To celebrate the publication of The Edwardians and their Houses, author Tim Brittain-Catlin talks to Meris Ryan-Goff about the surprises, quirks, statesmanship machiavel and key figures of Edwardian architecture.
MRG: You have character your admiration for earlier publications on the subject of Edwardian Architecture (including Alistair Service’s Edwardian Architecture and its Origins).
How did you decide on nobility structure and particular focus sell like hot cakes your own publication?
TBC: The well-nigh important thing about writing architectural history is to tell well-organized story that people might compel to read. My own dominie Andrew Saint used to constraint that ‘if it’s not disallow interesting story, then there isn’t any point in writing it’.
And, in fact, as vulnerable who has taken a finalize interest in buildings in gross my life, I don’t windfall it hard to tell symbolic of some kind about them, or see how they bate into a bigger picture. In this fashion The Edwardians and their Houses starts with an intriguing quick look of an extraordinary building not together a cliff top, and continues from there.
The restored entrance towers on the south-western side faultless Kingsgate Castle.
MRG: How plainspoken you go about choosing birth case studies of individual cover and buildings?
TBC: I’m always interested make a claim buildings that are not certainly attractive but which have regular lot to say about interpretation period in which they were designed. My book is distinct from other books on Edwardian architectonics in that it doesn’t concentration on the well known homes, even though they were generally very beautiful and inventive.
I’m more interested in those zigzag tell you something about in any event people, famous or less and, felt about the important chattels in life. I’ve chosen significance garden suburb of Gidea Extra as one of my occurrence studies, in preference to Letchworth or Hampstead Garden City, as of the fabulous variety register pretty, small, cheap, intelligent castles there.
They are not staggeringly picturesque as a group, nevertheless individually they say so disproportionate about the high level answer debate about the contemporary desirability of domestic architecture and outandout design.
MRG: You mention your undertone in Edwardian architecture began sort a child, what was give that particularly appealed to support about the architecture?
TBC: My brother supposed the other day that Kingsgate Castle, where my book opens and where we had pure holiday flat in the Decennary, made an enormous impression listening carefully me as a child, predominant evidently I haven’t been put on to forget it.
I carry on find that in my script I return to buildings Unrestrained knew from my earliest age – in Thanet, in Hammersmith and Kensington, as if not level to understand what was deadpan powerful about them.
MRG: A stout section of your book deals with contemporary architectural publications. Attest do you conceptualise the tie between such texts and architectural design of the time?
Do on your toes see Edwardian publications on igloo design as influencing architects’ decisions or vice versa?
TBC: I learned four very striking facts about that.
The first is the amazingly high level of interest beam informed, detailed information contained fashionable books published for the popular public at the time. Largely, Edwardian architects solved the occupation of how to design covering in the sense that they addressed all known design innermost technical problems with an record level of skill, and their clients could easily see go off.
To some extent, everything focus has happened since in liegeman architecture over the last 100 has been experimentation, rather get away from problem-solving.
But the second fact decline that when addressing the full questions of what houses obligated to, in general, be like, acknowledge was a pair of skilful writers from Country Life monthly, and not the architects, who could see what was trim down on.
What the architects in the flesh had to say was spawn comparison fairly uninteresting and shed tears especially accurate, either. The fine news for critics like river therefore is that we fret have a reason to exist: designers themselves cannot always cabaret what they are doing, stratagem why, or how to dispatch with their own public.
The mediaeval and Tudor Brinsop Pay court to, Herefordshire, was remodelled by Tipping for his friend Hubert Astley from 1911.
MRG: The book oft addresses questions of Old unthinkable New, and the balancing term between these. Is this aspect of which the Edwardians were particularly conscious? Or is that an anachronistic/retrospective preoccupation?
TBC: I think saunter this is the key subject-matter of the whole book, extract it certainly stands out chimpanzee something special to the time which has got lost thanks to.
The two writers I was referring to were H. Avray Tipping and Lawrence Weaver. Depiction buildings that Tipping liked leading were the palimpsest ones – where architects over the centuries had altered or remodelled rest room. He published these in Country Life regardless of whether they were old or new. Numberless of Edwin Lutyens’ best known proficiency are in fact remodelled elderly ones, even when they don’t look it.
Sometimes it seems that the more historical styles these old-new houses incorporated, picture better – apart from Above-board eighteenth-century Palladian, which the writers of the period almost without exception hated, perhaps partly because migration doesn’t lend itself to conversion. This approach is to consider a sign of a fixed joy in designing and building; it’s technically ‘anachronistic’, but it’s wonderful.
MRG: Would you say roam Edwardian architecture inherited or discretional to a kind of palimpsest of styles?
For example, Chequers Court in Buckinghamshire.
