DANIEL MAUDLIN

University of Plymouth

Constructing Identity
and Tradition
Englishness, Politics and the
Neo-Traditional House

In an increasingly globalized world, national governments appropriate vernacular building traditions

to support national identity-building political agendas. In England the neo-traditional house has
become an established feature of suburban architecture. This is not, however, as is often assumed,
indicative of the nostalgia of the consumer. Rather, neo-traditionalism is the result of planning
policies introduced by the government to preserve regional architectural identities and maintain a
visual Englishness in the built environment. These policies have, in turn, been undermined by the
nationwide standardization of traditional designs by national house-building companies.

The phenomenon of the neo-traditional house

has defined commercial suburban domestic
architecture in England through the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries. The high-volume
house builders (national firms such as Wimpey,
Persimmon, Barratt and RedRow) describe their
products as traditional or heritage homes.
From the early 1990s to 2008, the number of
domestic houses increased steadily.1 Through
weight of numbers, the widespread construction of
traditional houses has changed the character of
the built environment, particularly in suburbs and
provincial cities. However, these are clearly not
traditional buildings. They are two different
constructs of vernacular architecture: the traditional
and the everyday. Neo-traditional houses are
everyday suburban houses that imitate the form and
construction details of traditional buildings.
The consumer is offered only the illusion of
choice when it comes to the production of
contemporary neo-traditional housing
developments. Regional building traditions are
controlled by planning regulations devised to
maintain a national identity in the built
environment.2 The actual product, the neotraditional house, is the commercial response of
builders to regionalist government planning
regulations, because traditional . . . is the safe
option. It is easy to design, requiring no great

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skill.3 Neo-traditional houses are intended to

convey a nostalgic cultural message of
Englishness. The impact of these political and
economic interests on housing has created a new,
repetitive, vernacular condition: the architecture of
anywhere past.4

Design by Regulation
Regionalist planning control has created a market in
which neo-traditionalism is the only form of new
house available to the ordinary buyer. The
resurgence of traditional architecture is not, as
Leon Krier has claimed, the wishes of the majority
of the democratic electorate.5 Rather, it is the
result of regionalist planning policies devised by the
government, regional and national, to foster
English built environments. Homebuyers may like
the traditional style and cultural references of their
houses. However, the design is not driven by
consumer demand but is the product of a design
process between planner and builder, one in which
the buyer plays a minor role. The governments
National Planning Policy states that all new housing
must compliment the neighboring buildings and
local area . . . enhance distinctive character, relate
well to the surroundings and support a sense of
local pride and civic identity.6 All regional
government planning bodies must adhere to the
National Planning Policy. This is a remarkable step

Journal of Architectural Education,

pp. 5163 2009 ACSA

by a national government and has serious

implications for the English built environment.
Regionalist planning control began as a
backlash against characterless no-frills modern . . .
architecture of anywhere produced by high-volume
builders through the 1970s (Figure 1).7 During the
1980s, local authority Design Guides were
introduced to ensure that housing design
considered immediate site conditions, regional
formal traditions, and local building materials. Essex
County Councils Design Guide for Residential
Areas (1973) was the catalyst and template for
regional governments to follow. Builders supported
the new guidelines as they quickly realized that,
contrary to existing low-density prairie planning,
historic urban models permitted higher density and
higher profits.8 Post-war modernist architecture was
politically associated with the failures of the 1970s
British Labour Party (strikes, blackouts, etc.) and
their socialist public works, especially poor-quality,
ugly public housing. Neo-traditional domestic
architecture emerged in the 1980s market as
widespread disillusionment with Modernisms
promises of a utopian future was expressed as
nostalgic fascination with an idealized past.9
Design guides, therefore, were not a matter of taste
or local traditions, but the product of the political
totems of history, heritage, and national identity
that preoccupied Margaret Thatchers Conservative

government. Prime Minister Thatcher, in particular,

was concerned with using a range of government
policies to reinstate a submerged patriotic vision
of England and English identity.10 In 1988, the
Conservative government introduced the National
Curriculum in British schools that sought to
strengthen the relationship between school history
and collective identity . . . to articulate restorationist
visions of culture, heritage and nation.11 The
support of HRH Prince Charles, a high-profile antiModern architectural campaigner, lent further
impetus to the use of regionalist design codes and
the acceptance of neo-traditional design within
regional government planning departments.
In A Vision of Britain (1989), Prince Charles
urged Britain to revive its rural building traditions
using local forms and materials. Prince Charles and
Leon Krier made a significant contribution to neotraditional architecture with the development from
1993 of a site near Dorchester, in Dorset, now
famously known as Poundbury (Figure 2). Poundbury
was Englands high-profile response to the New
Urbanism movement that emerged in America in the
1980s. Similar to New Urbanist developments in the
United States, Poundbury purported to advance
fundamental qualities of real towns through a new
form of urban development that restored a sense of
community through diversity.This meant mixedincome housing, with public spaces, public buildings,
small-scale businesses and retail outlets.12
Neo-traditional design is common, but not
fundamental to, New Urbanism. In England, Leon
Krier, Quinlan Terry and Robert Adam were key
advocates of neo-traditional architecture. In the
United States it came to prominence largely through
the influence of Robert A. M. Stern, James Kunstler,
Doug Kelbaugh, Andres Duany and Elizabeth PlaterZyberk (DPZ).13 American New Urbanists introduced
traditional neighborhood development design
codes (TNDs) at developments such as Seaside,
Florida, from 1978, and Kentlands, Gaithersburg,
Maryland, 1988.14 The use of design codes at
suburban Kentlands is a precursor to Kriers work at

