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| Walled Up Windows |
Title and photo stolen from Brian Micklethwait's New Blog.
From Daylight Robbery:
The Window Tax was a property tax based on the number of windows in a house, introduced in England and Wales in 1696 under King William III. It was eventually repealed in 1851. What happened, inevitably, was that homeowners bricked up their windows to avoid paying the tax - and disproportionately so in the case of rented accommodation, where the landlords themselves wouldn't be affected but their wretched tenants would be deprived of light and fresh air.Thought I would take a look using Google Maps. It wasn't hard to find. Albert Street is only three blocks long. You can see the street sign in the above photo.
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| Northest corner of Delancey & Albert Streets, London England Okay, not all the windows are bricked up. |
I've been hearing all kinds of minor horror stories about England ever since the Bat-flu thing came on the scene, but this takes the cake. I guess that even though England has always been held up as a model of Western Civilization, it's also has always been kind of fucked up. Might have something to do with why America even exists.
1 comment:
From the 1800s to early 1900s in many states you were taxed for the number of rooms in your house. So most houses had no closets as they were counted. My 1908 house was built with no closets.
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