So far as my experience goes, the public generally are unaware of the real advantages and merits of terra-cotta for facing street fronts. When properly burned, it is absolutely impervious to smoke, and is unaffected by acid fumes of any description; it is about half the weight of the lightest building-stones, and its resistance, when burned in solid blocks in compression, is nearly one third greater than that of Portland stone; it is not absorbent—a great desideratum when damp has to be considered—it is easily molded into any shape, for strings, cornices, or window-sills and architraves, and can be easily modeled for figure or other enrichment. It can be got in good warm yellow or red color, and, when glazed, can be produced in almost any tones of soft browns, greens, reds, or yellows; and its strength, durability, and imperviousness to all the destructive influences of town atmospheres, to my mind, recommend it as the building material most adapted for facing street frontages.
Let me say a few words about iron railings. To what disastrous order of things we owe the prison-like bars and straight lines of the ordinary front railings in our streets, I am at a loss to understand; but surely nothing can be more hideous or more unartistic. Why cannot we redeem the general want of taste in London streets by something like good design in balcony-fronts or area-railings? They may be made just as secure, and just as useful, if made ornamental in form, like the beautiful iron-work of the old towns in Spain, Italy, and Germany, which can be seen in the humblest street front as well as in the princely palaces; or like the English work of the last century, some few specimens of which remain.
It is in these small matters that the taste of a people is shown, and it is by these minor features of design in the necessities of street architecture that picturesqueness and grace are to be obtained.
Let me close this lecture by a quotation from one delivered over a quarter of a century ago, by a writer who was then one of the greatest of living word-painters:
"If you build well and artistically, you will talk to all who pass by, and all those little sympathies, those freaks of fancy, those jests in stone, those workings out of problems in caprice, will occupy mind after mind of utterly countless multitudes, long after you are gone. You have not, like authors, to plead for a hearing, or to fear oblivion. Do but build large enough and boldly enough, and all the world will hear you; they can not choose but look."—Abridged from the Journal of the Society of Arts.
