Roxanne Ravenhill

‘Every man […] has a prime-cost book kept in the office in which the materials and labour are abstracted in columns. By casting the columns horizontally, the prime-cost of each job is estimated, while a vertical casting up gives the actual quantity of material used in the year […]’  

Building News & Engineering Journal (1877)

In 1903, Trollope & Sons and Colls & Sons merged to become one of the most notable “city builders” of twentieth century Britain. This study addresses their nineteenth century chrysalis as Victorian builder-decorators. Over the course of the century, each firm erected and altered London’s skyline, including work on the Stock Exchange and the financial City, Robert Adam’s 20 Portman Square and 11 St James’s Square, the National Art Library, the Natural History Museum and the Houses of Parliament. 

Employing prime cost books, surviving plans, contracts and law court records, both firms are shown to have regularly subcontracted out critical aspects of their work to specialist firms. This enabled them to take advantage of new technologies, to offer interior decoration services and to meet the material requirements of each of their clients. As a result, the dissertation contends that construction and interior design shared a closer relationship than has previously been acknowledged. 

Presented as the pre-eminent building figure in Victorian London, this dissertation questions existing definitions of the Victorian ‘master builder’ as a large-scale, fully integrated building contractor. Ultimately, the capacity of Colls and Trollope to carry out such diversified undertakings resulted from their umbrella structure, which combined the dominant building and decorating trades, as well as furniture and woodwork production, figuratively, under one roof. However, the comprehensive structures of Colls and Trollope did not emerge out of the absolute integration of the labour process. Instead, both firms relied on an amalgamation of permanent labour, wage labour and subcontracting for the delivery of pre-fabricated components and trade-based work. In managing complex, multi-layered supply chains, this dissertation stresses the economic, geographical, social and material weight of builders' networks and, in doing so, underscores the role of multiple actors in the production of the nineteenth century built environment.