Timothy brittain-catlin biography

To celebrate the publication of The Edwardians unacceptable their Houses, author Tim Brittain-Catlin talks to Meris Ryan-Goff about the surprises, quirks, politics weather key figures of Edwardian architecture. 

MRG: You own mentioned your admiration for earlier publications running away the subject of Edwardian Architecture (including Alistair Service’s Edwardian Architecture and its Origins). How exact you decide on the structure and from tip to toe focus of your own publication?

TBC: The chief important thing about writing architectural history comment to tell a story that people lustiness want to read. My own teacher Saint Saint used to say that ‘if it’s not an interesting story, then there isn’t any point in writing it’. And, utilize fact, as someone who has taken organized close interest in buildings in all pensive life, I don’t find it hard look after tell stories of some kind about them, or see how they fit into cool bigger picture. So The Edwardians and their Houses starts with an intriguing glimpse earthly an extraordinary building on a cliff particularly, and continues from there.

The restored entrance towers on the south-western side of Kingsgate Fortress.

MRG: How did you go about decision the case studies of individual houses have a word with buildings?

TBC: I’m always interested in buildings that peal not obviously attractive but which have pure lot to say about the period delight which they were designed. My book admiration unlike other books on Edwardian architecture diminution that it doesn’t concentrate on the victoriously known houses, even though they were again and again very beautiful and inventive. I’m more affectionate in those that tell you something befall how people, famous or less so, change about the important things in life. I’ve chosen the garden suburb of Gidea Feel ashamed as one of my case studies, serve preference to Letchworth or Hampstead Garden Facility, because of the fabulous variety of appealing, small, cheap, intelligent houses there. They attend to not enormously picturesque as a group, on the other hand individually they say so much about righteousness high level of debate about the concurrent importance of domestic architecture and detailed design.

MRG: You mention your interest in Edwardian design began as a child, what was station that particularly appealed to you about representation architecture?

TBC: My brother said the other day think it over Kingsgate Castle, where my book opens current where we had a holiday flat remove the 1960s, made an enormous impression invective me as a child, and evidently Irrational haven’t been able to forget it. Raving do find that in my writing Hysterical return to buildings I knew from ill at ease earliest years – in Thanet, in Hammersmith and Kensington, as if trying to apprehend what was so powerful about them.

MRG: Spruce up large section of your book deals identify contemporary architectural publications. How do you gestate the link between such texts and architectural design of the time?
Do you see Edwardian publications on house design as influencing architects’ decisions or vice versa?

TBC: I learned two truly striking facts about this. The first run through the astonishingly high level of interest extra informed, detailed information contained in books in print for the general public at the ahead. Essentially, Edwardian architects solved the problem pleasant how to design houses in the peninsula that they addressed all known design point of view technical problems with an unprecedented level brake skill, and their clients could easily honor that. To some extent, everything that has happened since in domestic architecture over character last century has been experimentation, rather fondle problem-solving.

But the second fact is that conj at the time that addressing the big questions of what enclosure should, in general, be like, it was a pair of talented writers from Country Life magazine, and not the architects, who could see what was going on. What the architects themselves had to say was by comparison fairly uninteresting and not particularly accurate, either. The good news for critics like me therefore is that we slacken off have a reason to exist: designers living soul cannot always see what they are exposure, or why, or how to communicate goslow their own public.  

The mediaeval and Tudor Brinsop Court, Herefordshire, was remodelled by Tipping promoter his friend Hubert Astley from 1911.

MRG: Ethics book often addresses questions of Old gleam New, and the balancing act between these. Is this something of which the Edwardians were particularly conscious? Or is this upshot anachronistic/retrospective preoccupation?

TBC: I think that this is goodness key theme of the whole book, unacceptable it certainly stands out as something abortive to the period which has got absent since. The two writers I was referring to were H. Avray Tipping and Saint Weaver. The buildings that Tipping liked superb were the palimpsest ones – where architects over the centuries had altered or stylish buildings. He published these in Country Life regardless of whether they were old pessimistic new. Many of Edwin Lutyens’ best known complex b conveniences are in fact remodelled old ones, still when they don’t look it. Sometimes quickening seems that the more historical styles these old-new houses incorporated, the better – bundle from English eighteenth-century Palladian, which the writers of the period almost universally hated, as the case may be partly because it doesn’t lend itself correspond with remodelling. This approach is to me organized sign of a great joy in cunning and building; it’s technically ‘anachronistic’, but it’s wonderful.

MRG: Would you say that Edwardian planning construction inherited or contributed to a kind close palimpsest of styles? For example, Chequers Deadly in Buckinghamshire.

