Window Tax

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…in England and Wales

From 1696 until 1851 a “window tax” was imposed in England and Wales1. Sort-of a precursor to property taxes like council tax today, it used an estimate of the value of a property as an indicator of the wealth of its occupants: counting the number of windows provided the mechanism for assessment.

Graph showing the burden of window tax in 1696 and 1794. In the former year a flat rate of 1 shiling was charged, doubling for a property when it reached 10 and 20 windows respectively. In the latter year charging began at 10 windows and the price per-window jumped up at 15 at 20 windows. Both approaches result in a "stepped" increase.
The hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is thinking in “old money”2.
Window tax replaced an earlier hearth tax, following the ascension to the English throne of Mary II and William III of Orange. Hearth tax had come from a similar philosophy: that you can approximate the wealth of a household by some aspect of their home, in this case the number of stoves and fireplaces they had.

(A particular problem with window tax as enacted is that its “stepping”, which was designed to weigh particularly heavily on the rich with their large houses, was that it similarly weighed heavily on large multi-tenant buildings, whose landlord would pass on those disproportionate costs to their tenants!)

1703 woodcut showing King William III and Queen Mary II.
It’d be temping to blame William and Mary for the window tax, but the reality is more-complex and reflects late renaissance British attitudes to the limits of state authority.

Why a window tax? There’s two ways to answer that:

  • A window tax – and a hearth tax, for that matter – can be assessed without the necessity of the taxpayer to disclose their income. Income tax, nowadays the most-significant form of taxation in the UK, was long considered to be too much of an invasion upon personal privacy3.
  • But compared to a hearth tax, it can be validated from outside the property. Counting people in a property in an era before solid recordkeeping is hard. Counting hearths is easier… so long as you can get inside the property. Counting windows is easier still and can be done completely from the outside!
Dan points to a bricked-up first storey window on a stone building used by a funeral services company.
If you’re in Britain, finding older buildings with windows bricked-up to save on tax is pretty easy. I took a break from writing this post, walked for three minutes, and found one.4

…in the Netherlands

I recently got back from a trip to Amsterdam to meet my new work team and get to know them better.

Dan, by a game of table football, throws his arms into the air as if in self-celebration.
There were a few work-related/adjacent activities. But also a table football tournament, among other bits of fun.

One of the things I learned while on this trip was that the Netherlands, too, had a window tax for a time. But there’s an interesting difference.

The Dutch window tax was introduced during the French occupation, under Napoleon, in 1810 – already much later than its equivalent in England – and continued even after he was ousted and well into the late 19th century. And that leads to a really interesting social side-effect.

Dan, with four other men, sit in the back of a covered boat on a canal.
My brief interest in 19th century Dutch tax policy was piqued during my team’s boat tour.

Glass manufacturing technique evolved rapidly during the 19th century. At the start of the century, when England’s window tax law was in full swing, glass panes were typically made using the crown glass process: a bauble of glass would be spun until centrifugal force stretched it out into a wide disk, getting thinner towards its edge.

The very edge pieces of crown glass were cut into triangles for use in leaded glass, with any useless offcuts recycled; the next-innermost pieces were the thinnest and clearest, and fetched the highest price for use as windows. By the time you reached the centre you had a thick, often-swirly piece of glass that couldn’t be sold for a high price: you still sometimes find this kind among the leaded glass in particularly old pub windows5.

Multi-pane window with distinctive crown glass "circles".
They’re getting rarer, but I’ve lived in houses with small original panes of crown glass like these!

As the 19th century wore on, cylinder glass became the norm. This is produced by making an iron cylinder as a mould, blowing glass into it, and then carefully un-rolling the cylinder while the glass is still viscous to form a reasonably-even and flat sheet. Compared to spun glass, this approach makes it possible to make larger window panes. Also: it scales more-easily to industrialisation, reducing the cost of glass.

The Dutch window tax survived into the era of large plate glass, and this lead to an interesting phenomenon: rather than have lots of windows, which would be expensive, late-19th century buildings were constructed with windows that were as large as possible to maximise the ratio of the amount of light they let in to the amount of tax for which they were liable6.

Hotel des Pays-Bas, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 11 (1910 photo), showing large windows.
Look at the size of those windows! If you’re limited in how many you can have, but you’ve got the technology, you’re going to make them as large as you possibly can!

That’s an architectural trend you can still see in Amsterdam (and elsewhere in Holland) today. Even where buildings are renovated or newly-constructed, they tend – or are required by preservation orders – to mirror the buildings they neighbour, which influences architectural decisions.

