 Well, welcome everyone to today's lecture. My name is Martin Posal. I can see on the bottom of the screen on the webinar, the participant numbers growing very, very rapidly as I speak. So I'm just gonna wait a moment until we reach a quorum. We've already got, wow, wow, over 90 people. See if we can make a ton. And then we can crack on with the proceedings. 99. Very 800. Okay. I think in that case, we can get going. So could just move on to, I've got a few housekeeping announcements that I have to make before we get to the business in hand. As it says on the screen, the talk will last approximately 40 minutes. And then that'll be followed by Q&A. You, the audience can type in questions using the Q&A function. I know by now we're all so used to this after a couple of years of this type of thing. So I'm sure most of you know how to do that. It's being recorded and it's gonna be made available to the public, which is wonderful. So there will be a record of this and closed captioning is available and you click the CC button on your screen to enable the captions. Okay. So I just wanted to say a few words by way of introduction to today's lunchtime talk. I'm Martin Parcel. I'm a senior research fellow here at the Paul Mellon Center. And it's my pleasure to introduce today's speaker and chair the Q&A session that's gonna follow. Timothy Britton-Catlin is a fellow of Hommerton College and he leaves the architecture apprenticeship course at the University of Cambridge. Tim's written extensively in books and articles on various aspects of architectural history. And his book publications include The English Parsonage in the Early 19th Century published by Spire Books in 2008 and Bleak Houses, Disappointment and Failure in Architecture published by the MIT Press in 2014. His most recent book, Hold It Up, is The Edwardians and Their Houses published by Lund Humphreys in 2020, which is, and those of you who haven't read it, it's a wonderful sumptuous volume as well as being a fascinating read. And this was published with support from the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. And it was shortlisted for the 2021 William B. Berger Prize for British Art History. As Tim notes, during his research for this book, he's identified series of key houses which illustrate how the attitudes of their architects and owners towards historic structures was quite different to the one which is prevalent today. And in his talk, he's gonna focus on three key buildings. Lord Avery's Kingsgate Castle in Kent, Lord Carrington's Doors Hill at Wikimabie, Buckinghamshire and W.D. Caro's Family Home at the Van in Surrey, none of which I'm ashamed to say I knew about before Tim's talk. And he's going to identify in the course of these case studies, his new research areas that emerged during the research for this book. So, time's moving on, so without further ado, I'd like to hand over to Tim to talk to us about the making and remaking of the Edwardian house. Over to you, Tim. Martin, thank you very much indeed for that generous introduction. And in fact, the first thing I'd like to say and I get to share the screen as I say this is that I would like to thank the Paul Mellon Center for British Art for the extraordinary contribution they made to this book by supporting the photography by Robin Forster. And I hope that you'll see over the next hour some wonderful photographs which were taken especially for this book and it reinforces the fact that first rate photography makes an enormous contribution to the primary research of historic buildings. So, and I'm sure that you'll appreciate that as we go through it. I'm going to start with the first of those three buildings that Martin mentioned. Now, this book as a whole covered how the Edwardian liberals mostly built themselves and other people houses at all scales. So they're building from the scale of the country house. Some of these people were cabinet members who needed a new house in London. They needed a new house within reach of London. They needed a new house by the golf course in many cases. This is one of those by the way. And at the same time they were passing legislation which enabled and encouraged the building of high quality houses outside London in Gideon Park in garden cities in what were called town planning schemes and so on. The Edwardian liberals are enormously involved and engaged with encouraging house building. And it's a period of a very high standard of discussion in the press in country life in particular but also in other professional magazines about what houses should look like why they look the way they do. And I often think that in a sense by the end of the Edwardian period we know how to design a house that works where to put the windows, where to put the bed where to position the door and the fireplace and so on. We know how to do that. And you could almost go as far as saying that all house design since about 1914 has been experimentation because the basic work has been done. Now, what this talk is about is about one particular theme that surprised me as it emerged through the book. And these three buildings are buildings are the buildings through which I discovered something that I had no idea about before I started. We're all familiar I think some extent with the arts and crafts history of Edwardian England and to some extent with the new country house history. The great theme that I discovered is what is happening when people are working with old buildings, what are they doing? And how was it that there was such a developed culture of working with existing buildings? And I think that this is today also an enormously important subject because of course we're all encouraged, architects are encouraged now increasingly to remodel existing buildings rather than use superfluous resources and building new ones. It seems to me to be something that is not only very current but also something which is very rich and very interesting, has a lot to contribute. And I'm glad to say visually, extremely beautiful. Now, this was my starting point. This is Kingsgate Castle. This was designed from 1900 for Lord Avebury. That's to say Sir John Lubbock as he then was. He took the title of Lord Avebury at the beginning of the new century. He wanted a new house to go with it. He found himself on the Thanate Coast between Broadstairs and Margate. He was staying at Holland House with the artist Luke Fields who was a friend of his. He saw this Georgian folly on the opposite cliff. It was at the time a kind of ramshackle house. It had a roof added in the 19th century in various rooms and so on. And he decides to turn this into his principal residence and he goes to an architect called W.H. Remain Walker. Most of Remain Walker's houses have become very luxurious hotels, which tells us a bit, I think about the kind of milieu he worked in. And Remain Walker converted the old building, the old folly building that had been stables for Lord Holland, converted it into a luxurious house if you look at the tower there, we're coming in through the central entrance arch straight ahead is a tower, a round tower which more or less takes the form of the original folly tower. And you can see there in the flint, the old flint and the new flint put together. It's a moment of looking at this. We'll see that Remain Walker pretty