Product Description

In this groundbreaking work, Clive Aslet brings us face to face with the personalities, technologies, industries and histories that have shaped the English domestic house. The journey begins at Clive's family home in nineteenth-century London, from where we peer out at the back-breaking business of brick-making and the gory executions at Tyburn. He then takes us to twenty houses around England, each throwing open a window onto a different period of history. From the imaginative wooden house a Marlborough silk merchant built for himself after 1653's Great Fire, to a populist row of flat-roofed prefabs on the outskirts of Amersham in 1947, Clive explores how our basic concept of 'home' has evolved through the years. On the grander end of the spectrum we meet 'house as metaphor, house as art' at colossal Elveden Hall in Suffolk, a glittering tribute to the Taj Mahal that nearly bankrupted the original India owner, and the Butterfly House in Surrey, a twenty-first-century glass-and-fibres homage to nature and a glimpse at the future of housing. The English House is a complete and captivating exploration of the way the English have lived over the last millennium.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51489 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Review
`Rewarding and readable' --Daily Telegraph

Review
`Informative and entertaining...The English House is a thorough treat'

Review
`Towards the end of this wide-ranging and highly personal exploration ... The English House is a passport through a nation's building trends and capabilities'

Customer Reviews

The English home from then until now
The starting point for Clive Aslet's easy-to-read social history is his own house in London. His interest in its past - who built it, when and in what circumstances, who has lived there - broadens to encompass all periods of English dwellings from the Middle Ages up to the present.
These are not grand palaces or defensive castles; they're the houses which the middle strata of society built for themselves, inherited or developed. One example (still standing, still lived-in) is chosen for each period, from the medieval hall-house to the suburban semi.
It's an engaging read, where facts are marshalled as comfortably as the red bricks of a Jacobean mansion. I enjoyed it so much that I gave a copy as a Christmas present.