Showing posts with label Tiled steps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tiled steps. Show all posts

Monday, 13 June 2011

One step at a time

As I was going up the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
Oh, how I wish he’d go away!


That can’t possibly be right, can it? If you go up one stair, you have gone up a step. However, then we would have to rhyme stairs with theres ...

Here I have a set of steps. All these photos are steps; not a staircase in sight. I have banish-ed them to the inside of the house. Luckily this post is about tiles, and the steps are purely a display method. But, I can be even more pernickety. The tiles are only on part of the step: the riser. The riser gets little wear and tear; not like the poor tread, which can bow under the weight of steps over the more than a century of use.


Gorgeous aren’t they: the tiles on these risers? I think they are all originals, which would date them from about the 1880 to the end of the 19th century. Sometimes it is hard to determine if they are original or renovated. Many of the tiles on the treads have been renewed as have the tiles on the small verandas on these Paddington terraces. However, the overwhelming majority of the tiles have been removed permanently and the steps simply concrete rendered to maintain their shape. Function over form – very boring.