The English House Review by Dan Cruickshank – If Walls Could Talk | History books

HThe story used to be about wars and histories, but for architectural writer and TV presenter Dan Cruikshank, it’s more about floors and grids. In his new book, he takes an insightful tour of eight English houses, from Northumberland to Sussex, dating from the early 18th century to exactly 100 years ago, and ranging from a quaint Gothic stack to one of the first council flats. In Cruickshank’s pages, classical influences from Rome and Greece give way to the revival of medieval English Gothic and the rise of modernism.

He is particularly interested in who built and built the residences he chose, and how they got the job done. It is a new twist on the modern fashion for historians to explore the homes of commoners, rather than royalty and aristocrats, in order to tell the life stories of their occupants. This probably began with the late Gillian Tindall, who wrote a very original book about the different tenants of an old house by the Thames next to the rebuilt Globe Theatre. This was followed by several series of A House Through Time, opposite Traitors star David Olusoga.

At first glance, Cruikshank seems to have set himself a thankless task – and to drag the reader into it with him. When it comes to determining how early buildings were constructed, there’s not much to be done. “Few contemporary or intimate documents – such as letters or diaries – survive in significant numbers in this historical record [their] “But all is not lost,” he says. “What remains is to build accounts listing merchant names, amounts paid and invoice payment dates.” He admits that this poses “rather barren evidence,” and he’s not kidding: over long periods, the English House was built of yellow building materials mixed with a dense architectural language (“… a semi-elliptical colonnade consisting of four free-standing Ionic columns supporting an entire roof and flanked by arched doors”). Cruikshank could be forgiven for wishing his book would be accompanied by a television series – with drawings to explain various building techniques – and if so, he would not be the only one.

A house is not a house, as Bacharach and David rightly tell us, and fortunately Cruikshank’s research ends up revealing a surprising amount about the inhabitants of its eight properties. Palant House in Chichester, now an art gallery, was the scene of lively discussions between the puffy young man who commissioned its construction and his older wife who paid for it all. This did not go unnoticed by the tradesmen, whose business records at the house reveal frequent disputes between the spouses over what should go where and how much they should pay for it. In Hull, a man called Henry Mason built a fine house for himself in the mid-18th century, but left most of the work to his brother Nathaniel, while he enjoyed his time in London. In 1744, Nathaniel wrote him an angry letter about ‘Mrs Rawlinson’s Toy Shop, Bedford Street, Covent Garden’. This was a red light district, and as Cruickshank notes, the capital’s first children’s toy shop would not be open for another 16 years – so “it seems not unlikely that the toys available in Mrs Rawlinson’s shop would be of a distinctly adult nature”.

If the author is somewhat uncomfortable with this evidence of the enduring human comedy, he is more receptive to the dark stories it reveals. Begun in the 1890s, the Boundary Street estate in London’s Shoreditch was home to the first council flat “as we know it,” says Cruickshank. Although it replaced a notorious and fetid slum, most of the unlucky rookery residents were moved rather than rehoused. A banker’s stay in Liverpool prompts an exploration of the port’s role in the transatlantic slave trade. The house built by Christian Christians in Spitalfields, east London, may today be close to the homes of millionaire artists including Tracey Emin and Gilbert and George (and Cruickshank himself, though he doesn’t say so) but these French Protestants, fleeing Louis XIV, were only the first wave of immigrants trapped in the building. It later became a synagogue, and is now abandoned. “It only takes a little imagination to fill its shadowy corners with ghosts, and it’s hard not to strain to hear the voices of the long-dead.”