Newport: Fields Park Road

Fields Park Road, Newport, is just to the North of Newport City Centre and is part of an area of properties built during Newport's period of rapid growth and affluence derived from the docks and coal from around 1860 to 1914.

Most of the pre-1914 houses in the Fields Park Road area are large - often three storey and up to six bedrooms. They are all built in red brick, with the bricks being made in St. Julian's on the other side of Newport (more or less where Junction 25 of the M4 is now). Many of the houses in this period were built in the Queen Anne Revival style of red brick, slate roof, double height bay windows, and stone window casings and decorative features.

Most of these houses were built speculatively by small, local builders and so each of them is different to the others and was completed at a different time. The detached houses are generally double-fronted with a central front door. The semi-detached houses are again double-fronted, with the "front" door on the middle of the side of the houses (ie the houses are "double-sided" with the main entrance located between the front and the rear set of rooms.

Whether detached or semi-detached the basic room layout is a rectangle of four rooms and a central hall/staircase, comprising three reception rooms and a kitchen. The larger houses have four reception rooms with the kitchen comprising a further room at the back of the house. Many houses are three storey, and some have an additional cellar.

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