ABSTRACT
The examination of the Georgian house, and its elevation to the status of a heritage icon, suggests that value is historically negotiated hence the need to study the history of heritage and determined by factors largely extraneous to the object itself. The tidy boundary now drawn in works of history and the arts between the Georgian and Victorian periods would not have made much sense to those who occupied the immediate post-Georgian era. The dissolution of the classical hegemony, and with it the influence of what has become known as the Georgian house, was driven by a complex but dynamic amalgam of three further factors; the spirit of improvement, a thirst for the past, and the generational syndrome, by which one generation defines itself by rejecting the norms of the previous. In the years after the Second World War the Georgian house secured its position as part of the national heritage.
