British architecture, period by period

Architectural history is usually told through cathedrals and country houses, which is a shame, because the interesting question is how a style reached the ordinary building. British architecture moves in a fairly regular rhythm: an idea arrives from abroad or from an antiquarian revival, it is built expensively for a decade or two, and then it becomes the default for everything.

Norman and Early English

The Norman contribution is mass. Thick walls, round arches, small windows and a structural logic that solves problems by adding material. Early English, from the late twelfth century, is the first British architecture with a lightness of its own: the pointed arch redistributes thrust, so the wall can be opened up, and the lancet window replaces the slit.

Almost nothing domestic survives from either period above the level of a fortified house, because ordinary building was timber and has gone.

Decorated and Perpendicular

The fourteenth century is the ornamental high point (flowing tracery, ogee curves, elaborate vaulting) and it stops abruptly with the plague. What follows is Perpendicular, the longest-running and most distinctively English of all the medieval styles: vertical panelling, four-centred arches, enormous windows, and a strong preference for repetition over invention.

Perpendicular is the language Gainsborough Old Hall is built in, and it demonstrates the point about ordinary building. The hall is not a cathedral, but the window forms, the arch profiles and the roof carpentry are the same vocabulary applied at domestic scale by craftsmen who worked on both.

The classical century and a half

Classicism arrives twice. Inigo Jones brings it directly from Palladio in the 1610s, and it does not take; then after the Restoration it arrives again and becomes the establishment language for two hundred years. The Georgian terrace is its ordinary form, and it is the most successful piece of British architecture ever devised in the sense that mattered: it could be built by anybody, anywhere, to a pattern book, and it still works.

Revival and the Victorian argument

The nineteenth century is a fight about which past to build in, and it was conducted with real passion. Pugin argued that Gothic was morally superior because it was Christian and native; the classicists argued for reason and proportion; Ruskin argued for the workman's freedom. The battle of the styles produced a Gothic Foreign Office design that was built classical after the prime minister intervened.

That argument is also the background to the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who were making the same case in a different medium at the same moment.

The twentieth century

Modernism arrives late and never fully wins. The interwar years belong to the speculative semi in a loosely Tudor dress; the post-war decades to system building and the new towns; and the end of the century to a pluralism in which no style is default. The story of twentieth-century work is taken up on the modern British architecture page, and the surviving early buildings are listed under historical buildings in the UK.

Questions about British architectural styles