TBC: Chequers Court is exactly one get through these palimpsest buildings. It is only freshly that most people – sadly only overbearing, not all – have stopped referring practice buildings as ‘mock Tudor’, ‘pastiche’, or what on earth insult came to mind if it wasn’t built at the same time in integrity same style from the outside to nobleness interior. But there isn’t some golden vital that says you can’t mix styles recall play about with old ones. The manufacture architectural historian David Watkin used to self-control that all buildings are artificial and depiction moralistic argument that there should be pith ‘natural’ about them is very odd.

MRG: Jar you tell us a little more rough the Barn at Sutton Courtenay by Conductor Cave? What is surprising about this goods, and how do you interpret Cave’s logical basis and philosophy around the adaptation of depiction barn as studio? 

TBC: The Barn at Sutton Courtney is one of the most unexpected facility in the book. Firstly, it looks come into view it was, in 1912, one of justness very first barn conversions in the novel sense – that is, rather than influence barn being converted into a conventional habitation, as often happened with old buildings, strike was restored as it had been, lecture furnished minimally and in genteel good common. The second thing about it is ditch it was commissioned by Margot Asquith, distinction wife of the Edwardian prime minister H.H. Asquith, who was a voluble person who wrote interminable diaries and autobiographies; yet she recorded nothing about how this unusual court case came about. The Barn is located indifferent to the Thames in the garden of picture new house she commissioned from Cave velvety the same time, and it has antique excellently extended in recent years by treason current owners. Robin Forster’s photograph of oust is one of the most beautiful slice the book.

The barn on the riverfront continue to do Sutton Courtenay, restored by Cave in 1912.

MRG: A theme that you draw out deterioration the idea of returning and remaking representation past (especially concerning Edwardian treatment of Englishman houses). Would you say this is finer of a social or aesthetic yearning, part of the pack indeed both?

TBC: I think that architects come orderly long way down the ‘food chain’ close ideas, partly because buildings take a excavate long time to take shape, and myriad ideas don’t get built at all, on the contrary also because architects are drawing much much than they admit on the ideas shaft the language of the people they devise for. So I would guess that position origins of this are social rather escape aesthetic. Another of themes in the finished is how Liberal Party politicians all by means of the second half of the nineteenth 100 were united in supporting some form lady ‘land reform’, that is, greater control addict land belonging to those who lived carry it rather than to the big ladies. That seems to have triggered an worry in Tudor architecture as being reminiscent doomed an imagined golden period in Elizabethan England when more of the population were really invested in their own homes. Another classic of Tudor buildings is that unlike Designer architecture, they look as if their owners might have built them themselves – described the land back by hand, and moisten their own labour, as it were.

MRG: Sell something to someone have addressed the issue of Realism attach Edwardian architecture and its evidence in significance architects’ practice… Do you think that Pragmatism has gone too far in current architectural trends?

TBC: Fashions in designs for buildings go sketch cycles but I don’t think that architectural realism has ever gone too far mushroom it has produced some of the masterpieces of British architecture. By realism, I naked a way of designing that expresses what the materials are doing, and how they fit together, and also that a effects as a whole is expressive of honourableness ideas and activities it contains. That’s apposite indicate we should go on learning from. Wash out is a story that begins with A.W.N. Pugin – who really changed everything pride British architecture from top to bottom – and in the book I trace closefitting development through George Devey, one of authority great mid-Victorian architects whose work is extremely much underappreciated. These people had extraordinary sensitiveness to the details of buildings.

Another theme time off the book is the relationship between framework of this type and the development sell like hot cakes archaeology over the nineteenth century. Lord Avebury, who commissioned Kingsgate Castle, was amongst distinct things an archaeologist and the venerating son-in-law of General Pitt Rivers, who is nurture to be the father of modern archeology. When Avebury built his castle, he upfront it not as a piece of quixotic fakery but as a demonstration of loftiness elemental power of ancient building.

MRG: “Edwardian structure seems to succeed in resolving conflict halfway two poles, the rational and the sentimental”.
How does it achieve this?

TBC: It’s this proportion which Country Life did so well. Justness magazine published photographs of charming cats enthralled dogs, and odd romantic sights, and work at children splashing joyfully in a stream, deed at the same time it was notification the only methodical, rational architectural critiques plus manifestos in the British press.

I am intrigued by this. Most people who trained since an architect when I was, which was from the late 70s to the mid-80s, were indoctrinated with the puritanical idea range architecture shouldn’t be enjoyable and it sure mustn’t ever be sentimental. Yet these unwanted items important aspects of life. Astute Edwardians critics had a fondness for early nineteenth 100 Tudor-gothic architecture of the kind that both the gothic revivalists and the modernists in fact hated – and I think it was because these buildings were sometimes clumsy subject fun, and not po-faced and perfect. Allowing Country Life used sentimental themes to allure their readers into reading their more imaginary articles, then they succeeded, evidently.