much rebuilt the whole thing. But he kept a great deal of the quality and the feeling of the old place. Now I always found this an intriguing building. We had a holiday flat in it when I was a child in the 1960s. It had been a hotel. And after the Second World War, when no one had perhaps the cash for big hotels, each pair of hotel suites was turned into a very small and very cheap holiday flat. And this is where we used to go. And this building, my brother says to me, this building made an enormous impression on me when I was very young. And I think that must be true because here I am 50-something years later still talking about it and thinking about it. But I wanted to find out more about it. And the central question here, I would say, was this. What people tended to say about buildings like Kingsgate Castle is that they were in some way fake, that it was a sham castle, that it wasn't a real castle, that it was a kind of mock-up and therefore was not a building to be taken seriously. And this approach troubled me because there was no reason to suppose that a high-minded person such as Lord Avery would have done anything fake in his life. He was a scientist. He was an archeologist. He was a political reformer. He was amongst the early initiators of the ancient monuments protection. He was, as we all know, he was the instigator of the public holidays. There was no reason to suppose that Lord Avery, although he had, I think, a bright and a warm personality, would have done something fake necessarily for his house. So I wondered where this came from. That led me into the following two houses. The first clue came about through reading up the biographies one by one as a very preliminary step of all the members of Asquith's government, simply in the dictionary of National Biography. And there I found something fascinating in the entry on Lord Earl Carrington, written by Andrew Adonis, who before he became a politician was a specialist on late Victorian Liberal Party land reform. And what the biography says of Lord Carrington was that at a certain point in life he decided to convert a farmhouse on his estate in High Wycombe into a residence for himself. Now, what you're looking at here is an early 20th century photograph of the house known as Dawes Hill, which was a farmhouse on the estate to the south of where Wycombe Abbey House itself is. What there was here in 1897 when Lord Carrington began this process was on the right-hand side. You can see it's the blob of white towards the right-hand side of the building. There was an old farmhouse building. And then the buildings in the foreground, whilst they didn't look as they do today, it was a collection of farmyard buildings. There was a carving shed. There was a slaughterhouse. There was a barn and so on. And these were a fairly ramshackle courtyard of single story, some of them quite tall buildings. What has happened was this, Lord Carrington, very interesting character. He was deeply involved in land reform, central, perhaps central plank of the Liberal Party from the 1880s onwards at least. And he was very astute on anything to do with land. It's interesting that as a person he moved in the highest classes of the nobility. He was a personal friend of Edward the Seventh. He was Lord Great Chamberlain to Queen Victoria. In fact, he spent his summers up in Balmoral. And he was very astute on land ownership. He was interested in the Land Nationalization Society. He became active as a member of Ascot's government in the creation of secure small holdings, mostly for agricultural workers. He gave a great deal of land and money to the town of High Wickham. And in the middle of all this process, he moved out of Wickham Abbey. But she saw as being a huge sink of money for his son. He perhaps he knew also the inheritance taxes that were going to come as part of Lloyd George's budget. And he'd moved in with his family to that farmhouse on the right-hand side while they decided to choose a new site for a new house. But the family loved the farmhouse. They found it cozy, comfortable, warm, and they decided to stay there. So Carrington at this point decides that if his daughters, his wife, his young son are happy in the farmhouse, then that's where he'll stay. And he converts these buildings into a residence. Now, one thing that's very striking about Lord Carrington is that although he was so active in building and in anything to do with building and land tenure, at the same time, he doesn't seem to have had any interest in architectural quality at all. In fact, it's rather a shame, I think, that the large sites that he granted, the new road that he built in the centre of High Wickel, he's got on the whole, very dull buildings on it. And he made no exception in his own case. In fact, at the time, he was a London County councillor for a ward in St Pancras. And he appears to have gone to the local districts of O's, named Mr. Lease, and asked him to carry out the task of converting this farmhouse into a series of rooms that befitted a member of the government and a friend of royalty. Edward VII and Queen Alexandra came to visit this house, for example. Now, I'll take you through a few photographs of how it is today. It's some considerable tribute to the photographer Robin Forster that you wouldn't know it, but this photograph was taken in the heavy pouring rain. That might account for why the colour is a little washed out, but it's nice and clear and you can see what it is. And you can also see that it's the fact that it's not particularly attractive or striking as a design of a building. It's in fact the thing that makes it interesting, I think, because all the emphasis of the design is on accommodating the old buildings and not on making a new set piece. There's the farmhouse on the right. On the far right is a much later building by Forsyth and Moore from the period when the Wiccum Abbey Girls' School, to whom Lord Carrington had sold the house, they took it over and they turned it into a dormitory building. And that's the right-hand bit, which actually is a very fine building, I think. Let me take you around and show you some of the areas. So here is the entranceway, the Carrington Catevons around it, and the old set of farm buildings runs from that front, from that front left-hand corner, you can see there back towards the rear of the site. And there are some clues about the original use of the buildings in some place. There is a view from the front. It's not perhaps what you'd expect of the residence of a cabinet minister. And I have to say he had other places. He had a house in Whitehall Court, and he had another castle in Wales. So it's not as if he was here all the time, but he spent a lot of time here. He liked being here. He liked the fact that it reminded him of how when he himself had been a child, he used to go and play in the farmyard, and he turned one of the old farmyard sheds into his study. So there is a little bit of remaking his early life, I suppose, into his later successful political life. Here are a couple of photographs of the interior, as it looked when the Carrington's lived there. What you're looking at here is the corridor that crosses from left to right in front of that entrance porchway. And this is the junction of the new corridor with the old range of farm buildings. And