Posted by Jock on August 13, 2007 at 15:43:14 from 87.105.81.146 user Jock.
In Reply to: Re: Beckfoot-other rooms posted by Ed Kiser on August 11, 2007 at 15:48:28:
There used to be the custom for the kitchen to be built as a separate building away from the house... To avoid the need to walk through the outdoors from kitchen to main house, perhaps that space in between was enclosed with a roof, thus making what was to be called the passageway, with a door at both ends...
I believe that separating the kitchen from the main house began to be practiced in English country houses from the 14th C. onwards. By the 17th C. the passageway could be a link bewteen two separate buildings (1) or be an indoor "passageway" linking a kitchen and dining room that were a long distance apart (2).
Beckfoot, although a modest affair by comparison to the grand country houses of old, appears to have once been the house of a prosperous owner and gone through a process of rebuilding and extension, possibly in Victorian times. It's quite possible that the final result left kitchen and dining room some distance apart.
Some 17th C. examples:
(1) Ornamental passageway between kitchen block and main house at Fawley Court, Henly-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. The brick built passageway contains three linking passages at kitchen (basement) level, at ground floor level, and a hidden passage in the ceiling above.
(2) Kitchen block and main building next to each other at Bloxworth House, Bloxworth, Dorset. The main house still retains its wooden screens passage inside the main house which protected the food from draughts as it was carried from the kitchen to the dining room.