The English House: The Story of a Nation at Home, by Clive Aslet
Earlier this year a brave publisher republished in two volumes and nearly 800 pages the classic book on English domestic architecture, The English House, by Hermann Muthesius. It had first appeared in German as Das Englische Haus in 1904. Clive Aslet’s new book takes the same useful title for his much briefer account of some 21 dwellings that encapsulate for him the enduring qualities of the English home.
Both Aslet in the 21st century and Muthesius in the 20th share the same strong sentiments about houses and the English. They both are convinced that domestic comfort and style has been perfected in England and that the intensity of our love of home and the homely virtues is unique in the world. Aslet trails behind him his years as editor of Country Life, where he spent his time often writing about houses in that journal which has, since its birth, celebrated houses for its readers and enhanced the profits of estate agents. Now he is an ‘editor at large’, and so nothing is safe from his pen and perusal. But he is a cautious writer who is unlikely to make any explosive judgments or crucial academic discoveries.
He starts this book modestly by describing, in the manner of an amateur detective, the history of his own modest terrace house in that strange London hinterland of Pimlico. He has checked the 1871 census when his house was occupied by five Victorian women; two widows, the wife of a Belgravia house steward, her baby daughter and a spinster lodger. He evokes the ordinariness of the history of most London houses, and explains that his intention in his book is to explore the social as well as the architectural history of his selection of houses.
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