1. The architecture of anywhere: 1970s bungalows, Okehampton, Devon. (Photo by author, 2009.)

2. Poundbury, Dorchester, Dorset, West England. (Anon., 2009.)

Poundbury, more so than the better-known isolated

holiday town of Seaside. In England, Poundbury
reflected Kriers conception of traditional architecture
as a timeless, universal form in Kriers words,
traditional architecture remains a living language.15
The potential failure of New Urbanism as a
movement within the American commercial housing
market was predicted by Todd Bressi in 1994:

Some critics contend that New Urbanist

projects emphasize visual style over planning
substance. There is a danger that the
movement will be characterized by houses
designed in historic styles and neighborhoods
planned to have a small-town feel while more
substantial planning ideas are abandoned out
of frustration or indifference.16

Constructing Identity and Tradition

52

English regional government design guides,

which typically state that housing design must be
of an appropriate location, scale, design and
materials, have also produced a generation of neotraditional housing developments. However, such
design guides were not meant to cover the
community master-planning of New Urbanism.
Design guides deal with the appearance of
developments, not the creation of communities.
They are effective because local government legally
controls permission to build (Planning Consent).
Planning consent will not be granted if a developer
cannot show the planner that its scheme is of
appropriate design. Typically, guides do not
explicitly state that buildings must be traditional in
appearance but that they require the use of
traditional local materials and design features.
While this wording allows for more critical
regional responses, planners have routinely
approved neo-traditional design since the 1973
Essex Design Guide.17
In 2006 New Labours National Planning
Policy (England) transferred the control of good
practice in design and political support of design
guides from the regional planning authorities to
central government. New Labour rejected the
tradition-and-nation model of identity promoted
by Thatcherism. So it seems anomalous that the
National Planning Policy was a New Labour
initiative. However, though wary of Conservative
nationalism, New Labour was equally obsessed with
promoting a collective British (not solely English)
identity. Regional identities replaced national
identity as the political underpinning of the
National Planning Policy.18
Developments produced through the current
planning process are scenographic interpretations
of the historic built environment. Design guides
are preoccupied with regional identity achieved
by reproducing existing historic fabric. West
Devon Borough Councils Local Plan Review
(2005) is a good example of this type of
planning policy:

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Design and Local Distinctiveness (Policy

BE11): New buildings have an impact on the
character of an area. Uniformity across the
local plan area and beyond tends to reduce the
locally distinctive character of each area. The
appearance of development and its
relationship to the surroundings are therefore
important issues. The Local Plan encourages a
high standard of design in all locations . . .
Development will not be permitted unless:
It is of a scale, massing, height and materials
compatible with the character and special
qualities of the area in which it is located.
It makes the best use of landscape,
townscape or topographical features that
make a material contribution to the character
of the area.19
The house building industry responds to these
guidelines with commercial pragmatism and the
result is invariably neo-traditional:
The use of traditional design is the safe
option. It is easy to design requiring no great
skill. This tends to be the default solution as
most developers have these designs as standard
house types; these are then plotted with no real
consideration of their relevance in relation to
local vernacular. Anything beyond this takes
effort! It also requires someone, somewhere
within the developer, designer or local authority
to want to achieve a quality scheme. Without
this drive the default will prevail.20
The Tiddy Brook Meadows development by the
national house building company RedRow is a good
example. Tiddy Brook Meadows, in Tavistock, South
West England, is a flagship development of 230
neo-traditional houses (Figure 3). The site is on
former farm land on the southern edge of Tavistock.
RedRow houses use a mix of modern materials and
construction methods with traditional housing forms