here, then, is that long side that runs off on the left-hand side. You see the castellated bit. That is probably the work of, that's probably the work of James Wyatt, who was at Wickham Abbey long before, of course. And here, you can see the old farm buildings with extra bits added to them, looking back up at the farm building. If you see that clock tower there with the cupular above it, follow that roof, the bottom left of it, along. You can see the original brickwork of the old barn below it. There it is in close-up. So you can see the different patched-up pieces of brick. They're also reusing bits of brick from the farm buildings and mixing them up with the new one. So you get something very uncertain age, I think. Now, that's a new wing that Mr. Lease built. He built a second new wing as well. It wasn't small this house. This is on the far side of the corridor. But this is what Mr. Lease does when he's left to his own devices with a new project. It's facing the rebuilt part. And this, I think, is probably the most extraordinary view of all. This is inside the old barn. So this is below that clock tower and cupular. There's no sign of it from underneath. Up on the ceiling there, you can see panels by Angelica Kaufman, which were taken from another of the various Carrington family residences. And this is the inside of the old barn after it has been fitted up. That big bay window that you will have seen on some of the other photographs, that's just off to the left. That's the source of the lighting here. So you see a very fine fireplace on the right-hand side. All this survives, not the furniture and not the Kaufman panels, but the room survives absolutely as it was. What's happened in this room is that paneling was taken from a different Carrington house and fitted in to a new room, which had been one of the old agricultural buildings with other bits to fill up the gaps. So that bit between the mantelpiece and the fire opening itself seems to me to be filled up gap. And there are other bits too, where the timber is slightly too good to be, or too sharp, I suppose, to be part of the original work. So it's a great collection of stuff being put inside the building here. Now, where does this come from? The most, I think, the thing that I learned from this is that there is actually a continuing developing story from the 1850s right through to the 1930s of the reuse of buildings and the reuse of building components and the shifting around of the interiors of one building to another, continuously going on and enormously prominent in the press, which is much overlooked in histories of the period. It's rather in the nature of architectural history that it tends to concentrate on things that are completely new on the one hand. And on the other hand, they concentrate also on the fact that a building has achieved novelty in some way or another. It's the way in which most histories are built up. But you can look at this in a different way and see a continuing development of the idea of mixing the old and the new. And it only works if the architect has got a tremendous detailed knowledge of how the old building fitted together. So this is where the story changes slightly. What you're looking at here is a farm called South Park just to the southwest of Penthurst in West Kent. And it was designed, and I'm gonna go back to what exactly I mean by that word. It was designed by George D.V., round about 1850. So first of all, remember that Pugin is still alive. D.V. at this time was doing something that was really quite remarkable. And I don't think that it had really happened before in quite the same way. He worked on this farm yard. He also worked on a little group of cottages called Leicester Square, which sit at the entrance to the church yard in Penthurst. They're extremely picturesque. They are slightly too good to be true. But on the other hand, what they are is enormously authentically remade and remodeled by D.V. in such a way that you cannot tell what is old or what is new. And that's the most important part, I think. Now, I want to stress that particular element, and I'm going to return to it, because one thing we know about the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and its long-lasting influence is that it became an absolute principle of Spab that retaining the old material of a building was something that was non-negotiable. Anybody who was adding to, restoring to or anyone who's been doing this in recent years of an old building, as generally speaking, had to accept the fact that the old part cannot really be changed and that any new work must be completely distinct. But what's important to remember is that nobody thought this at the end of the 19th century beyond the activists of Spab themselves. So what D.V. is doing to these cottages around here is that he has such a knowledge of how these old buildings are held together, that he can, as it were, go into their past and remake it. He can remodel the buildings. Now, you will say architects have always added to old cottages. They've always modernized them. They've always put in new rooms. They weren't waiting until George D.V. in 1850 before they started to upgrade houses and so on. And of course, that's true. But if they were an architect, as opposed to perhaps a local builder, what they generally did was make the new work completely distinct. We can all think of examples where a completely distinct addition was added. It might have been a distinct facade where a Tudor house was re-fronted by in the 18th century, for example. But D.V. isn't doing any of this. With D.V., the concept of history, as it were, is completely disappeared. He's going in and working at it subtly in a lot of different ways. And what this requires is enormous interest in the precise details of the way in which materials join together. He said that this is 1850 and Pugin is still alive. We know that if Pugin had been working on these Pennshurst cottages, they would have looked to some extent like Pugin houses, whereas they don't look like D.V. houses necessarily. D.V. was the ultimate pursuit of perfection in building details. There is a famous, all the best stories about him are told by Voisey, who worked for him. And Voisey tells the best story of all, which is that a builder once called D.V. up onto the roof of a building that he was working on and had to admit to a kind of bodge up between the flashing and the tiles or something of that sort. But he said to the architect, Mr. D.V., don't worry about it. Nobody will see it. He's up here on the roof. And D.V. famously replied, I should be ashamed for the birds to see it. So this is the level of precision that D.V. is interested in. Now there is a process that runs from the publication of D.V.'s work and the discovery of D.V.'s work as he died relatively young age up to the Edwardian period. And the great step forward, I think, is the establishment of country life in the 1890s as in Mark Gerard's words, was the culmination of D.V.'s way of thinking about buildings and the precise assembly of objects in a particular way. It's very important also to remember country life. And for many of you today, we're well aware of the fact that country life has throughout the whole of its history published very often the best up to date historical accurate research