The Cottage in Interwar England: Class and the Picturesque
by George Entwistle
(London: Lund Humphries, 2024)
ISBN: 978-1-84822-698-2 (hardback)
248 pp., 161 col. & b&w illus.
£45.00

This book, the cover of which shows what John Betjeman (1906-84) celebrated as the “child of the First War, … the cottage of our dreams”, fills a very large hole in the literature, a lacuna that has existed largely because the building of some four million local-authority and owner-occupied dwellings between 1919 and 1939, hailed in the pages of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung as “the only great achievement of the English people since the War”, has been grossly undervalued, mostly because it had no truck with Modernist theorising, and the dominant æsthetic was that of the Picturesque. As the author of this excellent tome puts it, private homebuyers’ æsthetic preferences, it transpired, were part of an historical continuum, congruent with the model cottages described in many of the Picturesque’s early nineteenth-century pattern books. As Terence Conran (1931-2020) observed: “many detached and semi-detached houses built between the wars pretend to be cottages”. Albert Richardson (1880-1964) was not impressed: “as a nation”, he wryly observed, “we have sold our birthright for a mess of cottages”.

However, there had been numerous publications that described and illustrated designs for “rustic” dwellings from the 18th century: Humphry Repton (1752-1818) was a pioneer of the “cottage style” that was to be such an important ingredient of the Picturesque Movement, and his disciple, John Claudius Loudon (1782-1843) also promoted it in his publications, drawing on work by Edward Buckton Lamb (1806-69) and others. There were numerous books of designs by ambitious young architects, keen to promote their own careers by drawing attention to their skills in the creation of agreeably rustic gate-lodges and other houses for those who worked on their estates. Among those jostling for attention were Thomas Frederick Hunt (c.1791-1831), Thomas Downes Wilmot Dearn (1777-1853), John Plaw (c.1745-1820), and William Fuller Pocock (1779-1849), while Henry Roberts (1803-76) drew on vernacular architecture for his range of designs for the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes produced during the 1840s and early 1850s. 

Entwistle’s book shows how, in so many ways, the idea of the rural dwelling impinged on aspirations after the catastrophe of 1914-18: as an architectural and social concept; as a “problematic” (as Entwistle sees it) continuity with class and cultural dimensions; and in its connections with the æsthetic theories and manifestations of the Picturesque. Indeed, that idea influenced domestic architecture in England long after the emergence of the Picturesque as an æsthetic category in the latter part of the eighteenth century. As Entwistle rightly observes, the word “cottage” was an “ideologically loaded domestic architectural type at the heart of the housing debate”: David Lloyd George (1863-1945 — Prime Minister 1916-22), in his Manifesto for the 1918 General Election, pledged to acquire land for men who had served in the war “for cottages with gardens, allotments or smallholdings”. 

Certainly the idealised dream of a country home loomed large in the minds of many who had been uprooted from the country only a generation or two before: it was no accident that many who served as soldiers in the 1914-18 conflict carried copies of A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman (1859-1936) with them in the trenches (I know that one of my uncles had a battered edition with him all through his time in Flanders, and he was not the only one by any means). Player’s Cigarettes also issued a series of cards entitled Picturesque Cottages in 1929: Entwistle illustrated several examples from this series, one of which depicted an elaborate timber-framed Elizabethan house with a jettied gabled element, described in the text at the back of the card as “the type … so extensively copied by the modern builder”, but the picture shows a building that is rather grander than a cottage. The comforting view of creeper-covered thatched cottages near a parish church, such as that shown on Card No.7 in the series depicting exemplars in Winterborne Stickland, Dorset, is fairly typical of the kind of reassuring, familiar image of the imagined Paradise that was a rural, peaceful, civilised England.

But the Domestic Revival, which had grown out of the Gothic Revival, an interest in vernacular and mediæval dwellings, the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, and the powerful stimulus of an appreciation of the Picturesque (which was probably the most influential force that informed much English architecture until the extraordinarily universal embrace by architects of the Modernist cult put paid to any such Romantic notions), encouraged an architectural language in the design of housing that could be seen, with regional variations, all over the country. Excellent examples can still be enjoyed at Port Sunlight in The Wirral (begun 1888), at Bourneville now a suburb of Birmingham (created from 1894), and at Vickerstown, Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, planned in 1899 as a marine garden suburb, where William Moss Settle (1876-1905), of Ulverston, architect to the Isle of Walney Estates Co. Ltd., designed some fine terraces from 1900, not entirely innocent of influences from Port Sunlight.

Such models prompted derivatives. Many architects drew up designs for “cottages” to be erected after the “Great War” ended: the under-rated but brilliant George John Skipper (1856-1948) produced very creditable proposals for a pair of cottages to be built in Norfolk, and nearly all his work is worthy of both admiration and respect. Skipper had attended Norwich School of Art from 1872, was articled to John Thomas Lee (c.1845-1920) in  London (from 1873), worked in a building contractor’s office 1876-9, travelled in Belgium, and commenced his independent practice in East Dereham in 1879 before moving to Norwich in 1880. Skipper produced much distinguished work, as did many of his generation with that kind of traditional training: nowadays “schools of architecture” promote the acquisition of skills in fancy jargonese, obfuscatory linguistic dances, and cod psychology, all far removed from anything resembling the real world, leaving supposedly qualified architects wide open to the sort of coruscating barrages of criticism following the Grenfell Tower affair in London.