Pre-WWI Neighbourhood gathering in Amsterdam, with enormous windows (especially on the ground floor) visible.
Notice how each building has only between one and three windows on the ground floor, letting as much light in while minimising the tax burden.

It’s really interesting to see the different architectural choices produced in two different cities as a side-effect of fundamentally the same economic choice, resulting from slightly different starting conditions in each (a half-century gap and a land shortage in one). While Britain got fewer windows, the Netherlands got bigger windows, and you can still see the effects today.

…and social status

But there’s another interesting this about this relatively-recent window tax, and that’s about how people broadcast their social status.

Modern photo, taken from the canal, showing a tall white building in Amsterdam with large windows on the ground floor and also basement level, and an ornamental window above the front door. Photo from Google Street View.
This Google Street Canal (?) View photo shows a house on Keizersgracht, one of the richest parts of Amsterdam. Note the superfluous decorative window above the front door and the basement-level windows for the servants’ quarters.

In some of the traditionally-wealthiest parts of Amsterdam, you’ll find houses with more windows than you’d expect. In the photo above, notice:

  • How the window density of the central white building is about twice that of the similar-width building on the left,
  • That a mostly-decorative window has been installed above the front door, adorned with a decorative leaded glass pattern, and
  • At the bottom of the building, below the front door (up the stairs), that a full set of windows has been provided even for the below-ground servants quarters!

When it was first constructed, this building may have been considered especially ostentatious. Its original owners deliberately requested that it be built in a way that would attract a higher tax bill than would generally have been considered necessary in the city, at the time. The house stood out as a status symbol, like shiny jewellery, fashionable clothes, or a classy car might today.

Cheerful white elderly man listening to music through headphones that are clearly too large for him.
I originally wanted to insert a picture here that represented how one might show status through fashion today. But then I remembered I don’t know anything about fashion7. But somehow my stock image search suggested this photo, and I love it so much I’m using it anyway. You’re welcome.
How did we go wrong? A century and a bit ago the super-wealthy used to demonstrate their status by showing off how much tax they can pay. Nowadays, they generally seem more-preoccupied with getting away with paying as little as possible, or none8.

Can we bring back 19th-century Dutch social status telegraphing, please?9

Footnotes

1 Following the Treaty of Union the window tax was also applied in Scotland, but Scotland’s a whole other legal beast that I’m going to quietly ignore for now because it doesn’t really have any bearing on this story.

2 The second-hardest thing about retrospectively graphing the cost of window tax is finding a reliable source for the rates. I used an archived copy of a guru site about Wolverhampton history.

3 Even relatively-recently, the argument that income tax might be repealed as incompatible with British values shows up in political debate. Towards the end of the 19th century, Prime Ministers Disraeli and Gladstone could be relied upon to agree with one another on almost nothing, but both men spoke at length about their desire to abolish income tax, even setting out plans to phase it out… before having to cancel those plans when some financial emergency showed up. Turns out it’s hard to get rid of.

4 There are, of course, other potential reasons for bricked-up windows – even aesthetic ones – but a bit of a giveaway is if the bricking-up reduces the number of original windows to 6, 9, 14 or 19, which are thesholds at which the savings gained by bricking-up are the greatest.

5 You’ve probably heard about how glass remains partially-liquid forever and how this explains why old windows are often thicker at the bottom. You’ve probably also already had it explained to you that this is complete bullshit. I only mention it here to preempt any discussion in the comments.

6 This is even more-pronounced in cities like Amsterdam where a width/frontage tax forced buildings to be as tall and narrow and as close to their neighbours as possible, further limiting opportunities for access to natural light.

7 Yet I’m willing to learn a surprising amount about Dutch tax law of the 19th century. Go figure.

8 Obligatory Pet Shop Boys video link. Can that be a thing please?

9 But definitely not 17th-century Dutch social status telegraphing, please. That shit was bonkers.

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Dan Q found GCAJGEA Welcome to Amsterdam! (Virtual Reward 4.0)

This checkin to GCAJGEA Welcome to Amsterdam! (Virtual Reward 4.0) reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

TFTC! I’m not carrying any tickets for UK transport, but I’ve got a (mildly defaced) British banknote and I found a tram (the number 13, which connected me to my hotel this week) and a ferry (which I then went and caught to go find some more caches!).

A £10 note with "Dan Q's Geocaching Fund" written on it in front of a number 13 tram.

A £10 note with "Dan Q's Geocaching Fund" written on it in front of a ferry.

