Were Bricked-Up Windows Really a Tax Dodge?

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4 hours ago

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Walk along a street of old Georgian houses and you may spot one: a neat rectangle of brick or plain stone set into the wall, framed exactly like a window, with no glass in it at all.

Ask a passer-by about it and there's a good chance you'll hear a story about tax. Once upon a time, it goes, the government charged people for every window, so they bricked them up to save money, and that's where we get the phrase "daylight robbery".

Part of that is true. Quite a lot of it isn't.

A tax you could count from the street

The window tax was real. It was introduced in England and Wales in 1696, under King William III, and it lasted until 1851.

The government needed money. The country's silver coins had been badly damaged by clipping, the practice of shaving slivers of silver off the edges of coins, and the shortfall had to be made good. The law that brought in the tax said as much: it was meant to cover the deficiency of the clipped money.

The design was clever. At the time, many people bitterly opposed the idea of an income tax, which would mean officials prying into private finances. Windows, by contrast, were on public view. Bigger, grander houses tended to have more of them, so counting windows was a rough way of measuring wealth without anyone opening their account books. As the economist Adam Smith later noted, the assessor didn't even need to go inside. He could count from the street.

At first, every house paid a flat charge, and houses with more than ten windows paid an extra amount on top, with a higher band for more than twenty. Over the following century and a half, Parliament changed the rates and the thresholds several times.

People respond to where the line is

Any tax with a sharp threshold invites people to arrange their lives around it, and the window tax was no exception.

Some owners did block windows up, or board them over, to drop into a cheaper band. Some painted them black. New houses could be designed with fewer windows from the start. The tax was unpopular because it seemed to put a price on two of the basic necessities of life: light and air.

Counting the windows

Economists have since shown that people really were counting. Wallace Oates and Robert Schwab studied local tax records from Ludlow, a market town in Shropshire, covering nearly 500 houses between 1747 and 1757. At the time, a house with nine windows or fewer paid no window tax at all. A tenth window meant paying on every window in the house, and there were further jumps at 15 and 20.

If people had ignored the tax, you'd expect window counts to be spread fairly smoothly. They weren't. About 18 per cent of the houses had exactly nine windows, compared with fewer than 5 per cent at ten. The same pattern showed up at the next steps: plenty of houses with 14 or 19 windows, very few with 15 or 20.

When Parliament later extended the tax to houses with eight or nine windows, the bunching moved too. In a sample from the early 1760s, more than a quarter of the houses had exactly seven windows, and only about 3 per cent had eight. Economists call a step like this, where one small change suddenly costs a lot more, a notch, and the window tax is one of the clearest historical examples of people rebuilding their lives around one.

Tempers could run high. When the rates were tripled in 1797, according to a speech in the House of Commons decades later, people blocked up thousands of windows and chalked a mock prayer on the bricked-in spaces: "Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Pitt!"

Not every blank window is a tax dodge

Here's the twist. Many of the blank windows you see today probably have nothing to do with the tax.

Georgian architects cared a great deal about symmetry. A grand front with evenly spaced windows looked right. A gap where a staircase, wall or chimney flue happened to sit behind the front did not. So architects often built in blind windows, window-shaped recesses that were never glazed, to keep the pattern unbroken. Blind windows had been used as decoration in Europe for centuries before the window tax existed.

Archivists at the National Records of Scotland, which holds the old Scottish window tax rolls, describe the idea that the tax drove people to brick up their windows as more myth than fact. Blocking a window saved only a few shillings a year, they point out, which was hardly enough to persuade a well-off household to give up its daylight.

The two fit together. The tax clearly shaped how many windows houses had, especially right at the thresholds, but that doesn't mean any particular blank window is a tax dodge.

And anything built after the tax ended in 1851 can't be blamed on it at all.

Who really paid

The tax was meant to fall on the wealthy. In practice, some of its heaviest effects landed on the poor.

In fast-growing towns and cities, many working families lived in tenements: large houses divided into many separate rooms or flats. For tax purposes, a whole building could count as a single house. Add up all its windows and the total could push it into a high band, even though each family inside had only a few.

Landlords had an obvious way to cut the bill: block windows up. For the families inside, that meant darker, stuffier, more crowded rooms. In the nineteenth century, doctors and public health reformers argued that the tax was harming the health of the urban poor, linking poorly lit and badly ventilated homes to outbreaks of diseases such as typhus and cholera, and they campaigned for its repeal.

They won. In 1851 the window tax was abolished and replaced with a tax on inhabited houses.

So a tax designed to charge the rich for their fine houses ended up, in some places, charging the poor in light and fresh air.

The phrase that doesn't fit

Then there's "daylight robbery". It's a lovely story: a government literally charging people for daylight, and everyone grumbling about being robbed of it.

The trouble is the timing. The phrase does appear in print in 1804, but there it describes an actual robbery carried out in daylight. Its modern meaning, being blatantly overcharged, isn't recorded until 1863, twelve years after the window tax had gone. Scotland's archivists say there's no scholarly evidence connecting the two.

So if the window tax had given us "daylight robbery", it would have had to do it after it had been abolished. That's quite a trick, even for a tax.

Scotland, Ireland and beyond

It's worth being precise about places. The story above is mainly England's. Scotland had a window tax from 1748, with its own rules, and Ireland had one from 1799. Both were abolished in 1851, along with England's. France had a window tax of its own too, which lasted until 1926.

Look twice

Next time you pass a blank window on an old façade, it might be exactly what it seems: a window blocked up long ago by someone counting shillings. Or it might be a careful piece of design, built blank from the start to keep the front looking balanced, with a staircase or a chimney hidden behind it.

Either way, it's worth looking twice before blaming the taxman.