British architectural history

Simon Jenkins has, over the years, assembled a winsome array of higher coffee-table books about the kind of building which welcomes National Trust mobility scooters and the beige brethren aboard them. This is a man who knows the cardigan market. And he knows his stuff, mostly. He subscribes to a version of the Great Man school of history, which casts the great man as an exigent client who believes himself the maker or author. But, sadly, the grim-faced Bess of Hardwick did not install the glazing herself. And another promoter ever anxious for an attribution, God Almighty, did not personally carve his supplicants’ chantries. It might be his house, but

The Historic Houses Association can congratulate itself. This pressure group for country houses, founded in 1973, has proved to be one of the most effective lobbying organisations of our time. When it came into being, the future, according to the architectural historian John Cornforth, was ‘full of gloom’ for the country house. The Destruction of the Country House exhibition of 1974 revealed the extent of the crisis, which had set in a century earlier with the agricultural depression of the 1870s. That was when aristocrats who had previously relied on the income from their estates built their hopes on landing a transatlantic beauty with ‘plenty of tin’. The supply of