and external decoration. The Tamar type occupies

the gateway plots, visible from the main road
(Figure 4). The Tamar is clad with distinctive
Tavistock Green stone, with windows picked out by
cream margins, and it has a slate-effect roof. These
features echo Tavistocks historic town centre,
especially its nineteenth-century public buildings
such as the town hall, police station and pannier
market. The Tavistock Green gateway houses screen
the rest of the development, which consists of
cream-colored generic historicism. Standard houses,
such as the Morton and Hayward, share
common decorative traditional features: creamcolored renders, projecting stone margins to
windows, gabled slate-effect roofs (composite slate)
and artificial chimney stacks (Figures 5 and 6). They
are arranged closely together to create irregular
traditional streetscapes.
RedRows neo-traditional design extends to
more than just the external appearance. While
construction methods and materials are
unapologetically modern, Tiddy Brook Meadows
houses are generally based on historic floor plans.
RedRow uses different historic periods, styles and
building traditions across their developments.
However, at Tiddy Brook Meadows the early
nineteenth-century (late Georgian) period prevails,
so types such as the Tamar, Morton and Hayward
are symmetrical, formally-arranged buildings. The
houses are typically three-cell arrangements with a
central passage, stairs to the rear, three to four
bedrooms upstairs and one or two public rooms and
kitchen downstairs. Smaller houses have a deep,
front-to-back, open-plan kitchen and living area.
Regionalist architectural writers such as Liane
Lefaivre, Juhani Pallasmaa, and Kenneth Frampton
have criticized these back to the future
solutions.21 Frampton, for example, argues that
superficial historicism can only result in
consumerist iconography masquerading as
culture.22 Liane Lefaivre writes like other kitsch
works these [houses] feed settings of emotion and
starve rationality the message can be received

neo-traditionalism can become an agent of

nationalism and ultimately racism.28
The National Planning Policy and the regional
design guides it supports create places like Tiddy
Brook Meadows: high-density suburban
developments of neo-traditional houses laid out in
irregular, traditional streetscapes. Unlike American
New Urbanism, English planning policy has never
sought to create communities but to maintain visual
regional identities, English character, in the built
environment. It is Neo-Traditionalism, not New
Urbanism.

Englishness and the English Home

3. Entrance to Tiddy Brook Meadows development, Tavistock, Devon, South West England. (Photo by author, 2008.)

without a translator.23 Lefaivre uses kitsch

pejoratively, implying these buildings are cynically
produced to please the aesthetically uneducated
and artistically uninformed. Using Jean Baudrillards
concept of the simulacra, the copy without an
original, Lefaivre highlights neo-traditionalisms
perceived lack of authenticity, arguing that neotraditional houses are simulated places of memory
designed to alleviate the anonymity of
contemporary life in as-if settings, simulacra of
places, faades, masks of environment.24
Eleftherios Pavlides also criticizes what he terms
folkloric regionalism as the culturally
counterproductive repetition of historic references
in which government regulations preserve local
character by relying on the folkloric conception of
type as representative of a region.25 Similarly,
Juhani Pallasmaas dislike of sentimental
provincialism is not tempered by his concern for
the evident loss of the sense of place and cultural
specificity projected by processes of globalization
and commodification. For Pallasmaa, a champion
of Alvar Aalto, neo-traditional developments
recreate a sense of place and rootedness in history
through the application of historical and regional
motifs . . . they usually fail because of the

one-dimensional literal use of references and a

manipulation of motifs on the surface level.26
In todays globalized, transient existence, where
cultural identity is reduced to networks of
subcultures, the creation of contemporary places
that use architecture to evoke place-specific identity
brings problems. The cultural value invested by
regionalist architecture, historicist or contemporary
in style, must be questioned. According to Nezar
AlSayyad, arguments, such as those of British
government planners, that character needs to be
preserved through the use of traditional local
materials and design features against the
contemporary forces of globalization are generally
weak, invoked to preserve particularly national or
regional agendas.27 It is remarkable that in a
culturally diverse country with an increasingly
mobile population, national planning policy
specifically demands that architecture represents
English identity based on place and tradition. The
political use of domestic architecture enforced by
the 2006 National Planning Policy (England) was
anticipated by Neil Leach in his 1998 JAE essay
The Dark Side of the Domus. Leach argued that
expressions of ethnic inclusivity, of boundaries, in
domestic architecture are also exclusive and that

References to traditional, mostly rural, forms and

artifacts as a means to affirm identity is an English
cultural condition: to evoke images of what is
essentially rural England with its village greens,
half-timbered pubs, and even red-coated huntsmen
[and], if the widespread use of these images by
advertising directed at the English market is any
guide, to add purity, decency, and Englishness to
the product or the idea evoked.29 From literature
to product design, history-informed cultural
products have reflected a later twentieth century
return to tradition and country values.30 A
cultural perspective summarized by Peter J Taylor:
The English do not have a homeland as such
rather they have the Home Counties, a corner of
the country masquerading as representative of
the whole . . . there is a presumption that
everything that is good about England is rural.31
The use of traditional forms and details to
communicate a historical, rural notion of identity in
the design of domestic buildings has been a
recurring theme in English architecture since the
pastoral tradition of the eighteenth-century
landscape movement. The landscape feature of the
picturesque hameaux evolved and gained its full
cultural resonance in the later eighteenth century as
specifically English cottages and villages, celebrated

