Past Events

Making and Remaking the Edwardian House

Research Lunch – Timothy Brittain-Catlin

  • 1 April 2022
  • 1:00 – 2:00 pm
  • This event is part of the Paul Mellon Centre's Spring Research Lunch series.
  • Online

Many of the well-known new Edwardian mansions were actually remodellings of older houses or incorporated within them fragments of other buildings that had been recently demolished. During his research for The Edwardians and their Houses, Timothy Brittain-Catlin identified a series of key houses which illustrated how the attitude of their architects and owners towards historic structures was quite different from the one prevalent today.

Concentrating on three key buildings – Lord Avebury’s Kingsgate Castle in Kent, Earl Carrington’s Daws Hill at Wycombe Abbey in Buckinghamshire and W.D. Caröe’s family home at Vann in Surrey – this talk identifies new research areas that emerged from the research for the book. All three houses incorporate details or older elements of other ones, in the case of Kingsgate and Daws Hill pieces that had come from other homes in family ownership. The subtitle of the book is 'The New Life of Old England', drawing on the fact that there was an element of renewal in these buildings that also influenced the appearance of new houses designed at the same time.

Adaptive reuse has become a priority for architects working today and the research behind The Edwardians and their Houses has uncovered some of the historical and intellectual origins behind it.

About the speaker

  • Close up of Timothy Brittain-Catlin

    Timothy Brittain-Catlin is a fellow of Homerton College and leads the Architecture Apprenticeship course at the University of Cambridge. The Edwardians and their Houses was published by Lund Humphries in 2020 with support from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art and was shortlisted for the 2021 William M.B. Berger prize for British Art History.