The new style can be traced back to mid-seventeenth century London, to Inigo Jones (1573-1652) and his design for Covent Garden, a Palladian inspired formal square of the 1630s.Then following the Great Fire of 1666, large-scale speculative building of classically influenced brick town houses commenced in London and by the end of the seventeenth century similar developments were under way elsewhere.Noxious trades were usually excluded from these new developments by the terms of the original building leases.Developed by speculative builders for wealthy clients the Georgian suburb was intended to be purely residential.Wherever you happen to be London, Bath or Bristol, Edinburgh or Dublin there is no mistaking Georgian housing (photo shows a late Georgian terrace c1790).Uniformity, symmetry and a careful attention to proportion both in the overall arrangement and in the detail characterised eighteenth century domestic architecture. It was inspired by the architecture of ancient Greece and Rome that had been rediscovered during the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and re-codified by Andrea Palladio (1509-80) in Italy in the 1570s; and then re-interpreted again for the Georgian builder by eighteenth century British architects and writers such as William Chambers and Isaac Ware.

In Haverhill as the seventeenth century gave place to the eighteenth, weaving began to expand in the town, no doubt as a result of the influence of Flemish Huguenot refugees who had settled in the eastern counties late in the seventeenth century, following the French King Louis XIV's revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

Also, the combination of snippets of varying quality, and from different cultures, may sometimes build up to an overall impression more convincing than the individual parts.

Sources are of very variable quality - sometimes tertiary or even more distant from the first hand accounts, but we have tended to include interesting assertions, using the best references to hand, and allow the reader to discriminate.

Palladian taste promoted order and uniformity..Ware stated, There ought to be...a uniformity of all the parts first to the whole building and next to each other.

Guided by the published rules and conventions of Palladian architecture, Georgian house builders swept away centuries of vernacular house building rooted in local traditions and materials: timber framed construction, gabled roofs and casement windows and other features of the vernacular disappeared in the first few decades of the eighteenth century.