Constructing Identity and Tradition

54

by the national romantic movement. Through poets

such as James Thomson, the countryside and its
contents (nature, people, and artifacts) came to be
used as metaphors for an inclusive notion of
Englishness.32 Romanticism brought a new
understanding of traditional rural dwellings where
materials and form evoked the English everyman
who dwelt within.
Traditional dwellings, especially the rural
cottage, became cultural artifacts and valued as
vessels of memory and identity. James Maltons
romantic Essay on British Cottage Architecture
(London, 1798) offered plates of designed
cottages. Maltons designs for large houses are
carefully irregular compositions of mismatched
elements from traditional building types, not
necessarily cottages, such as projecting gables,
thatch, half-timbering and mullioned windows
with leaded glazing (Figure 7). The aquatints of
cottage elevations in British Cottage
Architecture are assemblages that communicate a
notion of Englishness based on traditional rural
folk dwellings (notwithstanding the books claim
to Britishness, i.e., English, Scottish, Welsh, and
even Irish).33 As with the twenty-first century
neo-traditional house, the emphasis of a Malton
design is on external decoration: signs and
symbols not spaces. Maltons late eighteenthcentury cottage designs reflect romantic
traditionalism and the picturesque in a similar way
as the neo-traditional homes of the Moorcroft
development, Okehampton, mid-Devon by Sylvan
Homes, 20022004 (Figure 8). Moorcroft houses
are irregular picturesque compositions, unlike the
symmetrical houses of Tiddy Brook Meadows,
although RedRow also builds asymmetrical
models.
In the twentieth century the neo-traditional
house was the stylistic and cultural heir of the
widely popular Mock-Tudor duplex of the 1920s and
1930s, known as a semi-detached or semi. The
Mock-Tudor style used ornamental Tudor beams
on the front of mass-produced, brick-built, cement-

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4. The Tamar, Tiddy Brook Meadows. ( Photo courtesy of RedRow.)

rendered houses. This middle-class suburban type

was derided by social commentators such as the
satirical cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, who coined the
phrase by-pass variegated.34 The Mock-Tudor

semi reflected a wider mood of nostalgia and loss

in the aftermath of World War I a zeitgeist
described by the poet Robert Graves as The Long
Week-End.35

psychologically close to the countryside the

homeplace of Englishness and English tradition.
The belief that what is good is rural, itself a reaction
to rapid industrialization in the nineteenth century,
is a central theme of twentieth-century urbanism
and planning. Ebenezer Howards Garden City
movement promoted a new low-density model for
town planning which brought the countryside
into the urban environment. The first Garden City
was Howards Letchworth, Hertfordshire, 1903.
Much of the early housing at Letchworth was
designed by Arts and Crafts architects Raymond
Unwin and Barry Parker, making domestic
traditionalism the counterpart to Howards utopian
planning.
International Modernism had a complex
relationship with the Garden City Movement. While
the Garden City was widely acknowledged by
modernists to be a primary source for their new
theories of urbanism (Le Corbusier went so far as to
describe his city for three million as a Vertical
Garden City), the forms of its architecture were
resoundingly rejected because they were
sentimental, historical familiar.36 However, the
Ministry of Housing and Local Governments
publication Design in Town and Village
(1953) showed that fascination with the
picturesque and the traditional village continued in
post-war England:
The English village is among the pleasantest
and most warmly human places that men have
ever built to live in. And certainly it has a
physical characteristic and appearance that is
strongly its own.37

5. The Morton, Tiddy Brook Meadows. (Photo courtesy of RedRow.)

In terms of planning and urban design, the late

twentieth-century neo-traditional housing boom is
synonymous with the growth of the suburbs,
especially around provincial cities and market towns.

Edge-of-town developments offer easy access for

car-bound commuters, off-street parking, gardens
for children to play in and quasi-public green
spaces. But, most importantly, they are

Design in Town and Village echoed post-war

debates in the architectural press on the nature of
tradition and modernity. In The Embalmed City
(1963), Reyner Banham attacked Nikolaus Pevsner
for his interest in Englishness and the picturesque
tradition as put forward in The Englishness of
English Art (1956).38 Pevsner sought to establish

