There was a time in Great Britain when having windows in homes and buildings were prohibitively expensive.
The rich usually had larger houses with more windows, and so were liable to pay more taxes.
Poor people, on the other hand, lived in smaller houses and so paid less.
A building with bricked up windows in Bath.
Photo credit:Jo Folkes/Flickr
But the tax was not nearly as progressive as it first seemed.
But the most fundamental error was the assumption that people wouldntrespondin creative ways to avoid tax.
Many people with a lot of windows started bricking up windows instead of just paying the tax.
It was novelist Charles Dickens who gave voice to these dissatisfaction.
Neither air nor light have been free since the imposition of the window-tax.
One year later, in 1851, the window tax was repealed156 years after first being introduced.
A building with bricked up windows in Greenwich.
Many buildings built with oversized bricks still stand in Measham, Leicestershire.
But the window tax was by far the longest lasting and the most hated.
It was only after 1949 that the phrase was firmly associated with unfairness.
A family looking forward to seeing more of the Sun when the Window Tax would be repealed.
Cartoon by Richard Doyle, 1754.
A house in Gillingham, Dorset.
Photo credit:Carole Dorran/Wikipedia
