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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.
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References
Notes
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