Handrail

Also called: handrailing, handrail wreath, balustrade, newel

A handrail is the long, shaped rail that runs along the top of a staircase's upright posts, the part a hand rests on and grips going up or down.

The balustrade it sits on

The uprights beneath a handrail are called balusters; together with the rail they form the balustrade. At the ends of a flight the balusters and rail meet a post called a newel, and where a run of balustrade breaks against a wall or a landing instead of a full post, a shorter half-newel carries that joint in the newel's place. In better-quality work the parts that meet a newel are not simply butted against it: they are housed, meaning a slot roughly 6 mm deep is cut into the newel's face to receive them, so that if the timber shrinks later no open gap shows at the joint.

How the balusters are fixed

How a baluster meets the rail above marks the grade of the work. In common, ordinary-grade work the balusters are nailed straight onto the underside of the handrail, with nothing between them: no separate core block is fitted for them to nail into. A frequent alternative runs a flat bar of wrought iron, iron that has been worked rather than cast, along the underside for the balusters to fix to. Rivington gives two different figures for it: roughly a quarter of an inch thick in the 1887 edition, about three-eighths of an inch in the 1875 edition, in both cases as wide as the top of the baluster. In the best work a groove is worked into the underside of the rail itself, a refinement Riley (1905) records: 'In the best work the underside of the handrail is grooved, and an iron bar.'

Rails that rake over a flight

Where a handrail runs up a slope over a flight of steps, often called a raking handrail, the balusters beneath it cannot stand square-topped: their tops are cut at an angle to match the sloped underside of the rail, so each one meets it flush.

Open-newel stairs

Not every stair carries its balustrade on solid posts throughout its length. A stair is classed as open-newel when its string, the sloping board that carries the ends of the steps, is cut or notched to follow the profile of the steps rather than running as one solid closed board. This class of stair usually does without a newel post altogether, or, if one is used, it is worked in only as an ornamental finish to the balustrade rather than as a load-bearing part of the stair.

Setting out a rail's section

A handrail that turns or rises is difficult to set out, because its moulded profile has to stay consistent while it twists through a curve. The traditional method fixes what is called the plane of section, the surface across which the rail's profile is always cut square, using a triangular prism: a triangle is the only straight-sided shape whose side lengths, once given, cannot be arranged into more than one shape, so it is the one figure that pins that surface down without ambiguity. This approach is known as the normal sections method, and while several writers on stairbuilding cover it, Ellis (1932) singles out Mowat's account as treating it more fully than most.