about houses. That's something I think that we can probably all agree on extremely high quality. And it was doing it right from the start. But what country life was also doing and the professional press was not for quite a while was it was publishing regular articles on doors, on windows, on chimneys, surveyed from different parts of the country and discussed and compared. So that an architect in the very end of the 1890s in the beginning of the 1900s had if they wanted particular access directly to the historic ways of building in a way that they really didn't before. This coincides also with the explosion of books by Batsford and by others. And the emphasis here is not so much on the perfection of a complete new building. It's much more on what happens when you put different junctions of buildings together. Now I've stayed on this image of South Park for a while because I think that the DV story is important. It's very rewarding. DV's buildings sometimes suffer from looking a bit like a great mixture of building materials all jammed together without any overall coherence. But I think to some extent, one might even slightly say that it is the point. Now on the subject of country life, before I go on to talk about the third of the great houses today, you say a little bit more about country life. Country life had two of the greatest writers I think on domestic architecture that we've ever had. In fact, I think it's fair to say that Lawrence Weaver who was writing for country life from 1999 onwards was probably the first architecture critic in the modern sense of the word. And by that, I mean, you need only to compare the way in which Weaver writes about buildings with the way in which say, Ruskin had written about buildings to see a world of difference. Weaver has a very broad informed practical view about buildings and how they're put together. And one can find really remarkable occurrences of this in the pages of country life. For example, famous houses by Edgar Wood with the flat roots and so on. They appear in country life before they appear in the architectural view, for example. So he's open-minded, he's logical and he's very analytical in his thinking. And he came as the successor to H. Avery Tipping who was an extremely, I think extremely talented and perceptive writer on houses and on buildings really of all kinds. It's an extraordinary combination. And what Tipping and Weaver particularly liked, Tipping I think in particular, what they really liked was houses that had a great jumble of architectural periods together under one roof. They liked South Raxall Manor, for example, because it has this combination of the medieval and then it has a pair of 17th century columns, Tuscan style columns on one wing of it. They liked this clash. And they were, I think, they were right to like it because it's a very difficult thing to do to resolve the details from different historical buildings within one single house or within one single room. Philip Webb puts a fireplace that looks like it might be by Van Bra in what is otherwise a mostly Tudor room. It's very difficult to get that right. It's a reason why architects in particular revered Webb because Webb could do it. In fact, the 17th century in general was particularly popular during the Edwardian period because of the way at which it runs from Tudor Jacobian right up to the William and Mary, the William and Mary style. So for those reasons, it gives them a lovely collection of difficult things to put together. It's often said that Lutians was unusual in putting classical interiors inside Tudor houses. But in fact, it wasn't unusual at all. Almost everybody was doing it. He was doing it better and he did it perhaps more photogenically. But nevertheless, it becomes enormously common. Now, here we are on house number three. And house number three is called Van. It may be familiar to you as architect historians. It would also be familiar to you if you saw the BBC's version of Emforster's novel, Howard's End, where they stood in for Howard's End and it was a brilliant piece of location casting because this house, the way it looks now was designed in 1907, which is roughly speaking when Forster was writing Howard's End. And you wouldn't think so to look at it. And what you're looking at is a combination of not only Edwardian work but with the remnants of the medieval and 17th century buildings on the site. But you're looking at a tremendous mixture of things brought from different places at different times to arrive at the house, which because of the complexity of the combination in it could really only be an Edwardian house. I've heard it said about these houses. I mentioned that people criticize buildings like Kingsgate Castle as being sham, as being inauthentic. And that this too might be one of those inauthentic houses because it's made up of bits and pieces. But I take the opposite view. I would say that this is a building which is enormously real because the individual elements of it are specifically doing a particular job which the architect wanted to do. Let me take you through some of the images of Van. By 1907, Caro is a well-established and serious architect, very substantial buildings. The church commissioners building on Milbank is perhaps the outstanding example. That's where he had his office. And then he came down here. He had, for picturesque reasons, he had a, got the post office to install a letterbox at his entrance gate here. The post office was reluctant to put a letterbox down a otherwise completely deserted windy country lane in the middle of nowhere. They said they would only do it if there were 2,000 letters deposited in it, I think a month. So what Caro did was he brought all his office post from Westminster and he posted it in the letterbox outside his house in order to keep the post office happy. So a lot of things going on in Caro's life at the time, I think he built this for his family. It's a combination of a number of different things which are brought, different objects, which are brought from different houses in order to make something that is of its period in a completely unspab like way. Some of the brickwork here on the far left-hand side was there before Caro arrived. Some of the timber framing, but by no means all of it that you can see on the upper floor, on the left-hand wing was there but very little else was, in fact. You can see that the chimney is in you. Here's another view of the house from further along and you can see a bit of 18th century, 17th century, 18th century brickwork on the left-hand side but windows which are definitely 1907 and the pile hanging and the modern brickwork of the chimney above it and a bit of mixture of the brickwork to bring it from different places. It's a wonderful thing about this house that the proportions seem to change depending on precisely the angle that you're coming at. This is the garden on the opposite side from that long view that you saw. So there is the existing brickwork on the right-hand side and a new piece of the house on the left-hand side timber framing of different bits and pieces. Here is the front door. The door is made especially for the house but many of the items and some of the other doors which I'll show you are in fact made up from other doors from other places. Here is the corner at