My wife is from upstate New York and every home is made from wood, I don’t think I’ve seen a wooden house in the UK. Maybe one or two grade 1 listed pubs.
I get the proximity to cheaper materials, the availability of brick, local resources etc.. But I also see it reflected in the price £400k, for a 4 bed in East Greenbush (outside Albany), vs £700k for a 4-bedroom brick house outside Chester (I thought roughly equivalent, if not weighted in favor of NY).
Surely there’s a market for cheaper wooden houses in the UK? What’s the deal?
In: 15
There are few different reasons, and it depends on when and where construction happened and when.
Take coastal Scotland for example – people live by the coast or rivers because it supplies means for trade, transport and food. Wood hasn’t been plentiful in these areas for thousands of years, so they built with locally quarried stone. When wood is scarce, it’s expensive and as a result you only use it for the things you need to – ships for example could only be built with wood, but houses could be built with masonry. Over time that becomes tradition, and you end up with lots of skilled masons in the region who know how to build in stone, so why change?
In areas where they built by rivers, such as the London basin, there’s a lot of clay which can be used to make bricks.
In the north of England where there was a lot of coal mining, you often find red brick houses as the clay was a ‘waste’ product from coal mining.
A second reason relates to legislation. In London, for example, the by-laws were changed after one of the London fires and effectively prohibited the use of exposed timber details. Until there was reliable sources of cement in the U.K. (early 1800s) that meant there was a period between the introduction of those specific by-laws which iirc were introduced in the early 1700s where you couldn’t basically couldn’t build in timber without also having masonry.
Tldr: scarcity of timber in some places, timber structures kept burning down in built up cities.
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