Londinium, Architecture and the Crafts — Reading Companion

ittle stones—what the French call _petit appareil_—as described above. An immense amount of piling was used in wet ground under streets and wharves, as well as walls. Foundations have been discovered of three rows of piles close together with a wall coming directly on their heads (Fig. 3). A wall found on the site of the Mansion House seems to have had only one row of piles; it was plastered outside.

_Tile Walling._—The brick commonly used in Rome was a crude or unbaked block; the burnt walling tile was, as said above, developed from pottery, and it always remained pottery-like in texture and thin in substance. As Mr. T. May has said of bricks: “They were made of heavy clay, well tempered and long exposed; the modern practice is to use the lightest possible clay right off without tempering.” Walling tiles were used in Londinium not only as bonding courses, but for the entire substance of walls. It is usual to write “Roman tiles or bricks” interchangeably, but in origin and character the thing was a tile, and, indeed, roofing tiles with flanged edges were used as a walling material occasionally. Tiles were of various sizes and shapes, but an oblong, 1½ ft. by 1 ft. and about 1½ in. thick, was most usual. In the Guildhall Museum are several triangular tiles which must, I think, have been used for facing walls with concrete cores. Solid tile walling was used in Londinium so extensively that it was evidently a common material for better buildings. The Lombard Street excavations of 1785 exposed “a wall which consisted of the smaller-sized Roman bricks, in which were two perpendicular flues, one semicircular and the other rectangular; the height of the wall was 10 ft. and the depth to the top from the surface was also 10 ft.” Here we have evidence of a brick wall rising the full height of one story at least (_Archæol._ viii.). Roach Smith noticed a wall in Scott’s Yard “8 ft. thick, entirely composed of oblong tiles in mortar.” Mr. Lambert has recently described some walls of brick 3¼ ft. thick found at Miles Lane. A building in Lower Thames Street had walls of _red_ and _yellow_ tiles in alternate layers. This fact I learn from a sketch by Fairholt at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and such use of bricks of two colours was a common practice. In Hodge’s sketches of the tile walls of a great building discovered at Leadenhall Market it is noted that some of the courses were red and buff. Price recorded of walls, 2½ ft. thick, found in the Bucklersbury excavations, that “the tiles were the usual kind of red and yellow brick.”

More recently a bath chamber has been found in Cannon Street built of tiles which on the illustration are indicated in alternate courses of red and yellow. In the description in _Archæologia_, it is remarked: “It would appear that the yellow was preferred, the red being employed where they were not visible.” Years ago Charles Knight observed that the tiles used in the City Wall at America Square varied from “bright red to palish yellow.” This has been confirmed by more recent accounts in _Archæologia_. Finally, Roach Smith, describing the discovery of a part of the South or River Wall of the City (_Archæological Journal_, vol. i.), says that the tiles used as bonding bands were straight and curved-edged (that is, flanged roof tiles), red and yellow in colour. At the Guildhall there are a roof tile and a flue tile of yellow colour. Building with tiles may for long have been customary, but the use of red and yellow tiles in the way described would probably have been a fashion during a limited time only, and in that case it follows that the buildings erected with red and yellow tiles are likely to be nearly contemporary; the date would, I suppose, be the fourth century. Specially made tiles were used for columns. At the Guildhall are several round tiles 8 in. diameter, suitable for the piers of a hypocaust. Also some semicircular tiles 12 in. in diameter. In Rochester Museum are some quadrants making up a circle about 1½ ft. in diameter. Tiles, eight of which made up a circle, have lately been found at Colchester, and in the Guildhall Museum is a course of a round column made up of twelve tiles around a small central circle. A large number of columns were evidently of such bricks plastered.