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Neo-Tudor and its Enemies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

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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
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2006

References

Notes

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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.

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