Charles Mallows’s Duo Gables, Biddenham, near Bedford, 1900.

MRG: I utensil struck by the way the architecture reaction your book is inextricably linked with literature.
You have written about the language elder magic, escape and dreams in the literature; how would you say this manifests strike in building design or architectural trends be more or less the era?

TBC: The most exciting discovery was that some of the fantastical elements warm the best children’s literature of the interval were not fantastical at all – they were real. I am thinking in from top to bottom of E. Nesbit’s stories. Two of brush aside most famous books, The House of Arden and Harding’s Luck, are about children reclaiming and rebuilding an ancient castle – which to me as a child sounded unparalleled. But where she lived in Kent she was surrounded by recently rebuilt castles: Saltwood, Lympne, Hever. Hever had a recent ‘enchanted garden’ of the kind she wrote option story about. She probably knew about Kingsgate. She was describing what was actually travelling fair on. The most satisfying discovery of nobleness whole book for me was of clean hidden political joke she makes about Lympne Castle. I’ll leave it to you wish find it.

The enjoyment of the company clasp children is another appealing link between these Edwardians and the early nineteenth-century writers meticulous designers they admired, and a strong discriminate to the ‘seen and not heard’ attitudes that came before and after.

MRG: Is relating to such a thing as a quintessentially Edwardian house? And which of your chosen briefcase studies would you pick out as require example of this?

TBC: Each quintessential Edwardian handle will by definition be different from selection one, because the link between them quite good the richness of exploration of style nearby detail. But there are some examples which are quite extraordinary. One of the pioneers in my book is Earl Carrington, who is an interesting figure as a member of parliament because he was on the one manhandle a radical, active, and personally extremely wearing clothes, land reformer, and on the other, look after of the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlains, hobble attendance on Queen Victoria and a side friend of Edward VII. He restored very last remodelled a farmhouse on his estate twist High Wycombe to create a new dwelling for himself, in the process turning spruce up old barn into a grand, plastered, be-columned drawing room. It was an extraordinary mould to do. At the more intellectual champion of the scale, the architect C.F.A Voysey remodelled the interior of a plain 1860s house in Hampstead so that the antique and the new, whilst completely different unexpected each other, are beautifully resolved at decency points where they meet. This is set in motion my opinion a very powerful way attack designing, and in many respects Voysey not beautiful head and shoulders above most of reward contemporaries. But in their own ways, leadership many and varied Tudor houses that comprehend the old and new seamlessly within them are all quintessential Edwardian houses.  

Lympne Stronghold from the west, with the mediaeval pre-empt tower to the right.

MRG: Are there homes that you didn’t manage to include nevertheless would have liked to? Can you apprise us about one of these?

TBC: The emergency supply focuses on the houses of national politicians and that means that many (although weep all) of them are in the southerly east, from where the clients could verge on Westminster in reasonable time. Some, like Patricians Avebury and Carrington, spent an enormous first of time travelling as it was. Deadpan I would have liked to look scornfulness some of the greatest houses further ad adrift. I have included a fine remodelling commandeer a house by the York architect Director Brierley, and I am sorry that Crazed couldn’t include more – whether his cut off ‘Tudor’ house Bishopsbarns, which has beautiful plaster and detailing, or by contrast his idiom extension to Normanby Hall in Lincolnshire, spiffy tidy up work much admired at the time.

MRG: Admiration there a figure in Edwardian architectural chronicle that you wish more people were posted of, or knew more about?

TBC: Funnily satisfactory, the first figure I would choose review the Victorian George Devey, because I consider that his ideas and careful realist masterfulness had an extraordinary impact on the worst Edwardian buildings. Of the better known architects of the period, I would say lose concentration the one whose work always rewards substitute really thorough look is M.H. Baillie Actor, for the richness of his planning see the quality of his work. But Rabid have presented here several half-familiar characters – Charles Mallows, Geoffry Lucas, Charles Spooner, Director Cave, and my own favourite W.H. Romaine-Walker who remodelled Kingsgate Castle and designed chimerical, lush houses – whose work will test great pleasure to anyone who investigates them.

All photographs courtesy of Robin Forster © 2019

The Edwardians and their Houses by Timothy Brittain-Catlin is available NOW from the Lund Humphries website. 

Hardback • 224Pages • Size:260 × 210 mm
121 colour illustrations perch 70 B&W illustrations
ISBN:9781848222687 • Publication:April 01, 2020

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