The English “Regional” Chair
This post is part of a series from Neon Antiques called A history of the world in 100 everyday antiques. My goal is to tell the stories of 100 “everyday antiques” that you could have in your home for under £100. This story is about a chair in my kitchen.
The problem with London fashion
I’ve always loved old chairs. And you can pick up a well made, solid wood antique seat for the same money as you might spend in IKEA... so I find it hard sometimes not to take in new ones… But since lockdown/ home working I’ve spent a lot more time getting to know my old chairs. And it turns out that some of them are not great to sit on.
The back support is weird or the seat is too hard. They don’t stand up to leaning back against a wall and you can’t stand on them in the kitchen to reach a high shelf. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this is the case for all old chairs. I previously sang the praises of the very comfy 1810 Sheraton Chair I’m sitting on right now (I’ve used it as my work chair for the last 9 months). But I’ll admit that some of my chairs are perhaps best used us clothes horses and bedside tables.
Why is this? Why would you make a chair that you can’t sit on for more than 15 minutes without getting a numb bottom? Who would do that? Maybe when these chairs were made people had more hardy posteriors and corsets provided all the back support necessary? Or perhaps it was all part of a 19th century ploy to get the dinner guests to leave early? Nope.
The answer is fashion. London fashion: For most of the 1700s and 1800s furniture design for the wealthy in England was driven by what was trendy in London. And the problem is that not everything that’s fashionable is necessarily comfortable or practical. Try stilettos.
Sure, a lot of these “London Style” chairs look great (depending on your taste!). But through lockdown I’ve found a new favourite chair — with a design driven by practicality rather than by London trends.
The chair I’m talking about is comfortable and durable (with excellent back support) and has a tonne of boot-legged, off-beat design quirks that make it weird and delightful. It’s like one of those incredible 1980s bands that emerged from a small town that had developed an entire musical subculture of its own.
And, like an obscure 80s concept album in a charity shop, this chair also has the price tag of something that’s not yet found its deserved “cult classic” status. You can pick up one of these beauties for around £20.
Introducing: The Lancashire Chair
My chair was made in Lancashire in about 1825. It’s made of solid ash, with a hand woven rush seat. It has a distinctive “wavy” ladder back. The legs and crossbar have been lathe-turned to a uniquely identifiable design. The front legs have “pad” feet and the tops of the back uprights have “nipple” finials carved on top. I sit on it every morning in my kitchen to eat porridge with my daughter.
It’s what gets called a “Regional Chair” by antique geeks (more on this later). This means that it’s part of a rich tradition of English chair making that’s rooted in different local materials, manufacturing techniques and design motifs.
Pretty much every region of England has an identifiable chair design — often with stylistic nuances that allow you to find the specific village or town where it was made. Or even the individual maker. These were chairs made by local crafts-people for practical everyday use in working homes.
Design
So what makes this chair so obviously from Lancashire rather than any other part of the country? Well there are whole books written on this, so I won’t get into it too much, but here are the tell-tail signs:
Wavy ladder
The “wavy ladder back” is the big thing (it gives the chair it’s name). Chairs from other regions also have the “ladder” structure of multiple slats up the back of the chair, but this wave shape is unique to Lancashire. Now that you know to look out for it you might spot lots of different variations of the ladder back — each design represents a different regional accent. For example below is a ladder from another (very similar) chair that’s more likely to come from the Lancashire-Cheshire border due to the shape of the ladder and the “bar top”.
Back legs
On my chair the top half of the back legs are turned (so they’re round) but the bottoms still looks square. In fact they’re actually octagonal (the 4 corners have been chamfered off). This combination of the turned + straight and the 8 sided lower leg are generally signs that a chair was made somewhere in the NorthWest of England.
The front legs
The front legs are turned to look like “cabriole” legs and have a “pad” foot. The cabriole leg was fashionable in high-end furniture making in the early 1700s, over 100 years before this chair was made. I like to think (I have no proof for this!) that the design feature was adopted into regional chair making some time in the 1700s and was refined over time into what you see here.