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Dan Q found GC7RN72 #33 D.J.F. – Moana

This checkin to GC7RN72 #33 D.J.F. – Moana reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Stared at its excellent camouflage for a while before realising what this was! Paddled down by inflatable canoe (picture attached) and landed right by here. Thought to check for local caches as we deflated the boats and was delighted that this one was right here in this picturesque spot! TFTC.

A pair of inflatable yellow canoes approach from the distance along a wide, calm river.

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Dan Q found GCYK2M Got A Light Boy ? Longships Lighthouse

This checkin to GCYK2M Got A Light Boy ? Longships Lighthouse reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

I just launched my partner’s brother – shown in free attached picture – out in his rowboat to begin his attempt to row from Land’s End to John O’ Groats. Naturally this first involves rowing South, around the headland and past the lighthouse, to get to Land’s End! So I came up the hill to watch him get started. And while I was at it, I figured I’d find this cache! Took travel bug. TFTC!

Robin rows away from Sennen Cove and towards St. Ives

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Narrowboating

I’ve had a tardy summer for blogging, falling way behind on many of the things I’d planned to write about. Perhaps the problem is that I’m still on Narrowboat Time, the timezone of a strange parallel universe in which everything happens more-slowly, in a gin-soaked, gently-rocking, slowly-crawling haze.

Matt, JTA and Ruth tie up the narrowboat after our first day's travel.
The apparent haze in the centre of this photograph is not the result of gin, however, but of a scuff on the lens of the camera I was using; a fault which was not apparent to me until after I looked at the pictures, and so – now I’ve pointed it out – you won’t be able to un-see it in any of the other snaps, either.

That’s believable, because this summer Ruth, JTA and I – joined for some of the journey by Matt – rented a narrowboat and spent a week drifting unhurriedly down the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal… and then another week making a leisurely cruise back up it again.

Matt takes a siesta atop the boat.
Symptoms of “boat-lag”, which is a result of spending any significant period on Narrowboat Time, include siestas, lounging, and a generally relaxed and laid-back attitude.

We picked up Nerys, out of Cambrian Cruisers, who also gave us an introduction to the operation of the boat (driving it, filling it with water, pumping out sewage, generating electricity for appliances, etc.) and safety instructions (virtually all of the canal is less than four feet deep, so if you fall in, the best thing to do is to simply walk to the shore), and set out towards Brecon. In order to explore the entire canal in the time available, we needed to cover an average of only five miles per day. When you’re going at about two and a half miles per hour and having to stop to operate locks (there are only six locks on the navigable stretch of the canal, but they’re all clustered towards the upper end), though, five miles is plenty.

Matt looks out over the Usk Valley, near our first mooring.
Time spent mooring up, casting off, refilling the water tank, and squeezing past other boats on the narrow canal willalso slow you down. But it’s still worth getting started moving on a morning, to ensure that you don’t need to compete for one of the more-beautiful spots to tie up at the end of your day’s travel.

The upper end of the canal is by far the busiest, with not only narrowboats cruising up and down but a significant number of day boats (mostly on loan from Brecon) and at least one tour boat: a 50-seater that you don’t want to have to wiggle past at sharp corner North of the Bryich Aqueduct. From a navigation perspective, though, it’s also the best-maintained: wide enough that two boats can pass one another without much thought, and deep enough across its entire width that you needn’t be concerned about running aground, it makes for a great starting point for people who want some narrowboating practice before they hit the more challenging bits to the South.

Dan and Ruth with a geocache.
The towpath is also a haven for geocachers. Ruth and I are here seen holding GC3698Y, “Jass @ Jammy”, which was hidden only a short walk from where we moored at the end of our first and third days.

Ruth was excited to find in me a driver who was confident holding the boat steady in a lock. Perhaps an expression of equal parts talent and arrogance, I was more than happy to take over the driving, leaving others to jump out and juggle the lock gates and lift bridges. Owing to Ruth’s delicate condition, we’d forbidden her from operating the entirely-manual locks, but she made sure to get a go at running one of the fancy hydraulic ones.

Ruth operates a hydraulic lock.
The hydraulic locks aren’t any faster than the unassisted ones, but they don’t take quite so much “pushing”.

After each day’s cruising, we’d find a nice place to moor up, open a bottle of wine or mix up some gin-and-tonics, and lounge in the warm, late summer air.

Matt, Dan and JTA enjoy wine on their moored-up boat.
Matt, Dan and JTA enjoy wine on their moored-up boat. Ruth, who of course can’t drink, is behind the camera.