Constructing Identity and Tradition

56

the picturesque as a modern, specifically English

aesthetic centered on irregularity. It was also at
the heart of Gordon Cullens treatise Townscape
(1961, revised second edition 1971). Cullens
sketches and photographs of modern urban views
and traditional market towns and villages were
infused with a picturesque sensibility which
emphasized the irregularity of built form and the
specificity of composition.39 Cullens sketches and
accounts of the alleys, split levels and snaking
lines of the traditional urban environment greatly
influenced a certain type of international
modernismweary planner and architect in the
1970s. Although unintentional (like Pevsner, Cullen
promoted the picturesque as modern), Cullens
Townscape acted as a catalyst for design guides
and the neo-traditionalism that followed. Indeed
the first, the pioneering Essex Guide, was
published in 1973. In the late twentieth century,
while committed to the community-oriented
principles of American New Urbanism, Krier and
Prince Charles were able to recreate Cullens
picturesque townscapes and in the process gave
royal endorsement for design guide planning
policies nationwide.
Post-Poundbury, the RedRow sales brochure
for suburban Tiddy Brook Meadows invokes a
familiar love of the countryside: Tiddy Brook
Meadows: the edge of town. The heart of the
country. The streetscape and planning of Tiddy
Brook Meadows, and its marketing, follow the same
conception of Englishness and the rural built
environment as Poundbury and Letchworth
(Figure 9). The site plan shows curving asymmetrical
streets typical of post-Poundbury commercial
suburban developments (Figure 10). A variety of
house designs and sizes are grouped into eight
zones, organized around the snaking lines of the
sites internal roadways and areas of green planting.
Developments by RedRow and similar national
companies consistently follow the same informal
planning as Krier at Poundbury. For instance, Tiddy
Brook Meadows is very similar to RedRows

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6. The Hayward, Tiddy Brook Meadows. (Photo courtesy of RedRow.)

developments at Kennett Heath, Berkshire, and

Priory Fields, Derbyshire or Barratt Homes Broome
Park, Devon.

Both the interwar Mock-Tudor semi and the

late-twentieth century neo-traditional house are
direct descendants of the picturesque and romantic

7. James Malton, British Cottage Architecture, 1798. (Courtesy of the Winterthur Library, Printed Book and Periodical Collection.)

8. Moorcroft, Okehampton, Devon, Sylvan Homes, 2002-2004. (Photo by author, 2008.)

traditions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries. Each subsequent period of architectural
nostalgia was the product of national cultural
nostalgia and a reaction to political and
socioeconomic uncertainty. Maltons national
romantic style responded to the English fear of the
French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars in the late
eighteenth century,40 while Mock-Tudor fitted the
nostalgia of the long week-end after the First
World War.41 In turn, the suburban neo-traditional
house in the late-twentieth century reflected a
sense of urban decay, national decline and civic
dysfunction. Since the 1980s, English history has for
many been defined by football hooliganism, labor
disputes, and a succession of urban riots (often
race-related), for example: Brixton, London, 1981,
1985 and 1995; Toxteth, Liverpool, 1981;
Manchester, 2001; Bradford, 2001.
These connections between identity and
tradition in architecture can be viewed in terms of
kitsch. In the context of cultural identity, kitsch
need not be a pejorative term. Celeste Olalquiaqa
interprets kitsch not as a judgment of taste but as a
cultural condition, a sensibility of loss a yearning
for objects to help recapture the past; things that
are kitsch are not what an educated group considers
bad taste but cultural artifacts that respond to a
deep-seated human need for meaning.42 By this
interpretation, kitsch is a deeply rooted, historic
tradition in domestic architecture linked to periods
of cultural insecurity. What is new about the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century
phenomenon of the neo-traditional house is that for
the first time the Englishness of domestic
architecture, its kitsch nostalgia, has been
prescribed by government regulation.

Commercial Subversion
Most regional planning authority design guides
stipulate that new architecture should be of an
appropriate location, scale, design and materials.
Neo-traditionalism according to developers is the
easy way to meet these criteria. The result, however,

Constructing Identity and Tradition

58

9. Streetscape, Tiddy Brook Meadows. (Photo by author, 2009.)

is not a national diversity of houses imitating

regional building traditions, as is the concern of
regionalist critics such as Lefaivre, Pavlides and
Pallasmaa. Instead, national house-building
companies have developed neo-traditionalism as
the new universal architecture of everyday. The
governments attempt to maintain regional identities
through planning control has been subverted by the
housing industry through the indiscriminate
production of generic traditional houses which
take little or no account of historic regional
variations.
National house-building firms routinely use
design banks of traditional houses assembled
from eighteenth and nineteenth century
precedents. RedRow, for example, launched its
New Heritage Range of 47 models of house in
1997. In 2008, those same 47 core models were
built across 118 developments. Models are
selected from a companys design bank according
to the size of the site and the number and type of
dwellings approved by the local planning authority
(typically a mixture of three- or four-bedroom
family homes and two-bedroom affordable
homes). Little consideration is given to the local
historic building stock. This practice has succeeded

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as most historic market towns and small provincial

cities contain unremarkable everyday buildings
from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and
local authority planners, unlike national house
builders, do not take account of national building
stocks (past or present). Historicism and
regionalism are not always compatible: twenty-first
century developers use late eighteenth and early
nineteenth century archetypes considered by
vernacular historians to mark the decline of
regional building traditions and the beginning of
the nationwide commodification of design and
consumer culture.43
At Tiddy Brook Meadows, the prominent
gateway houses such as the Tamar use stone
cladding as a gesture towards Tavistocks
characteristic green building stone. RedRow also
uses the Tamar at Kennett Heath where it is clad in
red brick (Figure 11). The Tamar appears again as the
Lynton at Loves Farm, Cambridgeshire, in
undecorated cream. Similarly, the Tamar and the
Morton appear at Priory Fields as the Eastry and
Glasbury. RedRow is, of course, not unique among
construction companies in this approach to regional
character. The lesson for planners is that historicism
is not necessarily compatible with regionalism.