The desperate shortage of housing, exacerbated during the war when building virtually came to a standstill, inevitably pushed government intervention into action, and the admired models of Bourneville, Port Sunlight, and Hampstead Garden Village seemed to offer exemplars for the way forward. At the last development Richard Barry Parker (1867-1941) and his brother-in-law, Raymond Unwin (1863-1940), who had planned New Earswick Village near York for the Joseph Rowntree Village Trust from 1901 and the layout of the first Garden City at Letchworth, Hertfordshire (from 1903), created a successful example, a paradigm, in the ideas of low-density housing, and thus the prototype for many interwar suburban developments. The style of the housing was immensely influential.

The state of the health of the nation, revealed during recruitment for Great War cannon-fodder, drew attention to overcrowded, poor, insanitary living conditions, and it was widely accepted that something would have to be done to remedy this. Unwin was one of the guiding lights, but there were many others who realised that drastic measures were required, involving central and local government, and that private speculators could no longer be expected to be up to the colossal task. Writers such as  Henry Canova Vollam Morton (1892-1979 — with his In Search of England and other publications) and politicians, notably Stanley Baldwin (1867-1947), continued to promote the Picturesque æsthetic for housing, specifically looking to English vernacular domestic architecture, as transformed in developments such as Hampstead Garden Suburb, as the ideal. 

But there were voices raised against this, notably by Charles Herbert Reilly (1874-1948) and his colleagues at the Liverpool School of Architecture, who favoured at the time a Beaux-Arts approach with a pronounced American flavour, and Reginald Theodore Blomfield (1856-1942) felt it was his mission to divert students of his from the fashion for the Picturesque. Geoffrey Scott (1884-1929) attacked the Picturesque as a stifler of every opportunity of growth, and because its bogus connection with morality (largely a misbegotten creation of John Ruskin [1819-1900], some of whose utterances, accepted as Holy Writ by so many of his contemporaries, verge on the deranged), was deeply unhelpful, an argument he called “The Ethical Fallacy”. 

Others raised questions about affordability, suggesting that æsthetic concerns were a kind of luxury the government could not afford. Besides, no matter how fine and splendid the new housing might be, it could quickly be wrecked by certain types of tenant: “you may abolish slums, but you won’t abolish sluts and slatterns so easily. Sluts and slatterns may be expected to carry their natures with them, and in time make their new surroundings somewhat like their old”. Entwistle regards this as “high octane snobbery”, but is it? The visitor to Port Sunlight will be struck by how badly damaged are once fine groups of houses on the New Chester Road, unprotected by the Listings and Conservation policies that apply to the village proper: on that main thoroughfare from Birkenhead to Chester individuals have inserted ghastly pvc windows and those awful mass-produced doors with fanlights in them, completely wrecking the coherence of the original architecture. I have also seen what grateful tenants can do to property, reducing it to a wreck in the twinkling of an eye.

This book gains much by the number of illustrations showing drawings, with plans, of many types of houses proposed as solutions to a severe national problem. Among them are entries to the National Cottage Competition of 1917-18, including fine designs by Alexander Thomson Scott (1888-1962), Thomas Morgan Bevan (1878-1925), and William Ravenscroft (1848-1943), the like of which, were a housing competition to be held today, would not be found among the entries, not least the high standard of draughtsmanship and sensitivity to details, materials, and scale.

However, some of the modern photographs in this book are real stinkers, in particular those with absurdly violent converging verticals: two of the worst, on pp. 48 and 144, should never even have been considered for publication, let alone made it into the finished volume. The bibliography has problems as well: outdated editions superseded by far better later ones are included, ignoring the newer versions, while some key texts are omitted altogether, even though the topics on which they are based are included in the book.

Entwistle says that today, the “idea of the cottage has found a kind of equilibrium, denoting “a better, safer, quieter life away from the city”, but that “between the wars, things were more complicated. Analysis by the Oxford English Dictionary shows the word itself in much wider circulation then than now”. One reads those interwar articles, reports, speeches, and so on, when the word “cottage” and “cottager” recur in connection with The Housing Problem, but there were endemic difficulties with its meanings inextricably bound up with discussions of the problems in which the words were employed. Their histories, in culture, language, perceptions of class, the built environment, visual matters, are complex and convoluted. Both words, of course, irreverently bring to mind certain places of resort by ageing thespians for what is sometimes sniffily called “soliciting”, but on such delicate matters Entwistle restricts himself to a more confined vocabulary. 

One last thing: this tome was decently printed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over the years in reviews I have lamented the fact that so many books published in these islands these days are printed in China and elsewhere when so many of our own companies are crying out for work. I shall no longer campaign for that as I have recently been badly let down by a West Country firm of printers which has compounded the fault by trying to fudge the issues instead of putting everything to rights. This is typical of contemporary Britain: instead of immediately endeavouring to remedy matters, the umbrellas go up and every attempt, often carried to ludicrous lengths, is made to get away with the disasters rather than simply admit the errors and immediately apologise and correct them. Those sorts of cowardice, incompetence, and stupidity are obvious everywhere one looks these days, at every possible level, in just about every institution: it will all inevitably end in tears, and it deserves to do so, with an almighty crash. 

I recently received an edition of one of my books translated into Japanese and published, designed, bound, and printed in Japan: it is a beautiful job, far superior to the original English edition in every possible way, including binding (the English hardbacks fell apart in no time at all). So never again will I pen any support for British printers.