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Neo-Tudor and its Enemies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Gavin Stamp
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Has any architecture – even the concrete ‘shoe boxes’ of the 1960s – received such consistent abuse as the neo-Tudor of the first half of the twentieth century – especially in its middle-class, suburban manifestations (Fig. 1)? ‘The abominable Tudoristic villa of the By-pass road’, ‘The worst bogus Tudor housing estates’, and ‘Those repellent, jerry-built, sham-Tudor houses that disfigure England’ are some contemporary judgements. And as far as that enthusiast for the modern, Anthony Bertram, in his 1935 book, The House: A Machine for Living In, was concerned:

The man who builds a bogus Tudoresque villa or castellates his suburban home is committing a crime against truth and tradition: he is denying the history of progress, denying his own age and insulting the very thing he pretends to imitate by misusing it.

Type
Research Article
Information
Architectural History , Volume 49 , 2006 , pp. 1 - 33
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2006

References

Notes

1 Bertram, Anthony, Design (Harmondsworth, 1938), p. 61 Google Scholar; Richards, J. M., An Introduction to Modern Architecture (Harmondsworth, 1940), p. 87 Google Scholar; Gloag, John, ‘The Suburban Scene’, in Britain and the Beast, ed. Clough Williams-Ellis (London, 1938), p. 199.Google Scholar

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8 Loudon, J. C., An Encyclopdedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture, new edn (London, 1835), p. 792 Google Scholar. Frank Kelsall points out to me John Betjeman’s description in a 1946 letter of Sir Ninian Comper’s house, The Priory in Beulah Hill, which apparently dated from 1836: ‘Such a funny house, my dears, all sort of Tudor but not the real thing, you know, like they build nowadays, but in plaster, did you ever?’ (John Betjeman Letters, ed. Candida Lycett Green, 1 [London, 1994], p. 381).

9 I owe this observation to Michael Hall.

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32 The New Ship Inn was rebuilt by Ernest R. Barrow, the King & Queen Hotel in 1931–32 by Clayton & Black; I am grateful to David Beevers for telling me after which monarchs this latter inn was originally named.

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37 Caption to photograph of the bar counter in ‘At the Sign of the White Horse’ in a Tavern car, 1949, quoted in King, Mike, An Illustrated History of Southern Coaches (London, 2003), p. 160 Google Scholar. I am grateful to Nicholas Long for this reference.

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41 That such plans derived from houses by Unwin in Hampstead Garden Suburb and elsewhere was suggested to me by Andrew Saint.

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50 Kemp & Tasker designed flats for Morrell’s in Heme Hill where they also designed two houses in Dorchester Drive in contrasting styles: no. 5, which is modernistic, and ‘Tudor Stacks’, now demolished; both are illustrated in Gavin Stamp (ed.), ‘Britain in the Thirties’, Architectural Design, 49, nos 10–11 (1979), p. 17.

51 For the Borders case, see McCulloch, Andrew, ‘The Mortgage Strikes’, History Today, 51 (June 2001), pp. 20–21 Google Scholar; also Jackson, , Semi-Detached London, op. cit., pp. 197–99 Google Scholar; Blake, Lewis, Before the War: A Portrait of Bromley & District 1929-1939 (Bromley, 1985), pp. 30–33.Google Scholar

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62 Oliver, Paul, ‘The Galleon on the Front Door. Imagery of House and Garden’, in Oliver, , Davis, and Bentley, , Dunroamin, pp. 161 and 157 Google Scholar; also see Stamp, Gavin, ‘Through Eden Park to Arcady’, Event, 4-10 March 1981, pp. 16–18.Google Scholar

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