Pallasmaas concern with the loss of the sense

of place . . . projected by processes of
commodification applies as much to the
phenomenon of the neo-traditional English house
as it does to the post-war International Modernism
that was the object of his criticism. While one need
not agree with his architectural vision, Leon Kriers
interpretation of neo-traditional architecture most
accurately describes the standardized model of neotraditional housing. Krier considers traditional
architecture not as a response to regionalism but as
a modern universal architecture: traditional
architecture remains a living language.44 The
subversion of regionalist planning policy by national
building companies such as RedRow has produced a
new vernacular based on the repetition of
traditional house forms. Design guides were
introduced to assert regional character over the
commercial architecture of anywhere. The result,
however, has been the creation of a new
architecture of anywhere past.

The Neo-Traditional Home and the

Homeowner
Studies by architectural writers about the everyday
home, from Christian Norberg Schulz and Robert
Venturi to Leon Krier and Paul Oliver, have focused
on the role of the homeowner as a cultural
consumer. Such studies, while moving beyond
aesthetic criticism towards a cultural understanding
of the ordinary, tend to examine homeowners
cultural values and how their houses express those
values. What does the everyday house tell us about
the otherwise anonymous occupant? These
interpretations, based on assumptions about
peoples tastes and their ability to express them, do
not fit an analysis of the contemporary neotraditional home as a cultural phenomenon where
the homeowner, the consumer, is largely absent.
For instance, in Architecture: Choice or Fate
Leon Krier suggests that architectural historicism
and the nostalgic return to stylistic figures . . . is
not contrary to the wishes of the majority of the

10. Site plan, Tiddy Brook Meadows. (Courtesy of RedRow.)

democratic electorate.45 Elsewhere Krier has

confidently claimed: All the talk about being
forward-looking and daring about building is OK,
but people want houses that are traditional or at
least ones that look that way.46 Similarly, while
viewing the homeowner as separate from the expert
architect or art historian with different,
incomprehensible tastes, Christian Norberg-Schulz
also felt that the appeal of neo-traditional design to
the layman was in the detail, and the meaning it
carried in their beloved architecture of the past.47
Both these arguments assume that the homeowner,
a universal Western consumer, chooses neotraditional as a preferred style: it is their taste.
However, in England, government regulation and its

subversion by commercial interests has resulted in a

contemporary new-build housing market with no
choice. Within the planning system one cannot
assume that people want houses that are
traditional or that the modern-house buyer
identifies with nostalgia and the beloved
architecture of the past.
A more nuanced interpretation is that within
the framework of the class system the owner of a
neo-traditional home does not see his or her
house as having a nostalgic English identity, as
intended by government policy. Rather, the neotraditional house indicates an aspiration to be
middle class, to own the historic houses of the
middle class, the suburban Arts and Crafts villas

(by Lutyens, Voysey, et al.), Victorian country

vicarages, Regency cottages and Georgian
farmhouses. As the sociologist Thorstein Veblen
argued, the leisure class stands at the head of
the social structure in point of reputability; and
its manner of life and its standards of worth
therefore afford the norm of reputability for the
community.48 But, again, while this may be the
case for some neo-traditional homebuyers, it is
not necessarily social emulation. While the
individual homebuyer may identify traditional
architecture with the middle class, homebuyers as
a group have no choice but neo-traditionalism
when selecting a new house and cannot show any
stylistic preference.

Constructing Identity and Tradition

60

choice when selecting a new house and later

through a myriad of personal additions and
alterations. Venturi and Brown interpreted the
embellishment of everyday American suburban
houses as easy-to-read signs expressing the cultural
values of the occupants.49 Similarly, in his analysis
of Mock-Tudor houses of the 1930s, Paul Oliver
concluded that Mock-Tudor can teach domestic
architects the importance of choice, and the
provision of design elements which can facilitate the
personalization of the home within community
norms.50 Olivers argument is that the homebuyer
is not interested in the cultural resonance of a
houses Mock-Tudor beams they just need to be
different from the Mock-Tudor beams of the house
next door. The need for self-identification and
expression identified by Venturi and the importance
of choice proposed by Oliver show the way to
understand the role of the consumer in the
neo-traditional housing market. The consumer is
sold choice, not tradition and identity. RedRows
in-house research suggests that consumers like the
irregularity and detailing of neo-traditional houses
because it offers character:
The buying public applies the term individual
house character as its main requirement.
Character can be broken down into many
different categories and ultimately, of course,
people have to buy what is available in the
area within which they want to live. However,
only a small proportion would care enough not
to buy a house with uPVC windows! There is
no overwhelming demand for better design.51