the junction of what was mostly a medieval house with what was certainly a completely new piece of house and there is an 18th century water tank as you can see with some very fine decoration on it and what Carrow is doing here is what you'd expect from someone who is following Divi's example which is you take the best possible thing from another house or from another place and because of the quality of the thing regardless of its age or regardless of how well it fits in historically with the building you put it in it because the architectural quality is the combination of these different details. Now here is a plan of the house and everything that is black is new so you can see that only the bit on the right-hand side is the grain pod that was there before and even then that was very greatly changed. Here's the entrance hall. It's got a fireplace brought, a fireplace surround brought in from elsewhere. The stairs are mostly new. You can see the other side of that door that I showed you from the outside. On the far side the house belongs still to the Carrow family so it's had four generations of architect living in it and Oliver Carrow is a great source of wisdom on this house and tells many interesting stories about it and one of the best stories of all I think is that there was on the upper level of the medieval house there was a timber beam that was too low for a modern corridor. So what Carrow did was he chopped it off and he reconnected the roof truss above the level of the new ceiling height using a new metal and iron fixing, out of sight above the ceiling and then where the old beam had been he put a much more slender one that allowed someone to walk under it to represent the old beam that had been there before. Now this of course was the greatest horror of horrors to Spab because in Spab's view not only had he cut up the old building but he'd also put in something that looked like it was a piece of the old building and but if that wasn't that what Carrow had put in was representative of what there had been before rather than the actual thing and that particular conflict I think is an extremely interesting example of precisely where Carrow and the attitude of architects like him is different from that of the general view of historical building and fabric that we're now so familiar with that we perhaps forgotten that it was ever controversial. There's some fantastic metalwork in this house. There is a ceiling that Carrow brought in from the house, different houses together from 17th century house in Wales that's being demolished and as we all know huge numbers of houses were developed after the First World War. This was put in I think before the First World War but Carrow went on moving things around. He moved things from place to place within the house as well as bringing them in from outside. So there isn't really anything I suppose you could say that was originally anything. Everything you see is part of the building that he created. There is, now that's a very fine door I think and they're quite a different style really was brought in but that does show a nice example of the point I was making before about resolving different types of architecture so that they still look right even though they're from a different period if they're well enough detailed and well enough absorbed into the old building they can look exactly, exactly right. There is on the right-hand side you can see a piece of timber that is in place of an old one that needed to be removed which very probably followed the line that you can see on the left-hand side actually to the left-hand side of the window is the upper floor at Van and here is a view towards the barn. We weren't able to photograph the barn but the barn is part of its history. Now the barn at Van is converted into I think you would call it a party room it had a billion table in it. It's not actually the first barn conversion in the modern sense. The modern sense barn conversion I would say means a building which is stripped down to its basically to its original form and it becomes kind of good taste residence with minimal amount of furniture from heels in it but a few rugs and a few antiques and so on. Now the first person to do that was of all people the wife of the prime minister Margot Hasquith she did it at her house in South Courtney which was then in Berkshire now in Oxfordshire and that's where she used to go she called it her studio and that really is the first barn conversion and that's about 1912. Mrs. Hasquith wrote absolutely voluminous volumes of well that's a bit of a tautology isn't she? She wrote large amounts of self-justifying autobiography but nowhere does she say why she took this extraordinary step and it almost certainly came about through a suggestion of her architect Walter Cave. Walter Cave does not appear at all and Mrs. Hasquith's there is although she had an awful lot to do with him he built her a new house as well and that's a sign that architects were very much socially I think below the radar of people of the status of the prime minister's wife. So whereas on the one hand you get this wonderful idea which I think is also forms a nice part of liberal party ideology at the time about houses belonging to the land and so on being made from the land to treat the timber on the land and so on rather than imposed on them in a way that a Palladian house might be or a Gothic revival house might be or a Grand Baroque house might be. So on the one hand it's her barn conversion is a sign that the liberals are people who belong to the place and the land belongs to its people all the rest of it and the other hand she's much too grand to talk to the architect and in fact Romaine Walker doesn't appear in the visitor's book for Kingsgate Castle until Lord Avery has died only then does he come in through the front door he comes in interestingly enough with a very young Harry Goodheart Randall who's come to snoop around with him but let's return to Van this is the corridor that leads up to the barn itself and Oliver Carrot told me that in the barn and I think converting the barn into a big party room was actually an afterthought because it hardly features in the Carrot office survey drawings of the building I think he would have taken it more seriously earlier on if he'd known what it was he was going to do with it but what he did was he moved to he moved the timbers around so a Joyce becomes a war play if he rotated the peers of the posts inside because on one side they'd been abraded by the cattle so he rotated them and so on I'm very grateful to Oliver for all the comments he made about the house because there's nothing like living in one to get to know it extremely well so there is an awful lot going on here and none of it is quite as it seems now with that I'd like to return to and to conclude with a bit more about Kingsgate Castle this is the entrance gateway bits of it are part of the 18th century folly it was all remade by remade by Romain Walker for Lord Avery the wing on the left actually wasn't added till the 1930s this became a very smart hotel from the 1920s onwards it's where Hollywood film stars would come Lawrence Olivier would come here Constance Cummings and so on there's a list of visitors it had everything that they needed it had the croco lawn it had the Moorish