I live in an ancient city, in a medium-old apartment — one that is rapidly approaching its bicentennial. Like any building in continuous occupation for nearly 200 years, form and function have changed: it’s been retrofitted with indoor plumbing, gas central heating, electricity, broadband internet. The kitchen has shrunk, a third of it hived off to create a modern (albeit small) bathroom. The coal-burning fireplaces are either blocked or walled over. Three rooms have false ceilings, lowered to reduce heating costs before hollowcore loft insulation was a thing. What I suspect was once the servants’ bedroom is now a windowless storeroom. And rooms serve a different function. The dining room is no longer a dining room, it serves as a library (despite switching to ebooks a decade ago I have a big book problem). And so on.
But certain features of a 200 year old apartment remain constant. There are bedrooms. There is a privy (now a flushing toilet). There is a kitchen. There is a living room. And there is a corridor.
This apartment was built around 1820, for the builder of the tenement it’s part of: he was a relatively prosperous Regency working man and his family would have included servants as a matter of course in those days. And where one has servants, one perforce has corridors so that they may move about the dwelling out of sight of the owners. But it was not always so.
Rewind another 200 years and look around a surviving great house, such as Holyrood Palace, also in Edinburgh. Holyrood largely dates to the 16th and 17th century, and reflects the norms of that earlier era, and if you tour it one thing is noteworthy by its absence: corridors. The great houses of that period were laid out as a series of rooms of increasing grandeur, each leading to the next. Splendid wide main doors in the centre of each wall provided access for nobility and people of merit: much smaller, unadorned doors near the corners allowed servants to scuttle unobtrusively around the edges of the court. Staircases ascended through grand halls at the centre of such houses (accessible from doors leading to the main function rooms around the periphery): servants’ areas such as the kitchen, stores, and pantry might boast their own staircases, and the master apartments of a great house had their own stairs leading to privy or ground floor.
But the corridor in its modern, contemporary sense seems to have started out as a narrowing and humbling of the grand halls and assembly rooms of state, reduced in scope to a mere conduit for the workers who kept things running — before, of course, they later became commonplace.
Charles Stross, “Social architecture and the house of tomorrow”, Charlie’s Diary, 2019-04-29.
September 24, 2022
QotD: The evolution of the domestic corridor
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