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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
‘A variety of buildings are necessary for carrying on the business of field culture; the nature and construction of which must obviously be different, according to the kind of farm for which they are intended. Suitable buildings … are scarcely less necessary to the husbandman than implements and machinery … There is nothing which marks more decidedly the state of agriculture in any district than the plan and execution of the buildings.’ These words, written in 1844 but paraphrasing remarks made by Arthur Young in the 1790s, emphasize the importance that well-designed buildings held in the eyes of the improver-landlords and agricultural theorists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the farmsteads on most great estates were rebuilt to ideal plans. Surprisingly, these buildings have received little attention from architectural historians despite the fact that many of the leading architects of the period including Robert Adam, Sir John Soane, Henry Holland, James and Samuel Wyatt and Thomas Cundy Snr were all involved to a greater or lesser degree in the design of model estate buildings.
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