Before the catastrophe of 1914-18—before “architectural education” became controlled by lefty apparatchiks whose heads were stuffed with poverty-stricken Modernist humbug, dictating a narrow brainwashing curriculum rather than rounded education embracing humane, civilized values—there were places where Vitruvian Firmness, Commodity, and Delight informed the design of buildings and areas where people lived, happily and contentedly, without crying out to be rescued from a dystopian hell on earth.

That was a time when the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (as it was then) was immensely rich, a major creditor on the world stage: there were many aspects of its governance, political stability, and what it produced that were globally admired. In those far-off days, all over the world Britain’s power and prestige counted for something. There were, however, cracks beginning to show: there was unrest in Ireland, and by 1918 not only was Britain a debtor rather than creditor, ruined by the Great War, and having to bankroll France and Imperial Russia to keep fighting it (Russia, of course, left in 1917), but 26 counties of Ireland opted out of the Kingdom to become the Irish Free State.

Before 1914, however, there was much to admire, especially on the architectural front, and notably in relation to the design of dwellings fit for human beings. When domestic architecture was designed by sensitive, gifted architects who drew intelligently, creatively, imaginatively, and tastefully on historical precedents, it was invariably realized by builders who employed properly trained craftsmen taught by earlier generations in apprentice systems. In addition, such craftsmen worked with natural materials, often from local sources, so new buildings harmonized with the landscape from which those materials were taken, and respected other structures already erected in the vicinity. Indeed, British craftsmen were educated and highly skilled, able to produce work of the highest quality, something that is still obvious when we visit late-Victorian churches, where the workmanship is breathtakingly fine, and the design wondrous, exquisite, and glowingly beautiful. There was pride in such work well done.

The qualities of architectural design and workmanship found in British domestic architecture at that time became known through publications, prompting the appointment of Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927), attaché at the Imperial German Embassy, London (1896-1903), to investigate in depth and comprehensively British domestic architecture and design. This he duly did, travelling widely all over Great Britain (which means the big island, united under one Crown in 1603 when James VI of Scotland became James I of England and Ireland, and was merely a convenient label for the newly joined nations, and has nothing to do with grandiosity, power, or anything of that sort), collecting material and illustrations, and meeting and staying with numerous architects and their clients, some of whom became his personal friends. His labours culminated in the superb Das englische Haus (The English House), brought out by the distinguished Berlin publishers of Wasmuth in 1904-5, with a revised and even better second edition of 1908-11, which publicized works of numerous British architects throughout the Continent and especially in the German Empire.

It is a sad and dim reflection of the present day that the names of many of the distinguished designers responsible for some of the finest domestic buildings ever erected in Great Britain have been forgotten—ignored because they did not fit neatly into the “Grand Narratives” of Modernism espoused by the likes of the chief drum-banger of the Modern Movement, Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-83). His pernicious Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936) says it all: the Great Lie was to create false links between the Arts-and-Crafts and the Modern Movements, when what actually happened was a complete rejection of the Arts-and-Crafts ethos by Gropius, the Bauhäusler, and other doctrinaire Modernists who demanded the tabula rasa, the rejection of all “Historicism,” and the embrace of a meaningless, empty style that suggested “functionalism,” cleanliness, industrialized building processes, and “modernism,” but was, in fact, only packaging. It was also, for the first time in human history, a style devoid of ornament, labelled a “crime” by Modernists.

A recent finely illustrated book, The Edwardians and their Houses: The New Life of Old England, by Timothy Brittain-Catlin, with many stunning photographs specially taken for it by Robert Forster, encapsulates the astonishingly innovative, imaginative, and creative Edwardian period (the reign of King-Emperor Edward VII, 1901-10), when superbly crafted dwellings were erected to the designs of grossly underestimated architects such as William Henry Romaine-Walker (1854-1940), George Herbert Kitchin (1870-1951), Charles Edward Mallows (1864-1915), and Henry Avray Tipping (1855-1933). It rightly emphasizes the literature of the period, including the highly influential articles on architecture in Country Life, the magazine established in 1897 by Edward Burgess Hudson (1854-1936), which brought out finely illustrated weekly articles on country houses, employed Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932) to provide the “Garden Notes” column for some three decades, and promoted the career of Edwin Landseer Lutyens (1869-1944) who was to design the Deanery Garden, Sonning, Berkshire (1899, restore Lindisfarne Castle, Holy Island (1902), and create the enchanting Plumpton Place, Sussex (1927-8, all for Hudson. That excellent journal also played an important role in disseminating taste through the copious writings of Lawrence Walter William Weaver (1876-1930) and Avray Tipping. Picture books aimed at the builders of smaller, humbler dwellings are not ignored, and the influence of leading circles within the once-mighty Liberal Party, in causing an incredible amount of fine domestic architecture to be realized from great houses to humble cottages, is acknowledged, providing exemplars for new developments all over the country. 

Such figures as John Lubbock (1834-1913, 1st Baron Avebury from 1900, today mostly remembered for legislation concerned with the preservation of ancient monuments), called on Romaine-Walker to remodel Kingsgate Castle, Kent (1901-12), and the same architect worked at Rhinefield, near Brockenhurst, Hampshire (with its lavishly coloured Hispano-Moresque smoking-room), designed for Edward Lionel Walker-Munro (1862-1920). Romaine-Walker was responsible for new works and transformations for Robert William Hudson (1856-1937) at Medmenham Abbey on the Thames, Buckinghamshire, and Danesfield, near Marlow, in the same County. That architect designed some 28 cottages around Medmenham in a Domestic Revival style, the planning of which was much praised in Country Life. The book describes the hitherto underrated garden-suburb of Gidea Park, Essex, a built exhibition of model houses costing between £350 and £500, including profits and fees: designed by architects including Courtenay Melville Crickmer (1879-1971), Thomas Geoffry Lucas (1872-1947), Ronald Potter Jones (1876-1965), Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis (1883-1978), Richard Barry Parker (1867-1947) with Raymond Unwin (1863-1940), Reginald Thelwall Longden (1879-1941), and others. The Gidea Park dwellings are varied, interesting, aesthetically pleasing, and finely crafted. They remain a reproach to the architecturally illiterate, jerry-built, inadequate, obscenely over-priced boxes inflicted on unfortunates seeking roofs over their heads in these benighted times.

The author of this brilliant, dazzling book, Timothy Brittain-Catlin, is a Cambridge-educated academic and architect, who has given us many other perceptive things to savour and enjoy, not least his study of the early 19th-century English Parsonage (2008), and his Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture (2014). He observes of that great taste-former, Country Life, that its “genius” lay in its ability to combine disciplined and technically precise editorial lines on the architecture of both new and remodeled houses with sentimental stories and dreams and gardens, and photographs of heiresses and Highland cattle, and of happy children splashing in streams, thus captivating its readership. Moreover, Country Life’s writers had an “astonishing ability to understand the meaning” encapsulated in architecture (does architecture have any meaning today other than as a demonstration of overweening arrogance and greed on the part of the uglifiers responsible for it?). His book is felicitously written, finely illustrated, and celebrates friendly, agreeable habitats for humans designed and made by sensitive professionals: those habitats put to shame the ghastly mess that passes for “architecture” and “planning” today, thanks to the pseudo-religious cult of Modernism, the foundations of which lie on sinking sands.

Professor James Stevens Curl’s Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism is published by Oxford University Press, causing much gnashing of teeth among dystopians. In 2019 he was honoured with an Arthur Ross Award for Excellence in the Classical Tradition for History & Writing by the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art (ICAA), USA. This New Urbanism series is supported by the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.