The Edwardians and their Houses
Timothy Brittain-Catlin’s latest project takes a fresh – even radical – new look at Edwardian domestic architecture, encompassing politics, conservation and the evolving architectural media of the era. Its publication was supported by the Society – more information about our publication grants can be found here.
Timothy Brittain-Catlin
King’s Close, Biddenham, Bedfordshire, by M. H. Baillie Scott, around 1909 © Robin Forster
To a somewhat muted fanfare, given current circumstances, my book The Edwardians and their Houses: The New Life of Old England was published by Lund Humphries at the beginning at the beginning of April. The book was generously supported by an award of a publication grant from the SAHGB. I’d like to thank the Society and its members for easing the book’s passage along the often awkward path of seeking funding to ensure that our work is presented in the most professional and appealing way possible.
The idea behind the book was to look at the domestic architecture of the period in a completely new light. A great deal of our finest architectural scholarship and writing has established the message throughout the world that the houses of the Edwardian era, and especially the ones designed within the orbit of the arts and crafts movement, were amongst the highest achievements ever attained by British architects of any period. I was quite sure that there was nothing I could add to this. But I also knew that these houses made up only a small proportion of housebuilding during a period in which domestic architecture in Britain reached an astonishing level of professionalism and beauty. And I was certain too that modernist interpretations of these houses had coloured the way in which we saw them.
These interpretations are easy to identify, and like much else about international modernism, they were derived from gothic-revival dogma. The most significant of these is the idea that architecture develops, and it is the line of development that is the thing worth studying. If an idea doesn’t go anywhere, it is seen as some kind of aberration, or otherwise below the radar: this was essentially the reason why the version of architectural history popularised by Nikolaus Pevsner had no place in it for Edwin Lutyens, in spite of him having been very recently the most famous British architect who ever lived. And the other, related, interpretation was the teleological, that you know in advance where history is going: the ‘Indian Summer’ idea that Edwardian-type architecture was getting itself ready to be finished off by the Great War, for example, or – most egregiously – that the whitewashed interiors of the arts and crafts movement were harbingers of the Ripolin-white rooms of Gropius and Le Corbusier, when at the time they were if anything intended to recreate the protestant interiors of seventeenth-century rural Holland.
Finally, I wanted to address frankly the fact that Edwardian domestic architecture was overwhelmingly Tudor architecture, that great bugbear of goths and modernists alike. And it was the Tudorness of it that offered the greatest scope for identifying its richness and its achievement. Its organic nature allows endless scope for manipulation, or remodelling as it might more politely be called, and its great stylistic range, from late mediaeval to artisan mannerist, allows a blurring of chronologies. A breakthrough came when I saw a description in 1910 of recent work by Charles Mallows on a house in Broadway by H. Avray Tipping, Country Life’s architecture writer. What Mallows had done was to complete a staircase from remaining fragments of a banister: Tipping described this as if the architect had regenerated part of the house from something that contained its essence – its DNA, as we might say now.
Indeed, it is possible to see how many of these houses were an attempt by the architects to go back into their past life as buildings, capture their youthful spirit and remake them as better adults. Lawrence Weaver, who succeeded Tipping, described a Lutyens building like this. Great Maytham Hall, near Rolvenden in Kent, looks like a new structure but in fact, like so many of Lutyens’ best-known houses, it is a remodelling of the remains of an old one. Weaver wrote in Country Life that Lutyens had ‘picked up the thread’ where the original builder had ‘dropped it’ in 1721. He had gone back into the distant past of the house and remade its subsequent history in a better version, as sometimes people do with their own life stories. Tuesley Court, a Tudor house near Godalming by E. Guy Dawber, was completely new, and he achieved something similar: the front elevation looks French-Scottish, as if English history had progressed differently through the seventeenth century.
Tipping and Weaver were not bystanders: they were at the centre of the architectural revival. Country Life was the only place where there was a coherent, continuous discussion of the best ideas in recent domestic architecture, one of which being that it was the quality, not the age, that mattered in a building, an unexpected attitude for Tipping who was otherwise a Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings enthusiast. It published sequences of photographs of building details with descriptive essays and analytical articles on the minutiae of small house design. You see this nowhere else. The Architectural Review tried to focus on buildings that it liked, and Mervyn Macartney published supplements of recent domestic architecture, but it could never agree on a party line, let alone the nuanced one that Tipping, a scholar, was crafting. With Reginald Blomfield booming, as one imagines it, in the background, the AR promoted classicism from the middle of the Edwardian decade as a kind of aesthetic counterblast to the prevailing Tudor fashion, but there wasn’t yet that much to show for it in domestic architecture.
And the other magazines were dependent on what was sent in – which presumably accounts for the enormous exposure given to Percy Morley Horder, who was evidently very good at public relations. The influence of Country Life writers was a tremendous tribute to the power of the astute, knowledgeable critic at a time when the architects themselves had surprisingly little to say that was interesting or revelatory about their own work, and in some cases, was actually quite silly.
But Tudor architecture had other aspects to it that caught the bigger, more political, mood of the period. My book focuses on housebuilders among the senior politicians in the Liberal Party, who ranged from the almost radical Earl Carrington on the one hand to the conservative, and eventually Liberal Unionist, Lord Avebury on the other. What these people had in common over the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was a commitment to land reform – the reclaiming, as they saw it, by the British people of the security of their homes from the big estates and landowners. Tudor architecture spoke clearly to them. Firstly, it belonged to what was seen as the Elizabethan golden age of a protestant culture. But secondly, timber-framed houses also look as if their owners might have built them with their own hands – which couldn’t be said of the much-hated eighteenth-century Palladianism – and thus they symbolise a direct connection between man and land.
It’s therefore fitting that the Liberal Margot Asquith, the prime minister’s wife, should have created as a private retreat what might be called the country’s first barn conversion in the modern sense, a restored Tudor building picturesquely sited on the banks of the Thames in Sutton Courtenay. Since Tudor buildings would have looked curious in a city, late Stuart, post-Glorious Revolution architecture was deployed there instead, at its best by Horace Field: I knew about Kingsway in London, of course, but I had not realised until undertaking research for this book that the area around Smith Square in Westminster was an Edwardian creation in which Georgian slums were rapidly transformed into an idealised, imagined townscape from the era of Queen Anne under the aegis of the Progressive – in practice, Liberal – London County Council.
My interest in Edwardian architecture began when as a schoolboy I bought a copy of Alastair Service’s Edwardian Architecture and its Origins. I looked first at the pictures, and then at the captions, and only later still did I read it from start to finish. Both that book and Alastair’s shorter Thames & Hudson overview, Edwardian Architecture, will continue to be indispensable guides to the period, not only because of their comprehensiveness but also because the author’s judgment is perceptive and rewarding. With grateful thanks to many, especially the superb photographer Robin Forster but also to the Society for its generous support, I hope that The Edwardians and their Houses will make a useful contribution to the subject for a new generation of enthusiasts.
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Kingsgate Castle, Kent, a Georgian folly remodelled in 1901–12 by W.H. Romaine Walker © Robin Forster
Yewlands, Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, by Geoffry Lucas, 1910 © Robin Forster