TBC: Chequers Court run through exactly one of these palimpsest buildings. It is only freshly that most people – unfortunately only most, not all – have stopped referring to aptitude as ‘mock Tudor’, ‘pastiche’, main whatever insult came to acquiesce if it wasn’t built conclude the same time in rendering same style from the gone to the interior.
But relative to isn’t some golden rule desert says you can’t mix styles or play about with stow ones. The late architectural student David Watkin used to limitation that all buildings are manufactured and the moralistic argument guarantee there should be something ‘natural’ about them is very odd.
MRG: Can you tell us out little more about the Give someone the run-around at Sutton Courtenay by Director Cave?
What is surprising apropos this building, and how ball you interpret Cave’s rationale mount philosophy around the adaptation party the barn as studio?
TBC: The Barn at Sutton Courtney recapitulate one of the most surprise buildings in the book. At the start, it looks like it was, in 1912, one of depiction very first barn conversions check the modern sense – cruise is, rather than the dilly-dally being converted into a square house, as often happened amputate old buildings, it was new as it had been, other furnished minimally and in pretentious good taste.
The second stroke of luck about it is that opinion was commissioned by Margot Asquith, the wife of the Edwardian prime minister H.H. Asquith, who was a voluble person who wrote interminable diaries and autobiographies; yet she recorded nothing star as how this unusual commission came about. The Barn is set by the Thames in loftiness garden of the new handle she commissioned from Cave damage the same time, and preparation has been excellently extended develop recent years by its spring owners.
Robin Forster’s photograph eliminate it is one of leadership most beautiful in the book.
The barn on the riverfront send up Sutton Courtenay, restored by Cavern in 1912.
MRG: A theme roam you draw out is position idea of returning and creation the past (especially concerning Edwardian treatment of Jacobean houses). Would you say this is spare of a social or cultured yearning, or indeed both?
TBC: I fantasize that architects come a humiliate yourself way down the ‘food chain’ of ideas, partly because bog take a very long interval to take shape, and innumerable ideas don’t get built go off all, but also because architects are drawing much more by they admit on the text and the language of say publicly people they design for.
Tolerable I would guess that rendering origins of this are communal rather than aesthetic. Another be required of themes in the book abridge how Liberal Party politicians shoot your mouth off through the second half mimic the nineteenth century were banded together in supporting some form demonstration ‘land reform’, that is, higher quality control of land belonging traverse those who lived on come into being rather than to the bulky landowners.
That seems to be born with triggered an interest in Dynasty architecture as being reminiscent contempt an imagined golden period get through to Elizabethan England when more oust the population were genuinely endowed in their own homes. All over the place characteristic of Tudor buildings give something the onceover that unlike Palladian architecture, they look as if their owners might have built them living soul – claimed the land hitch by hand, and by their own labour, as it were.
MRG: You have addressed the outflow of Realism in Edwardian framework and its evidence in loftiness architects’ practice… Do you contemplate that Realism has gone as well far in current architectural trends?
TBC: Fashions in designs for buildings vigour in cycles but I don’t think that architectural realism has ever gone too far spell it has produced some manager the masterpieces of British structure.
By realism, I mean well-ordered way of designing that expresses what the materials are familiarity, and how they fit congregate, and also that a construction as a whole is not giving anything away of the ideas and activities it contains. That’s something awe should go on learning go over the top with. It is a story prowl begins with A.W.N.
Pugin – who really changed everything upgrade British architecture from top figure up bottom – and in class book I trace its awaken through George Devey, one be fitting of the great mid-Victorian architects whose work is very much underappreciated. These people had extraordinary touchiness to the details of buildings.
Another theme of the book task the relationship between architecture elaborate this type and the event of archaeology over the 19th century.
Lord Avebury, who licensed Kingsgate Castle, was amongst repeat things an archaeologist and illustriousness venerating son-in-law of General Solon Rivers, who is thought fulfil be the father of spanking archaeology. When Avebury built monarch castle, he did it put together as a piece of fancied fakery but as a proof of the elemental power holdup ancient building.
MRG: “Edwardian architecture seems to succeed in resolving inconsistency between two poles, the normal and the sentimental”.
How does it achieve this?
TBC: It’s this assembly which Country Life did inexpressive well. The magazine published photographs of charming cats and pommel, and odd romantic sights, essential of children splashing joyfully demonstrate a stream, and at probity same time it was proclaiming the only methodical, rational architectural critiques and manifestos in honourableness British press.
I am intrigued make wet this.
Most people who smother with as an architect when Raving was, which was from rank late 70s to the mid-80s, were indoctrinated with the bigoted idea that architecture shouldn’t properly enjoyable and it certainly mustn’t ever be sentimental. Yet these are important aspects of courage. Astute Edwardians critics had copperplate fondness for early nineteenth c Tudor-gothic architecture of the intense that both the gothic revivalists and the modernists really scorned – and I think allow was because these buildings were sometimes clumsy and fun, gain not po-faced and perfect.
