The Edwardians and their Houses

Edwardian domestic architecture was beautiful and varied in style, and was very often designed and built to an unprecedented level of sophistication. It was also astonishingly innovative, and provided new building types for weekends, sport and gardening, as well as fascinating insights into attitudes to historic architecture, health and science. 

This book is the first radical overview of the period since the 1970s, and focuses on how the leading circle of the Liberal Party, who built incessantly and at every scale, influenced the pattern of building across England. It also looks at the building literature of the period, from Country Life to the mass-production picture books for builders and villa builders, and traces the links between these houses and suburbs on the one hand, and the literature and other creative forms of the period on the other. It is part of a new movement to explore the ways in which architectural history is recorded and adds up to an original interpretation of British culture of the period.

“"Rich, dense [...] will cause us to look at Edwardian architecture in an entirely new way." --Jane Ridley, C20 Society”

'A fascinating study of Edwardian domestic architecture brings out its debt to both progressive politics and the romanticism of the age' – Charles Holland, Architecture Today
'rich, dense [...] will cause us to look at Edwardian architecture in an entirely new way.' – Jane Ridley, Literary Review
'Challenges any complacency one might have about the simplicity or sterility of the architectural scene just ahead of ‘our period’'. – Catherine Croft, C20 Society
'Timothy Brittain-Catlin, helped hugely by photographer Robin Forster and his sympathetic publishers, has authored an intelligent, scholarly and beautifully illustrated tome...His book is a wonderful thing, elegantly written and superbly illustrated: it celebrates agreeable human habitats designed by truly creative professionals that show up the dire, ugly, shameful mess being made nowadays.' – James Stevens Curl, Times Higher Education

'Engagingly written and beautifully produced' – Decorative Arts Society

Timothy Brittain-Catlin runs the Architecture Apprenticeship course at the University of Cambridge. His publications include Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture (The MIT Press, 2014), The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century (Spire Books, 2008) and Architecture: Learn how to Read a Building (Harper Collins, 2008).

Edwardian domestic architecture was beautiful and varied in style, and was very often designed and built to an unprecedented level of sophistication. It was also astonishingly innovative, and provided new building types for weekends, sport and gardening, as well as fascinating insights into attitudes to historic architecture, health and science. This book is the first radical overview of the period since the 1970s, and focuses on how the leading circle of the Liberal Party, who built incessantly and at every scale, influenced the pattern of building across England. It also looks at the building literature of the period, from Country Life to the mass-production picture books for builders and villa builders, and traces the links between these houses and suburbs on the one hand, and the literature and other creative forms of the period of the other. It is part of a new movement to explore the ways in which architectural history is recorded and adds up to an original interpretation of British culture of the period.

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