The finish of such houses was slapdash out of economic necessity: there was no time to lavish care and attention on them. But go back to the late Victorian era and you find a subtly different picture.
The arts and crafts movement dreamed of a revival in traditional building methods and found in pebbledash an echo of the kind of stippled rough-cast rendering which dated back to Roman times. It is not always pretty but, for a remote coastal cottage, lashed by wind and rain, pebble dash is far more durable, and far cheaper to maintain, than bricks-and-mortar.
The garden has a fish pond, plus a two-acre paddock. Most agents will still tell you that pebbledash has more negative than positive connotations. Living areas have a balcony overlooking the garden, with bedrooms below. Smiths Gore , smithsgore. The render needs to be glossed over somehow, like the damp spot in the spare bedroom.
It has original fireplaces, decorative cornicing and coving, and timber flooring. The house looked far smarter and sold in no time. A defeat for Mrs Willumsen in Hampstead could turn out to be a victory for the residents of pebbledash semis in Walsall and Nottingham.
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How we can help Contact us. Could Britain's Victorian housing stock see values plummet if government rushes though EPC regulation? Other names used to describe the process are Dry-dashing, Harling and roughcasting. It is a finish that according to Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud, is a building material for which "a revival is long overdue". Pebbledash is the modern version of a rendering process that dates from Roman times: a mixture of quicklime and sand, thrown at external walls to give a stippled effect.
In Britain, it is thought to have originated in the 16th century in East Anglia, where there had been a recent revival of brickmaking, but none except the grandest could afford a whole wall full of the smart new bricks.
Then pebbledash was called "roughcast" — a mix of lime, sand and stone — and it was slopped over mostly jumbled stone exteriors like plaster, to fill the gaps.
Three hundred years later, it was this "roughcast" that caught the eye of the Arts and Crafts movement, instigated by William Morris. In particular, it was the renowned architect C F A Voysey who pioneered the use of pebbledash in the late 19th and early 20th century.
He deliberately designed buildings with cornices and window surrounds that would be highlighted when the ''dash'' was laid. And his houses often used pebbledash as a design feature. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner says that Voysey sowed the seeds of the modernist movement because his houses were white, clean-lined and pebbledashed.
Voysey's use of the material was taken up after the war when domestic design took a leap forward. This would then have been scratched to provide a good key.
This suggests that quicklime was slaked with the pebbles, shale or gravel in it. The principal component of the finished surface is thus the pebbles or stone fragments with a thin coating of binder.
For exposed environments Millar recommended the use of Portland cement rather than lime. Examples from this period which have survived would suggest that this approach was commonly followed, although it seems likely that most examples from the Edwardian period onwards contain Portland cement either on its own or as a gauged lime mortar.
Pebbledash was an ideal finish for a Portland cement render. When production was perfected in and the material began to be used widely, it was found that renders made with the material tended to crack almost immediately.
This was caused by the trowelling required to produce a smooth finish, since this increases the proportion of both small particles and moisture at the surface. However, a roughcast or pebbledash requires only the minimum of trowelling, and pressing the course stone aggregate into the surface consolidates it, minimising the risk.
The result is a hard, durable surface, easily capable of binding a pebbledash coating. Roughcast, as conservationists prefer to call the earliest material, probably has a history as old as lime mortar itself. It is widely found on medieval buildings, particularly in the rendered panels of timber-framed houses, but it can also be found on stone buildings, often with stone quoins and window surrounds projecting beyond the render.
In some cases the pebbles or stone fragments are pressed in flush to form a rough, uneven surface. In other cases the stone material is left deliberately proud to create a sugary texture, often acting as a foil for smooth features such as window surrounds and quoins. However, it was probably the work of Richard Norman Shaw more than anything else that was responsible for its popularity at the end of the 19th century.
Here, the asymmetric composition of steeply pitched roofs, jettied floors, small-paned windows and rough textures evoke an atmosphere of cosy cottage comforts with roaring log fires, albeit on a grand scale. The wall surfaces are a patchwork of textures, with areas of solid brickwork, roughcast renders and tile-hung gables. The Arts and Crafts movement that ensued adopted the palette of materials and forms popularised by Shaw, including tall chimneys, small-paned windows, clay tiles, and roughcast or modern pebbledash.
The list of exponents included architects like CFA Voysey, Lutyens, Baillie-Scott, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and by the turn of the century the material adorned the homes of the avant-garde and the rich, as well as those of the residents of garden cities and the expanding suburbs. Pebbledash and roughcast initially proved popular because they offered texture and because they were seen to be traditional craft techniques.
However, their revival flourished because they were cost effective, and they were ideal for use in the new suburban developments of the late 19th century. At Port Sunlight, a development much influenced by Bedford Park, the aim was to create affordable housing with the delights of the countryside. Roughcast and pebbledash enabled solid, brick-thick walls to be constructed of common bricks, relying on the hard, impervious render to keep out the damp.
This garden suburb was created in the late 19th century by William Hesketh Lever later Viscount Leverhulme in the Wirral, Cheshire to house the employees of his soap factory, Lever Brothers now part of Unilever.
Here pebbledashed buildings included a school, a cottage hospital and civic buildings, as well as hundreds of houses of varying sizes, all laid out with broad tree-lined streets.
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