Looking for information about building in the Regency era, I came across this marvellous site, which contains the written material from five years of Heritage Open Weekends by The Regency Town House. Everything you ever wanted to know about building at that time in the Brighton-Howe area. For example:

In the Regency, there was no tubular metal scaffolding of the type we now commonly see used on building sites. Instead, the bricklayers’ scaffold was constructed of various seasoned and unseasoned wooden poles of mixed lengths, each of which was lashed together with rope made of hemp or jute fibre. The differently sized poles used in the construction of scaffold were referred to as ‘standards’, ‘ledgers’ and ‘putlogs’, names that have passed down into common usage to describe the different lengths of metal tube used in the construction of scaffold today.

Standards were upright poles of 30 to 50 feet in length, to which the shorter ledgers were lashed, horizontally, to span the length of the building. These types of pole were cut from timber such as Baltic pine and yellow fir, the bark of which was frequently removed before use.