style squash courts next door and so on it was a very exclusive place at the time one of the things I never really worked out about it is how the food got from the service entrance to the right, to the dining room on the left and there must have been a tunnel this is very easily tunnelable chalk in this area so I guess that's what there was Romain Walker did do tricks to hide routes like this at Reinfeld, a big house in the New Forest which is now one of the grand hotels I was referring to earlier at Reinfeld where the kitchen is as often the case some distance away from the dining room what Romain Walker did was he built a kind of trench a sort of ha ha that the staff could walk along in front of the house without being seen and I think there must have been a tunnel here of some sort so it's a sophisticated and it's a modern Edwardian house and it's got in it and you can see in this photograph you can see in it some of these strata as it were of older Georgian period flints now one of Avery's interests was Romano-British history just down the coast from Kingsgate Castle there is, there are the remains of Richbrok Castle very late Romano-British construction something about 400 I think AD and he knew that area very well and he also tended to look he was the kind of scientist who liked to record the fact that he saw patterns and things he was very interested in strata and stone and so on he spent a lot of time looking at the chalk cliffs around Kingsgate to see the patterns of the flint in it and I think that he saw this castle as being with its different strata of new and old flint as having something of the quality of those old ruins that he liked so much one thing that's very striking about this castle is that when he built it and the current Lord Avery was kind enough to show me photographs that his ancestor had very wisely had taken professionally when the house was finished it didn't have a Victorian gardens finished about well, they're living in it by about 1903, 1904 it didn't have any kind of formal garden had no Victorian garden it had no Edwardian garden either it just sat on the grass and it looked a bit like an archeological site and I think for Lord Avery himself that was a great attraction to it and it wasn't a fake piece of ruins it was a new creation of something that did have something in common with the qualities of the old building there's also something else interesting that's going on here and that's a slightly childlike quality to some of these places it's something that recurs a lot in Edwardian houses of different scales there are a lot of new castles going up we used to read as children the stories by Inesbit and there's one called Harding's Luck which was our favourite and there's another one called The House of Arden and the characters in these stories come together towards the end and they're looking for the remains of some old ancestral castles so that they can remake it and of course we thought as children from 1960s that this was a kind of romantic fantasy that the castle might suddenly spring back into life again but I think it's important to remember that during the period when Inesbit was writing and she certainly knew about this new castles were actually springing up it was quite an accurate description of what was going on so these houses also have for all their realism for all the way in which little bits of the puzzle are fitted together with the expertise of architects who knew so precisely the different elements of building construction from different periods for all of that there is on the other hand slightly magical quality to it I sometimes think that one of the reasons why Country Life had the impact that it had was that Country Life was on the one hand a very hard-headed publication it was aimed at landowners or people wanting to commission new buildings so it was aimed at the clients as it were they were very supportive of Lord Carrington's land tenure reforms and they would fill pages with calculations about rents and so on for country landowners about what would happen, how much you should borrow in order to let out how much space with what kind of rental and so on they were actually very hard-headed but at the same time they presented these amazing romantic images not so much of the houses because I tend to think that the buildings are not particularly romantic really they're done by professional people in offices so romantic is not really quite what they are but a lot of other romantic imagery people's favorite pet their favorite dog children splashing through a stream that kind of thing and this was a very one of them was a very good way of selling the other and I suppose I would add same conclusion is that I discovered in the course of doing this research that these two themes run together and between them perhaps from their extremes when they meet in the middle they produce some of the finest houses that we've ever seen I think Martin I think I'll conclude at that point Oh, that's it now I'm hearing you Yeah, back together Thank you very much in detail that was wonderful and even covered such not just new research but new perspectives and expectations about what Edwardian architecture is and this deeply significant you talk about in your book this cultural and political vein and this strong collection with liberal culture and liberal ideology and so on we've got one question in the box so please do use the Q&A function there are still 130 people here so I'm sure some of you would like to ask Tim questions yourself I've got a few and I've got a sort of it's partly observation partly question Tim and it comes out of Dawes Hill there's not a house on you and as you yourself it's not the most exciting piece of architecture to look at in fact your book is not about and you say this is not about country houses per se as in the tradition of the English country house it's about Edwardian houses and they're all very, very varied and I was struck at Dawes Hill by the contrast between this almost municipal looking exterior and it's fantastic a grand interior with palasters and columns and pediments and oil paintings which felt very Georgian and I thought, well, this is interesting Georgian architecture is anathema and yet here's an you go into the house and you roll up go through the front door and you go, my God, this is this is not a farmhouse at all so that's a specific observation but it's also how these houses seek to blend in with the surroundings that they're not seeking to impress they're kind of under the radar they're vernacular and to what extent was that and you've talked about in your book a political statement as in not to attract attention or envy or reinforce hierarchy and status that they were even though they were private they were democratic and not aristocratic there is I think there is a very strong theme in liberal party builders of different sorts so with politicians to to clients of creating an architecture which is as you'd correctly put it Martin, not Georgian one staggering discovery I'd say staggering for me there'll be many people who did know about these things is that the area around Smith Square in London, south of Westminster Abbey which was mostly a mixture of Georgian slums with Victorian works of various kinds and some commercial buildings there was a gasworks