As we wound our way further South, to the “other” end of the waterway, we discovered that the already-narrow canal was ill-dredged, and drifting anywhere close to the sides – especially on corners – was a recipe for running around. Crewmates who weren’t driving would take turns on “pole duty”, being on standby to push us off if we got too close to one or the other bank.

Moored up with a plank.
Another effect of the shallow sides was that we’d sometimes have to “walk the plank” to get ashore. On the upside, we could raise the plank at night and feel like we were isolated in our own little fortress, with its own little drawbridge.

Each night moored up in a separate place gives a deceptive feeling of travel. Deceptive, because I’ve had hiking trips where I’ve traveled further each day than we did on our boat! But the nature of the canal, winding its way from the urban centre of Brecon out through the old mining villages of South Wales.

A gentleman "pumps out" our boat.
Modern narrowboats have a chemical toilet that needs to be “pumped out”. Slightly icky, but probably less nasty than the distant historical alternative, presumably, of putting your bum over the edge.

The canal, already quite narrow and shallow, only became harder to navigate as we got further South. Our weed hatch (that’s the door to the propeller box, that is, not a slang term for the secret compartment where you keep your drugs) saw plenty of use, and we found ourselves disentangling all manner of curious flora in order to keep our engine pushing us forwards (and not catching fire).

JTA fishes crap our of the weed hatch.
Reaching into a dirty, cold, damp hole and pulling out gunky, slimy strands of crap isn’t the most-fun job. And you really want to make sure you’ve taken the key out of the ignition, too, assuming that you’re fond of your fingers.

Eventually, we had to give up navigating the waterway, tie up, and finish the journey on foot. We could have gotten the boat all the way to the end, but it’d have been a stop-start day of pushing ourselves off the shallow banks and cleaning out the weed hatch. Walking the last few miles – with a stop either way at a wonderful little pub called The Open Hearth – let us get all the way to both ends of the navigable stretch of the canal, with a lot less hassle and grime.

Ruth and JTA at Five Locks
Ruth and JTA at the head of Five Locks, the lowest remaining navigable point of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal.

It’s a little sad coming to the end of a waterway, cut short – in this case – by a road. There’s no easy way – short of the removal of an important road, or the challenging and expensive installation of a drop lock, that this waterway will ever be connected at this point again. The surrounding landscape doesn’t even make it look likely that it’ll be connected again by a different route, either: this canal is broken here.

Ruth and JTA look into the Cwmbran Tunnel.
The Cwmbran Tunnel is narrow, 87 yards long, and both ends are badly in need of dredging. Knowing our luck, we’d have gotten grounded in there if we’d have brought the boat that far.

I found myself remarking on quite how well-laid-out the inside of the narrowboat was. Naturally, on a vehicle/home that’s so long and thin, a great number of clever decisions had clearly been made. The main living space could be converted between a living room, dining room, and bedroom by re-arranging planks and poles; the kitchen made use of carefully-engineered cupboards to hold the crockery in place in case of a… bump; and little space-saving features added up all along the boat, such as the central bedroom’s wardrobe door being adaptable to function as a privacy door between the two main bedrooms.

Ruth and JTA set up Arkham Horror in the narrowboat.
In dining room configuration, we were even able (with judicious use of nearby shelves and the seats alongside us) to play a game of Arkham Horror. And we won, which was perhaps even more-remarkable.

On the way back up the canal, we watched the new boaters setting out in their narrowboats for the first time. We felt like pros, by now, gliding around the corners with ease and passing other vessels with narry a hint of a bump. We were a well-oiled machine, handling every lock with ease. Well: some ease. Unfortunately, we’d managed to lose not one but both of our windlasses on the way down the canal and had to buy a replacement pair on the way back up, which somewhat dented our “what pros we are” feeling.

Our final pass through Brynich Lock
Our final pass through Brynich Lock was slick and seamless.

Coming to the end of our narrowboating journey, we took a quick trip to Fourteen Locks, a beautiful and series of locks with a sophisticated basin network, disconnected from the remains of the South Wales canal network. They’ve got a particular lock (lock 11), there, whose unusual shape hints at a function that’s no-longer understood, which I think it quite fabulously wonderful – that we could as a nation built a machine just 200 years ago, used it for a hundred years, and now have no idea how it worked.

Our trolley full of shelves, in Ikea.
Our “big” trip to Ikea a few weeks later was significantly bigger, even, than this one, though.

