Rooms with windows confusion

[greenvalley]

On quite a number of the Scottish census records the enumerator notes the number of rooms with one or more windows.

Did people live in rooms without windows? Because looking over the records I have seen, they all seem to have at least one room with a window.

Which leads to my next question; do you think that the rooms with windows also totalled the number of rooms they lived in? Or could someone have 2 rooms with windows and anothher 2 without??

Greenvalley

[Ruskie]

Just a guess, but does it fit in time wise to relate to this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-south-scotland-23356213

[Forfarian]

does it fit in time wise to relate to this?

I don't think so, because I don't think the question was asked in the earlier censuses.

I have always thought that 'with window' was part of the definition of a room in this context, that is, if it didn't have a window it didn't count as a room, but I may be under a false impreesion

[Gadget]

Something about it here:

https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/socialpolitical/research/economicsocialhistory/historymedicine/scottishwayofbirthanddeath/thecensus/


Add - Scroll down to Number of Windowed Rooms

[greenvalley]

It wasn't related to the window tax.

This is what I found on the National Archives about the question:

the number of rooms with one or more windows (reflecting concerns about housing and sanitary conditions and not to be confused with the window tax which had been abolished in 1851).

So, the question was asked to establish how people lived. But I still don't get it: does ot relate to all their rooms or just ones with windows

[greenvalley]

Thanks Gadget

It seems that I am not the only one who is confused. They didn't really know themselves.

My question relates to apartments in Mathieson Street and Duke Street in Glasgow. But it will be difficult to figure it out I reckon.

The fact that I can;t imagine a room with no window doesn't help either. Can't remember ever having been in one without a window.

[Treetotal]

This is interesting to me, as during the Heritage Open Days I visited Blaydes House and this came up in conversation, as two of the upstairs windows were boarded up, the explanation was that many years ago there was a Window Tax which was an indication of the size of the property. The owners were obviously trying to beat the system by boarding some of them up 

http://www.gsey.org.uk/page/1034/the-blaydes-family-and-their-house-in-the-high-street-kingston-upon-hull


Carol

[Gadget]

I particularly like this piece from the U of Glasgow link:

Despite the confusion, the GROS did not issue any general notice of clarification to all the registrars.  No wonder, then, that when the Sheriff Clerk at Lochmaddy cast his eye over the completed census documents for that locality, he found:

'the great majority of Enumerators have put down these apartments . . . as rooms having windows, while others have not thought these openings deserving the name of windows and have not, in a whole division, entered one house as having a window.'

Having spent a while in Lochmaddy in the 1990s, I can vouch for there being a few windows by then!

Gadget

[Forfarian]

This is interesting to me, as during the Heritage Open Days I visited Blaydes House and this came up in conversation, as two of the upstairs windows were boarded up, the explanation was that many years ago there was a Window Tax which was an indication of the size of the property. The owners were obviously trying to beat the system by boarding some of them up

That is probably quite true, but it has nothing to do with the census. The window tax was abolished in 1851, but information about the number of rooms with windows was first collected in the census in 1861.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_tax