The turning on the front cross-bar
This is the ultimate area of regional chair geekery. A real pro can look at the shape of the turning on the front bar at the base of the chair and potentially tell you not only the region it comes from but maybe even the individual maker. These sort of back to back “pear” shapes on my chair are typical of Lancashire.
Materials and construction
Like most “Regional” chairs from the North West of England, my chair is made from the wood of the ash tree and has a seat woven from fresh water rushes. It’s pretty easy to tell apart from the exotic mahogany stuff being made in the London fashion.
Ash forests were common across the region and the wood is incredibly tough and shock absorbent. It’s still the wood of choice for sports equipment like hockey sticks and hard working tools like hammers and axes. Historically it was a favourite material for constructing horse drawn carriages and it’s still used to build the chassis for the classic Morgan sports cars.
Chair makers working with Ash would have originally based themselves in the woods and carried out almost all of their work using hand tools. Ever wondered where the word “bodger” came from (as in “I’ll just bodge that together”)? A Bodger is an itinerant wood turner who moved between woodland areas making chairs.
However as regional chair manufacture grew things became less like a cottage industry and more like an industrial process. Design became standardised within a region and workers took on increasingly specialised roles — much more like a production line.
By the time my chair was made in around 1825 it was probably on quite a substantial production line, likely over multiple manufacturing locations, with specialists selling their work down the supply chain. Some jobs would have been relatively highly skilled, like the turners using lathes to carve the round sections of the legs and stretchers. Others would have been lower skilled like the early-stage wood cutters and shapers. Workshops would have had water-powered and maybe even steam-powered tools on a semi-industrial scale.
You can see how highly systemised the process was with my chair by the stamp you can still see on the base of one of the legs marking it as a “number 6” leg design:
One of the lower skilled jobs involved in making my chair would have been that of the rush weavers responsible for making the comfy, durable seat. Fresh water rushes have been an important part of English rural life for hundreds of years. They were ‘carpets’ in medieval homes, brushed out and replaced every year with fresh ones. Groups of rush weavers used to travel around between towns putting seats on newly made chairs and replacing old ones. It was tough manual work and from this video not nearly as low skilled as people say it is!
Lancashire in the 1820s
Lancashire in the early 1800s was in the middle of the first explosion of the Industrial Revolution. And the principle industry of Lancashire was textile manufacturing. Huge new factories were built to house giant new machines powered by water and steam.
This transformed Lancashire into an increasingly urbanised industrial landscape. Workers moved from cottages and farm labour into factories and hastily constructed urban housing. This was a huge societal shake up in the region and it also drew in workers from elsewhere in the country. The population of Lancashire doubled between 1801 and 1831 from 700,000 to 1.4m.
My chair was made in the midst of this boom. While it might look like a rural artefact it’s more likely to have had its first life in an industrial town in one of the thousands of brick 2 storey houses built for factory workers.
It would have got hard daily use in a family kitchen. Jackets would have been slung over the nipple finials, boots would have rested on the cross bar and bottoms would have been cushioned on rush seating after a long day of work.
Geek out more on Regional Chairs
If you’ve enjoyed this story and you’re inspired to find out more about the history of regional chair design then you should definitely consider finding a copy of “The English Regional Chair” by Bernard D Cotton, published by the Antique Collectors Club. It’s mega geeky and a very good guide if you’re looking to explore this world in more detail.
If you’ve got a Regional Chair and you’d like to know a bit more about it I’d be happy to look it up in my copy for you — feel free to message me below.
More stories like this
Thanks so much for reading this story about an old chair! It’s a bit of an experiment so I’d really appreciate your comments and feedback.
This post is part of a series from Neon Antiques called A history of the world in 100 everyday antiques. My goal is to tell the stories of 100 “everyday antiques” that you could have in your home for under £100.