11. Tamar, Kennett Heath, Thatcham, Berkshire, South East England. (Photo courtesy of RedRow.)

A different view is that the homebuyer does

not consider the building as a designed whole, with
a single meaning, but as a collection of parts each
with its own meaning. In their 1970 study of the

61

MAUDLIN

ugly and ordinary domestic architecture of

Levittown, Pennsylvania, Robert Venturi and Denise
Scott Brown identified how important it was for
homeowners to express their individuality through

At Tiddy Brook Meadows a range of different

houses is offered. The Morton is a two-story,
three-bay detached house with a stone-clad
projecting gabled bay to the centre. The Hayward is
a two-story, three-bay terrace house painted cream
with a bracketed timber porch. The language of
RedRows sales brochure for Tiddy Brook Meadows
is revealing. The text makes no reference to history

or Englishness but repeatedly stresses that they

offer YOU, the individual, CHOICE:
We build only one home. Yours.
Your new home: designed with you in mind.
With our range of homes, youre sure to find
just what you need.52
If an appropriate design standard is required
externally to satisfy the planners, internally, beyond
government regulation, developers focus entirely on
the consumer and the exercise of choice. As with
their neo-traditional elevations, RedRows spatial
planning is based on generic early-to-mid
nineteenth century house plans. Within these
traditional spaces, however, choice is offered
through a bewildering 73 options for interior
finishes and fixtures. This is RedRows bespoke
design service which allows the purchaser to apply
their own identity through the selection of
bathroom tiles, kitchen countertops and door
furniture. In contrast to the exterior, the majority of
these fixtures and fittings are contemporary in style.
At Tiddy Brook Meadows, show-houses such as the
Hayward also promote this contemporary taste in
interior decoration (Figure 12).
Recent theories of cultural consumption
support the view that neo-traditionalism has only a
passing relationship with consumers, who are often
more concerned with contemporary design.
Discourse in the 1980s emphasized consumer
agency and the guerilla strategies of everyday
consumer practices.53 However, subsequent
theorists re-emphasize the role of politicaleconomic power in Western culture and argue that
[the field of] cultural studies has vastly
overestimated the power of consumers by failing to
keep in view the determining role of production on
cultural consumption . . . the capitalist cultural
industries produce only an apparent variety of
products whose variety is finally illusory.54 John

12. Interior, living room, Hayward show-house, Tiddy Brook Meadows. (Photo by author, 2009.)

Storey counters by arguing that while the power of

the political economy has been underestimated
consumers are not incapable of discrimination . . .
and thus at the mercy of the barons of the culture
industry.55 However, while this may be true of
general consumer culture, contemporary domestic
architecture is, unusually, subject to a very high

degree of political control, and developers

preference for universal neo-traditionalism further
reduces consumer choice to superficial options.
National house building companies concluded
that while government may insist on architecture
sensitive to place and tradition, the key marketing
feature of a new development is not tradition,

Constructing Identity and Tradition

62

identity or a sense of place but choice. However,

the offer of choice is an illusion. Unlike other
consumer purchases, the neo-traditional house does
not represent everyday cultural consumption
because the design and production of these houses
is determined by government and the national
house-building industry.

Conclusion
We have seen how neo-traditionalism has defined a
generation of suburban domestic architecture.
Because neo-traditionalism, imbued with the
Englishness of a notional rural past, is the only
choice available it cannot be assumed that the neotraditional house is a direct expression of the values
and tastes of everyman. The result across
England is a new vernacular: the architecture of
anywhere past.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Robert Brown, Jane Campbell,
Jeremy Gould, Michelangelo Sabatino, and the staff
of RedRow.

Notes
1. 160,000 new homes were built nationwide in 2005, 170,000 in 2007
and an estimated 100,000 in 200809: statistics issued by the Office of
the Deputy Prime Minister (February, 2006),
http: www.communities.gov.uk planningandbuilding, accessed May 2,
2009.
2. National Planning Policy Statement 3: Housing (London: HMSO, 2006).
3. RedRow Design Centre, staff interview with author, January 15,
2009.
4. John OLeary, Town Planning and Housing Development, in
Housing: The Essential Foundations, ed. Paul Bachin and Maureen
Rhoden (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 134.
5. Leon Krier, Architecture: Choice or Fate (London: Papadikis, 1987),
pp. 17880.
6. National Planning Policy Statement 3: Housing.
7. OLeary, Town Planning and Housing Development, pp. 13335.
8. Ibid., p. 134.
9. Sharon Haar and Christopher Reed, Coming Home: A Postscript on
Postmodernism, in Not At Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in