there was a Victorian chamber of lawyer's offices but mostly Georgian slums around there was completely rebuilt to look the way it does today on the initiative of the London County Council which was run by the Progressive Party so all that area around there which filled up with Queen Anne period houses the best ones are by Horace Field there are two really fine ones in Cowley Street by Horace Field it was built to recreate a kind of Stuart architecture and a Stuart enclave in London that had in fact never existed at the time this was extraordinary to me I thought I knew that area well it turned out I didn't so there is there is definitely a feeling and it tends to be more it's not only hinted at it's sometimes said explicitly that what liberals were doing was that they were producing a kind of architecture which was very different to what they saw as being the Tory century of the big landowners and their big houses we're probably familiar with the rude things that Victorian architects had to say about Palladian houses and about 18th century houses in general very good on invective on houses of those periods but in fact even the country life people whose turn of phrase was often enormously subtle and very accurate even those people were sometimes quite brutal ascribing for example 18th or early 19th particularly didn't like early 19th century classical architecture and they would describe it as a crime for example when Robert Smirt pulls down a to do building and replaces it with a block of his own crime is what Weaver says about it and Weaver is a very gently spoken person the story of Gideon Park tells you an awful lot about attitudes Gideon Park was the was a garden suburb in Romford you can go to it on the Elizabeth line if it ever opens and it is it was a the initiative of liberal party activists one was an MP and the other two became MPs and what they built there was a little collection of houses almost all of them in variations of the Tudor style there was great of interest at the time this is 1910 about the a great deal of interest about how small can you build a good quality house these are small houses, cheap houses very high quality houses for all that they were 300 pounds and 500 pounds 375 I think and 500 pounds and in the middle of the site when it was developed was a very large 18th century house built on the site of a medieval one when the visitors guide to Gideon Park was produced what is astonishing about it is that it pretends in effect that the big 18th century house was not actually there the guidebook talks about the glories of the Tudor and medieval house that had been there and anyone who read the catalogue would think that it was still there but the enormous big white block that actually was there was completely ignored as if it was a brutalist kind of car park in the central pathways but quite astonishing so there is that and I think there is a feeling and it develops out of the three acres and a cow movement of Lake Victoria in England there is a feeling that an Englishman's house should look like the Englishman built it himself these Tudor houses that are made from local materials you can kind of imagine that the person who lives there actually built it themselves in a way that the person in the Baroque house the person in the Gothic revival house would not have been able to build the house itself there is something of that going on and it's on the edge of being explicit and there's occasionally there's a flash that indicates that it's true and there is Mrs. Asquith who in some sort maybe is a kind of Mary Antoinette figure living in her perfect Tudor barn which she has had restored to look even more like a perfect Tudor barn it's actually it's instantly recently been extended very well in much the same style so there is a consistent history here and there's a very strong connection I think between liberals and the architecture that book ends the 18th century Yeah, thank you so much that was an excellent response and following up I've got about half a dozen questions here some are very specific and I might leave those for a moment because they're things that you can answer in a moment but I'm going to turn to Helen Wilde she says thank you for your brilliant lecture Tim you shed new light on the relationship to the past in this crucial period I'm interested that your book focuses on liberal politicians and individuals following on from Martin's question were there elements of the Tudor and Stuart period that you think appealed to these people for political and ideological reasons? Well, some of that I suppose I've covered just now but I add a bit more to it because they were often being creative rather than simply nostalgic I mean nostalgic again like romantic I think the buildings are less like that in reality than is sometimes said but the one very interesting building and I think it actually appears in one of Ines Bit's stories actually is Lynn Castle now Margot Asquith had three brothers the brothers to her annoyance the brothers inherited the huge fortune made by their father Sir Charles Tennant for dry bleach in Glasgow and they spent it very quickly on expensive houses and in all cases they were existing houses that were remodeled so Jack Tennant asks Lutians to remodel his house that then became called Great Nathan Hall it looks like a new Edwardian house it isn't, it's a remodeled old one you can see at the edges funnily enough at the narrow ends of the house you can see the old bits peeping out and his brother Frank nearby restores Lynn Castle and what is very striking is that they've come from where the family house was called the Glen it was in the borders it was David Bryce house that's the kind of architecture that they all said they liked they at Lynn Castle what Frank Tennant does with the architect Robert Lorimer who'd worked on the family home in Scotland he builds a kind of castle that is a mixture of Scottish and English it has the stonework of the old medieval part with its round tower again and the Edwardian part it kind of merges together but what makes it stand out is the fact that it has a red tiled roof now English castles don't by and large have red tiled roofs a building in Scotland however of course is very likely to have a red tiled roof this is something in between so they're flat tiles and they're bright red and I think that there might have been a suggestion there of a kind of British castle a castle that was simultaneously English and Scottish there are other buildings that are doing something like this the there is a house by E. Guy Dorber outside Godelming today it's a convent and on one side on the garden side it's clearly English Tudor in style but on the entrance side on the northern side it's a mixture of Scottish and French of the same kind of periods of 17th century mixture of Scottish so it's providing a sort of alternative history it's as if the 18th century as if the the the wars of the 18th the civil war the 17th century had never happened as if the stewards had never gone away as if the Hanoverians had never arrived as if everything had worked out differently from 1625 onwards and created an idealized version of an architecture which might have mixed French and Scottish and English together so there's a great deal of imagination I think in in in those areas