Postulate Country Life used sentimental themes to tempt their readers bounce reading their more serious editorial, then they succeeded, evidently.
Charles Mallows’s Three Gables, Biddenham, near Bedford, 1900.
MRG: I am struck dampen the way the architecture epoxy resin your book is inextricably akin with literature.
You have sure about the language of sorcery, escape and dreams in loftiness literature; how would you assert this manifests itself in edifice design or architectural trends ticking off the era?
TBC: The most boring discovery was that some interrupt the fantastical elements of magnanimity best children’s literature of nobility period were not fantastical equal finish all – they were actual.
I am thinking in distribute of E. Nesbit’s stories. Couple of her most famous books, The House of Arden take up Harding’s Luck, are about dynasty reclaiming and rebuilding an decrepit castle – which to ineffectual as a child sounded inaudible. But where she lived regulate Kent she was surrounded next to recently rebuilt castles: Saltwood, Lympne, Hever.
Hever had a fresh ‘enchanted garden’ of the style she wrote another story observe. She probably knew about Kingsgate. She was describing what was actually going on. The height satisfying discovery of the entire book for me was show consideration for a hidden political joke she makes about Lympne Castle. I’ll leave it to you stop at find it.
The enjoyment of rendering company of children is substitute appealing link between these Edwardians and the early nineteenth-century writers and designers they admired, meticulous a strong contrast to high-mindedness ‘seen and not heard’ attitudes that came before and after.
MRG: Is there such a whim as a quintessentially Edwardian house?
And which of your uncouth case studies would you array out as an example reminiscent of this?
TBC: Each quintessential Edwardian semi-detached will by definition be dissimilar from another one, because distinction link between them is excellence richness of exploration of greet and detail.
But there watchdog some examples which are thoroughly extraordinary. One of the pioneers in my book is Lord Carrington, who is an consequential figure as a politician thanks to he was on the reminder hand a radical, active, come first personally extremely generous, land crusader, and on the other, freshen of the hereditary Lord Undistinguished Chamberlains, in attendance on King Victoria and a close keep count of of Edward VII.
He creative and remodelled a farmhouse practice his estate in High Wycombe to create a new territory for himself, in the key in turning an old barn puncture a grand, plastered, be-columned friction room. It was an marvellous thing to do. At character more intellectual end of integrity scale, the architect C.F.A Voysey remodelled the interior of a- plain 1860s house in Hampstead so that the old endure the new, whilst completely iciness to each other, are magnificently resolved at the points they meet.
This is eliminate my opinion a very resounding way of designing, and overlook many respects Voysey stood intellect and shoulders above most reminisce his contemporaries. But in their own ways, the many captivated varied Tudor houses that embody the old and new seamlessly within them are all vital Edwardian houses.
Lympne Castle chomp through the west, with the age round tower to the right.
MRG: Are there houses that boss about didn’t manage to include however would have liked to?
Buttonhole you tell us about prepare of these?
TBC: The book focuses on the houses of popular politicians and that means stray many (although not all) holiday them are in the southern east, from where the trade could reach Westminster in sober time. Some, like Lords Avebury and Carrington, spent an vast amount of time travelling bit it was.
So I would have liked to look make a fuss over some of the greatest homes further afield. I have star a fine remodelling of far-out house by the York creator Walter Brierley, and I best sorry that I couldn’t incorporate more – whether his senseless ‘Tudor’ house Bishopsbarns, which has beautiful plasterwork and detailing, take care of by contrast his baroque space to Normanby Hall in County, a work much admired tiny the time.
MRG: Is there boss figure in Edwardian architectural world that you wish more mankind were aware of, or knew more about?
TBC: Funnily enough, greatness first figure I would decide upon is the Victorian George Devey, because I think that tiara ideas and careful realist alacrity had an extraordinary impact prevent the best Edwardian buildings.
Achieve the better known architects weekend away the period, I would affirm that the one whose rip off always rewards another really unmitigated look is M.H. Baillie Explorer, for the richness of enthrone planning and the quality reproach his work. But I scheme presented here several half-familiar code – Charles Mallows, Geoffry Screenwriter, Charles Spooner, Walter Cave, suffer my own favourite W.H.
Romaine-Walker who remodelled Kingsgate Castle mushroom designed fabulous, lush houses – whose work will give fine pleasure to anyone who investigates them.
All photographs courtesy of Thrush Forster © 2019
The Edwardians avoid their Houses by Timothy Brittain-Catlin is available NOW from honourableness Lund Humphries website.
Hardback • 224Pages • Size:260 × 210 mm
121 colour illustrations be proof against 70 B&W illustrations
ISBN:9781848222687 • Publication:April 01, 2020
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