63

MAUDLIN

Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames

and Hudson, 1996), p. 258.
10. Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an
Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2006), p. 230.
11. Sydney Wood, Issues of National Identity and the School
Curriculum, in History and Heritage: Consuming the Past in
Contemporary Culture, ed. John Arnold, Kate Davis and Simon Ditchfield
(Shaftesbury: Donhead Press, 1998), p. 224.
12. Peter Calthorpe, The Region, in The New Urbanism: Toward an
Architecture of Community, ed. Peter Katz (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1994), p. xv.
13. Haar and Reed, Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernism,
p. 258. For DPZs list of references, see
http: www.dpz.com research.aspx, accessed May 28, 2009.
14. Katz, The New Urbanism, p. 31.
15. Krier, Architecture: Choice or Fate, p. 63.
16. Quoted in Katz, The New Urbanism, p. xlii.
17. Alan Powers, Britain: Modern Architectures in History (London:
Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 183.
18. Mandler, The English National Character, pp. 23637.
19. West Devon Borough Council, Local Plan Review (March 2005),
http: www.westdevon.gov.uk services, accessed May 2, 2009.
20. RedRow Design Centre, staff interview with author, January 15,
2009.
21. Haar and Reed, Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernism,
p. 260.
22. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture and the Critical Present
(London: St Martins Press, 1982), p. 77.
23. Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzoni, Critical Regionalism:
Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World (London: Prestell
Publishing, 2003), p. 19.
24. Ibid., p. 18.
25. Juhani Pallasmaa, Tradition and Modernity: The Feasibility of
Regional Architecture in Post-Modern Society, in Architectural
Regionalism: Collected Writings on Place, Identity, Modernity and
Tradition, ed. Vincent Canizaro (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
2007), p. 129; Eleftherios Pavlides, Four Approaches to Regionalism in
Architecture, in Architectural Regionalism, pp. 15859.
26. Pallasmaa, Tradition and Modernity, p. 129.
27. Nezar AlSayyad, ed., The End of Tradition? (London: Routledge,
2004), p. 6.
28. Neil Leach, The Dark Side of the Domus, in What is
Architecture?, ed. Andrew Ballantyne (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.
88102.
29. Alun Hawkins, Rurality and English Identity, in British Cultural
Studies, ed. David Morley and Kevin Roberts (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001), p. 155.
30. Harry Ziegler, Anarchy and Order: Reinventing the Medieval in
Contemporary Popular Narrative, in History and Heritage, p. 33.
31. Peter J. Taylor, Which Britain? Which England? Which North? in
British Cultural Studies, p. 134.

32. Marilyn Butler, Romanticism in England, in Romanticism in

National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 42.
33. Andrew Ballantyne, Joseph Gandy and the Politics of Rustic
Charm, in Articulating British Classicism: New Approaches to
Eighteenth-Century Architecture, ed. Barbara Arciszewska and Elizabeth
McKellar (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 16387.
34. Osbert Lancaster, Pillar to Post: The Pocket Book of Architecture
(London: John Murray, 1938).
35. Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, The Long Week-End: A Social
History of Great Britain, 19181939 (London: Faber, 1940).
36. Robert A.M. Stern, The Anglo American Suburb, Architectural
Design (1981): 4.
37. Thomas Sharp, The English Village, in Design in Town and Village
(London: HMSO, 1953), p. 26.
38. Reyner Banham, The Embalmed City, New Statesman (April 12,
1963), republished in Reyner Banham: Historian of the Immediate
Future, ed. Nigel Whiteley (London: Centennial Books, 2002), pp.
3080.
39. John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other
Irregularities (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 20206.
40. Ballantyne, Joseph Gandy and the Politics of Rustic Charm, pp.
16387.
41. Jeremy Gould, The Road to the Cappuccino City, RIBA Lecture,
Plymouth (February 2009).
42. Celeste Olalquiaqa, Kitsch: The Artificial Kingdom (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 131.
43. Ronald W. Brunskill, Traditional Buildings of Britain (London:
Cassell, 1981).
44. Krier, Architecture: Choice or Fate, p. 63.
45. Ibid.,, pp. 17880.
46. Leon Krier, Architecture in Arcadia, Architectural Design,
Architectural Design Profile 103 (1993): 78.
47. Christian Norberg Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1965), p. 15.
48. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class ([1899]
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 83.
49. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning
from Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), p. 153.
50. Paul Oliver, Built to Meet Needs: Cultural Issues in Vernacular
Architecture (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2006), p. 335.
51. RedRow Design Centre, staff interview with author, January 15,
2009.
52. Sales brochure, Tiddy Brook Meadows, RedRow (2008).
53. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste (London: Routledge, 1986); Michel de Certeau, The Practices of
Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
54. Nicholas Garnham, Political Economy and the Practice of Cultural
Studies, in Cultural Studies in Question, ed. Marjorie Ferguson and
Peter Golding (London: SAGE Publications, 1997), p. 58.
55. John Storey, Cultural Consumption and Everyday Life (London:
Arnold, 1999), p. 153.