Bakehouse

A bakehouse is a building built for baking bread, distinguished from a bakery by having no retail function attached to its production. Over its history the type took three main forms: a small structure in a home own yard for private use, a communal bakehouse serving a whole village or town, and a commercial bakehouse run as a business, with some of the simplest examples amounting to little more than a single large oven housed in its own small building, sometimes called an oven house. Purpose built bakehouses go back to antiquity, and archaeological evidence from Roman military installations shows the type serving food production and community needs for centuries before industrial baking.