ABSTRACT
Introduction ‘Why are you, or perhaps your neighbours, living in an imitation Tudor house with stained wooden slats shoved on to the front of it to make it look like what is called a half-timbered house?’ asked John Gloag in 1934. He pointed out that the house had been built quite differently from a real Tudor house, and that the slats in the new house had nothing to do with its construction. ‘Why’, he wondered, ‘do we live in this sort of half-baked pageant, always hiding in the clothes of another age?’1 There were two reasons for his attack. One was that he, along with many intellectuals who gave thought to the matter, saw the ‘imitation Tudor’ of the 1920s and 1930s as kitsch.2 It did not express the truth about its means of construction, and therefore was not serious architecture. The second reason was that such buildings, which we here identify as Tudoresque, were normal at the time. They were everywhere. It is this that makes them interesting for us, and what impelled Gloag to denounce them, rather than ignore them. There was a surprising consensus against them among architectural intellectuals, and those of us who learnt about twentieth-century architecture in Britain from books published during the 1930s through to the 1980s have all been taught that these buildings are wrong and bad. In this chapter we will sidestep the issue of quality; instead of querying their merit we will ask why there was such a demand for Tudoresque houses. At a popular level, in ‘vernacular’ taste, it seemed to be a very good idea to imitate Tudor buildings, as is evident not only in the abundance of buildings that survive from that time, but also in the journals of the period, especially those that were aimed at a popular readership, rather than the architectural profession.3 In order to understand why Tudoresque buildings seemed to be such a good idea at the time, we need to trace various cultural impulses across a wider terrain than simply the history of earlier buildings.
