4 Front door furniture
Take a stroll up to 1, Royal Crescent in Bath – one of Georgian Britain’s architectural gems – and you may catch sight of a wrought-iron cone above the railings near the front door. This strange object looks like an over-sized candle snuffer, and that’s pretty much what it was. But, instead of snuffing out candles, it extinguished the torches that illuminated the pedestrians’ way before street lights became widespread in the early to mid-19th century.
The Royal Crescent torch-snuffer is a high-end example of what can only be described as front door “furniture” – accessories that enabled Georgians and Victorians to express their wealth and taste around the entrances to their residences, while also giving us an insight into the changing habits of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Take walking, for example. Before the late 18th century, when cities were crisscrossed by filthy streets, this was viewed as the preserve of the poor. But, once pavements were improved, walking became a fashionable activity. Cue the rise of the boot-scraper, designed to clean footwear muddied during a perambulation. By the mid-Victorian era, increasingly elaborate cast-iron boot-scrapers adorned front and back doors across Britain.
Knocker-wrenching
Another form of front door furniture – the door-knocker – became similarly ornate. These could be installed to ward off evil or bring good luck. However, they were also used to communicate a message: a bow of crêpe on the knocker represented a death; felt swathing told of a killing; a white glove meant a birth; while a bunch of flowers signalled a marriage.
By the end of Victoria’s reign, door-knockers became so extravagant that they’d inspired an illicit new craze: “knocker wrenching”. In 1896, the
Daily Mail described Lord Charles Beresford’s efforts to steal the Marquis of Bath’s dolphin door-knockers. According to the report, “Lord Charles hopped out, carrying a stout rope. One end of this was attached to the knockers and the other to the body of the cab, the titled driver then being ordered to ‘whip up’. This he did. The horse sprang forward and out came not only the knockers, but also the panels of the door.”
Probably the most celebrated door-knocker of the 19th century was the “Wellington”, created by ironmonger David Bray in honour of the Duke of Wellington’s victories in Spain and Portugal in 1814. Following the battle of Waterloo a year later, the door-knocker became even more popular, with the Morning Post declaring that “every knock brings home to the bosom… the final downfall of the enemy of the rights and liberties of mankind”.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a cast-iron torch-snuffer outside the terraced houses of northern England at the turn of the 20th century. Here, tiled porches depicting rural idylls were rarer than hen’s teeth. But that didn’t stop their owners giving their front doors a little extra polish – and for that they used something called the “donkey stone”.
The donkey stone was a type of scouring block employed to scrub, clean and give extra grip to stairs and doorsteps, primarily in mill towns. The name originated from the Manchester-based “Donkey” brand, which imprinted a donkey stamp on the stones.
Cleaning a doorstep may sound simple, but there was an art to using a donkey stone. After scrubbing the steps, women would deploy the stones along the front edge and vertical sides to give their work a neat, decorative finish.
Thanks to an abundance of litter and the soot from coal fires, women had to “do the step” on a regular basis. However, it gave them an opportunity to socialise with their neighbours, all the while attempting to craft the most aesthetically pleasing doorstep on the street.
Looming threat
Another activity that would bring people together on their front doorstep was lace-pulling. In cities such as Nottingham – which remained a hub of Britain’s lace industry into the second half of the 20th century – women would sit out on their doorsteps, pulling out the thread that connected pieces of lace that had just rolled off the factory loom. A child would then collect these up in a pram, cover them with a clean sheet and run them back to the factory.
Like “doing the step”, this practice has long since passed into history, a victim of Britain’s manufacturing decline over the past five decades.
What hasn’t changed, however, is the front door’s status as a symbol of wealth and taste. In fact, you could argue that its position as a marker of social superiority has reached its zenith in some recent high-rise developments in Britain and the US. The rich enter the hotel-like lobby to access all the luxury and leisure activities contained within. Social housing tenants, on the other hand, access their flats near the bins and service entrance, through what has been termed the “poor door”. Have we come so very far from the days of the medieval portcullis or the Regency footman? Perhaps not.
Rachel Hurdley is a research fellow in cultural sociology at Cardiff University