundred, depending in their quality. Joinery worked out equally expensive, both for carpenters’ wages and for the cost of the wood, which had, incidentally, been the subject of considerable inflation during the Napoleonic Wars.25 Extras like glazing, plumbing and metalwork will also have added to the bill. It is almost impossible in retrospect to give a detailed estimate of the likely costs, but they must have been high - well over £1,000 and perhaps even approaching £2,000. It was indeed a lavish enterprise.

22 See C.W. Chalklin, The Provincial Towns of Georgian England: A Study of the Building Process 1740-1820 (Leicester, 1974), pp. 218-20 and ch. 8 passim.

23 Ibid., pp. 191, 218.

24 Elsam, The Practical Builder’s Perpetual Price-Book, passim.

25 For inflation, see Chalklin, Provincial Towns, pp. 221-3.