This survey originated in the predecessors of English Heritage carrying out a research programme evaluating the urban archaeological research resource in Avon, Gloucestershire and Somerset. A considerable number of seventeenth-century and earlier houses in Bristol are known, together with significant examples from the eighteenth century. This book, a model of its kind, nevertheless pulls the various aspects of the subject together. Knowledge of the material remains is extended by a rich topographical resource of illustrations, combined with archaeological data and documentary sources, together with an extraordinary photographic archive of 30,000 images from 1840 to 1952 and by 200 archaeological excavations. Roger Leech began work on this study in 1979, aided by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship, and while he was employed by the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England. The bibliography of this book lists twenty-nine articles by the author. Much, therefore, is already in the public domain.

Bristol was among medieval England’s most important towns. Throughout the period studied, Bristol was a commercial port centred upon its harbour. Wealth was generated mostly by trade – the social elite was composed mainly of merchants. Unlike London, its medieval housing stock was not destroyed by a great fire and so a hundred or so houses date from before 1700. After a brief introduction in which the Saxon and medieval city are analysed, Leech gets down to business and describes the urban tenements and the two characteristic building types occupying them – the hall house and the shop house. Both mirrored a communal-centred society. Gradually they were replaced by residential houses, with landlords investing by digging cellars and adding storeys, and by extending buildings backwards on the plots. They were up to four storeys along the High Street, with three storeys in the other main streets, and two in the suburbs. Such developments resulted in house plans with a greater emphasis on privacy and a carefully contrived separation of servants and masters. Frequent mentions of parallel developments in London are made, but there is only one reference to Bath (p 50) and, strangely, the seminal work by James Ayres, on Building the Georgian City (Ayres Reference Ayres1998), is absent. Other shortcomings are the insufficient discussion of the sources of the building stone and brick, and how these early modern developments were financed.

An unusual (and to the reviewer, novel) feature found in Bristol was the lodge or garden house. Such places were an investment in property, a retreat from the noise and bustle of the city, places for entertaining and for visiting one’s family. These houses were built on the edge of the city, within a twenty-minute walk from the centre.

Bigger houses could have as many as three parlours. This enabled the master of the house to have a quiet drink with a dealer, or the family to use a separate parlour to avoid conversing with common servants ‘from whom they seldom learn any good’. The proliferation of parlours also hints at gendered spaces and the notion of ‘closure’ and privacy.

The prosperity and housing stock of post-medieval Bristol was built on the profits of the Atlantic trade in slaves and slave-related goods. With the ending of the London-based Royal African Company’s monopoly in 1698, Bristol’s industry developed to exploit new markets; for example, the consumption of beer, cider and wine. Glass bottles for those drinks were exported in greater quantities from Bristol than from London. Other goods made in Bristol and exported to the West Indies were clay tobacco pipes and ceramics, which were exchanged with chocolate, coffee, tobacco and sugar.

Edmund Saunders was a chief developer of Guinea Street, laid out in the 1700s. Saunders, a slave-ship captain and an agent for the sale of slaves in and around St Michael’s, Bristol, exemplifies a direct correlation between wealth generated by the slave trade and the occupancy of new houses in Bristol. Residents of Queen Square were overwhelmingly connected with the Atlantic trade. By c 1770 Clifton was similarly awash with slave-based wealth. This slave-produced wealth and the brutality that went with it was juxtaposed with small homes in new cities such as Bristol that were similar in plan, elevation and internal fittings to those in London at this time (Guillery Reference Guillery2004).

Courtyard houses, hall houses, shop houses, residential houses with second residences and suburban villas – the design and location of the houses reflected and demonstrated aspiration and status. As time progressed, individualism took precedence over community; dates and initials were carved on property in the seventeenth century as never before. Houses were constructed on principles that made hierarchy in society seem natural: ground and first floors moulded for the display of wealth through panelling, plaster cornices, six-panelled doors, open strings and hand-finished handrails for stairs. As one ascended to the uppermost storeys, panelling and plasterwork became increasingly absent. Doors were reduced to four panels and then two.

As the Foreword states, ‘this book is a new way of looking at medieval and early modern urban housing, focusing specifically on the relationships between different building types and changes in building forms’. Leech does indeed show us the complex character of an evolving commercial city.