Tradition in Early Modernity: romanticism, nationhood and the invention of the 'English' house, 1780 - 1840

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Tradition in Early Modernity will examine the invention of traditional 'English' domestic architecture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a counterpoint to, and refuge from, early modernity. The project aims to establish the impact of romanticism and picturesque theory across the built environment, the spectrum of English (excluding Scotland, Ireland, Wales) domestic architecture including the anonymous and everyday. The project will tease out the theoretical, formal and cultural threads that precipitated the invention of the traditional 'English' house and will seek to assess its impact upon the English built environment. Prior to nineteenth century pan-European national historicism, the Arts and Crafts Movement and twentieth-century inter-war Mock-Tudor, traditionalism in British housing design first emerged out of the architectural theory and design practice of national romanticism and the rural picturesque: 'a manifestation of the nation's coming to being as a system of cultural significance within modernity' (Bhabha, 1990). These intellectual movements responded to the Enlightenment's universalist progressive rationalism and the social and environmental changes of the agricultural and industrial revolutions, rural flight and urban growth, through a new cultural reverence for a notional rural past as a place of national identity. In architectural design, this romantic conception of nationhood was (is) represented through the reproduction of the forms, materials and construction details of traditional rural buildings. The picturesque celebrated the irregularity and variety of vernacular buildings and took an amoral aesthetic pleasure in scenes of rural poverty and material decay (Macarthur, 1997). Proto-romantic English theories of the picturesque such as Udevale Price's Essay on the Picturesque sought to emphasise the specific aesthetics of place, including local building traditions, over universal, European, standards of taste. British National Romanticism further emphasised the significance of place in the formation of cultural identity and looked to rural folk traditions, including cottages, mills and farmhouses, as a source of inspiration and place of salvation (Curran, 2007; Porter and Teich, 1988). Modernity and tradition were fused in a set of complex interrelationships characterized by ambiguity and fluidity and tradition has subsequently maintained a presence within post-romantic modernity; what Ananda Roy has described as the 'corrupting impact of history upon modernity' (Roy, 2000). Tradition can be better understood not in terms of opposition but as a creative, adaptive and reflective process within modernity (Asquith and Vellinga, 2006; Bronner, 2006). Tradition in Early Modernity is an original interdisciplinary research project that will draw upon literary studies, cultural theory, vernacular (folk) studies, and architectural and design history; cross-referencing contemporary critical writings on tradition, identity and place with eighteenth/nineteenth century primary sources within a fieldwork-based historical study. Research will be divided between the archival study of treatises and pattern books at the British Library and field studies of extant houses (with particular reference to the South West which saw extensive estate and early suburban villa building activity in this period; to be compared with suburban villas of early industrial northern cities). While including the works of relevant architects it is a study of the invention of an 'English' domestic architecture not a conventional canonical study. The project will link current research on the eighteenth (Design History, 2009) and twentieth centuries (TDSR and JAE, 2009) and bring to fruition the wider project: Tradition in Modernity, 1700 - 2000.