Our next stop was Ikea, where we’d only meant to buy a couple of shelves for our new home, but you know how it is when you go to Ikea.

We wrapped up our holiday with a visit to Sian and Andy (and their little one), and Andy showed off his talent of singing songs that send babies to sleep. I swear, if he makes an album of children’s songs and they’re as effective as he is in person, we’ll buy a copy.

Andy, Sian, and baby
MiniRegz and parents.

Altogether, a wonderfully laid-back holiday that clearly knocked my sense of urgency so far off that I didn’t blog about it for several months.

Edit, 22 June 2018: after somebody from the Canal & River Trust noticed that my link to their page on the Brynich Aqueduct was broken after they’d rearranged their site, I removed it. They suggested an alternative page, but it didn’t really have the same content (about the aqueduct itself) so I’ve just removed the link. Boo, Canal & River Trust! Cool URIs Don’t Change!

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TIL that ‘Hellburners’, 16th century fire-ships filled with decks of gunpowder sandwiched between bricks and tombstones, are considered to be an early WMD.

This link was originally posted to /r/todayilearned. See more things from Dan's Reddit account.

The original link was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellburners

Hellburners (Dutch: hellebranders) were specialised fireships used in the Siege of Antwerp (1584-1585) during the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch rebels and the Habsburgs. They were floating bombs, also called “Antwerp Fire”, and did immense damage to the Spanish besiegers. Hellburners have been described as an early form of weapons of mass destruction.

Wikipedia

A Punting Story

This story actually relates to an event that happened in mid-2010, but I only recently got around to finishing writing about it.

Once upon a time there was a boy named Dan.

Dan lives in a big house with his friends Ruth and JTA.

(their other friend, Paul, lives in the house, too… but he isn’t in this story)

One day, Dan and Ruth and JTA went on an adventure. They packed up a picnic with all their favourite foods.

Big soft sandwiches, teeny-tiny sausages, cheese-with-holes-in, and a big box of chocolates. Then they got onto a bus.

Soon, they saw a big, wide river. “Let’s get off here,” said Ruth. JTA pressed the button to tell the bus driver to stop.

At the river, there was a man with all kinds of boats: boats with pedals, boats with paddles, and boats with poles.

“Can we borrow one of your boats?” Dan asked the man.
“Okay,” he said, and gave Dan a long pole.

Ruth and JTA got into the boat and sat down. Dan stood up on the very back of the boat. It was very wobbly!

Dan used the pole to reach all the way down the bottom of the river, and pushed the boat along. It was hard work!

They found a shady tree in a park, stopped the boat, and ate their picnic.

They drank some fizzy wine and felt all bubbly and dizzy. Soon it was time to get back on the boat and go back along the river.

One time, Dan almost fell into the water! But luckily he didn’t, and he, Ruth and JTA got back safely.

And they all lived happily ever after.

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Injured

FireSpent last night on the beach with Andy, Alec, Paul, Claire, and others last night. Folks like Andy and Alec are in Aber for the graduate’s ball tomorrow, we we went out for a barbecue. I took along my new juggling gear and practised juggling flaming brands. I wasn’t very good at it. I need more practice. Today, I have burns all over my arms.

Later, Claire and I borrowed Paul’s dinghy and paddled around in the sea for awhile. That was fun, too. All in all, a good night.

Kit wasn’t feeling well and retired early.

Came in to work late today. This afternoon, in fact. I love it when I get a lie-in. Claire’s uncharacteristically less horny than usual. Down to about my level, for once. Hmm… Anyway: lots of work to do for the company’s presence at the Royal Welsh Show next week. Better go get on with it.

Feel strangely nostalgic. Perhaps a result of the retro-computer games I’ve been playing. Or the music Alex has put on. Or just too much caffeine. Ah well.

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Paul In Aber

Paul made it to Aber. Woo and indeed hoo. He, Bryn, Kit, Claire, and I went to the beach and drank beer and ate pizza to celebrate. Then Claire and I took turns in an inflatable dingy and I got soaked as a wave leapt over the side. You’ll probably see their reports of this on their journals, soon, too.

The wiki I was coding got finished. Sadly, only a few of you who read this will ever be allowed to see it, but it’s pretty sweet.

Plothole appeared in the story on Andy’s LiveJournal – he has me drinking tea, which, as everybody knows, isn’t going to happen on account of (a) caffiene being a really, really bad thing for me and (b) I don’t particularly like tea. Have reported this to him and await feedback.

This made me laugh: type Weapons of Mass Destruction into Google and you’ll get this page. I laughed lots.