This investigation, entitled The Farm in the Pre-Industrial Town: A Study of Regional Variations in Town Buildings, is based on information from approximately 1,400 fire-insurance policies taken out by farms in 72 Swedish towns in 1828. The aim is to present an overall view of the buildings in Swedish towns as regards their structure and the materials used at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

By making a horizontal section through the time-axis at the year 1828, regional variations in buildings come to the fore. The material in the investigation is subject to the same limitations as the inventories of buildings and other documentation made in the past few decades. This material must be arranged in groups with the aid of a code or a nomenclature if it is desired to describe the general characteristics of the buildings based on information from a large number of fire-insurance policies rather than concentrate, as earlier research did, on the qualitative aspect of local history with special reference to particular monuments and buildings. The former alternative was chosen in this work, in which the frequency and distribution of various kinds of building materials and structures in different towns and regions have been compared.

Only a few farms have the farmhouse itself set back some way from the street - the so-called ’older town-farm’ as described in earlier research.

Of the 1,438 farms in which it has been possible to determine how many storeys the farmhouse had, 477 were of one storey. The remainder had two, with the exception of a small number that were three-storey buildings. Even though tiles were the most common form of roofing in the country taken as a whole, turf was equally common in dwelling-houses in Bergslagen. In Norrland, roofs of birch-bark took over this role. Finally, the information contained in these fire-insurance policies indicates that, at the time when the descriptions were made, dwelling-houses with walls of unpainted timber were as common as those in which the timber walls had a façade of plank treated with iron-oxide wash.