Thank you we've got a few more minutes I'm going to turn to Elsa Boyd who has more of a kind of practical question she said how much of these sort of conversions and expansions were to do with modern convenience hidden perhaps heating electricity etc oh it's not a priority is there still a lot of servants it's well you know there's an enormous amount of interest in precisely this I was saying earlier on how the Edwardians have virtually worked out how to plan a house by the time you get to the the First World War the Gideon Park catalogue gives a detailed description of every single one of its hundred and twenty or so little houses and you see a lot of developments in that which are are designs for servantless housing you see other things like bike stores integrated into the house for example what we would now call lifestyle design of one kind or another Gideon Park has got a modern kitchen and scullery arrangement as opposed to a living kitchen and then a back place for the other bit so this is all changing very fast not only at the big scale and at the small scale what it does at the big scale and the big houses Lim Castle is a very good example Kingsgate to some extent is that all the stuff that you need to run a big Edwardian household it can make for a very picturesque kind of house that is a house by Thomas Culker the architect of the Savoy Hotel built for himself up in Totterridge and this is one of these houses that looks as if it was put together at different times when in fact it was all designed at once and what he's done on the kitchen side is put an irregular wing on it at a slight angle which was no practical reason to do but what he did was he exploited the fact that surface wings had a combination of little rooms of different sizes and so on in order to build a knowingly picturesque addition that looks as if it might have been either there before the main part of the house was built or added afterwards but in fact it was all conceived at once so they were enjoying it and they were making the most of it and this is true of the large houses as it is true of the very smallest houses. Thank you. Just a question from Judith Teesdale and I think the answer is yes he said, did you research how clients for these houses chose their architects? You spoke of design decisions as though they were the choices made specifically by the architects but the clients must have had a say and might have driven the sometimes eclectic mixes of styles in conventions. Yes, Judith, that's absolutely right and this is why I think the country life is so significant. Yeah, I'm an architect and I've been reading the architectural review since I was at school and we tend as architecture historians where we tend to think that what is going on in architecture is going to appear first in the professional press. The reason why country life is so distinct is that it's talking directly to the clients it's not talking directly to the architects and that means it can do a lot of things that for example, the architectural review which is appeared at the same time as country life, the style that they can't do. The editors of the architectural review they may have had their own interests and sometimes they did grind their own axis but essentially they had to publish the stuff that they were sent and when they ran out of stuff that they were sent the editors who were luckily a very talented group of people published their own houses sometimes more than once that's what they're doing. Now the country life on the other hand publishes what tipping first of all and later weaver want to publish. So it takes a very wide range of interests from historic buildings to new buildings and they do it precisely as they want and they can focus on the subjects that interest them. Now I think it's quite likely that Lord Avery found Romaine Walker through country life because just before he invites Romaine Walker to come and work on Kingsgate Castle for him country life had done a large I think two or possibly even three week article about buildings designed by Romaine Walker for Robert Hudson, his great client another person who became rich by inventing a dry version of something that hadn't been dry before dry soap I suppose a bit like laksa powder or something and what country life had focused on in these articles was the extreme modern efficiency of the estate buildings that Romaine Walker had designed. Now these were buildings that were very picturesque and Tudor in appearance but inside they were beautifully planned and they had the latest machinery and what country life could say and the architectural review never thought of saying this as far as I know is that there isn't a conflict between these Tudor buildings and the modern machinery because the Tudor buildings are made up from modular pieces of timber they're slotted together in a regular and efficient way they seem to them to be all part of the same story. Now it's much more likely that Lord Avery found Romaine Walker by reading country life and it would have appealed enormously to a logical rational person like Avery to read about the success of these estate buildings that would have interested him whereas it's very unlikely I think having read Avery's biography that he would have been that interested in the various style wars that occupied the professional press at the time. So the short answer is country life I think. Thank you, lovely. I'm afraid we're gonna have to wrap things up at this because it's just after two o'clock and it just remains for me to thank Tim for his interlating talk and providing this overview and the subject and of course his book which I hope you'll all delve into or even purchase. Somebody asked, thank you, Tim is there a way to purchase a signed copy of your book? That's very cool. Let me say I've seen your kind comments everywhere in the chat and it's a pleasure to see them and to see them. Someone also asked about stand-in if I may just say yes, that also is a mixture house exactly like one of these. I'd be delighted to hear from anyone. If anyone would like me to sign their copy of their book I'd be more than happy. You can find me on the Cambridge University website or give you my email address. I was delighted to hear from anyone, not just on this subject but on a previous project that was supported by the Paul Mellon Centre which Martin kindly mentioned at the start which is Vicarage's and Parsonage's 19th century ones. I just can't hear enough about any of these subjects. I'm always delighted to hear from anyone on any of this. Please do put any questions directly to me. Thank you so much, Tim. That's very kind of you. Well, we've got a lively programme of events over the next months, details of which you'll find on our website. And I want to draw your attention to the six part public lecture course beginning on the 7th of April, Britain and the world in the Middle Ages, images and reality that takes place in our lecture room and it's live streamed at our book launch at 6pm on the 26th of April, Pevsner Architectural Guides Birmingham and the Black Country. This is hot off the press and that takes the form of a Zoom webinar. And I'm sure we'll see lots of you then. So from all of us here, Tim, Steph and me. Goodbye and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you very much.