England's Lost Houses ─ From the Archives of Country Life

Of all the photographs in the Country Life archive, none are more poignant than the images of houses that have been lost through demolition or fire. From Uffington House, Lincolnshire, a fine Restoration house burned in 1904, to the Rococo magnificence of Nuthall temple, Nottinghamshire, its site now buried under the M1 motorway, this book explores one of the saddest chapters in English 20th-century history. Giles Worsley's incisive text makes this more than just an elegy?by studying the circumstances behind 100 houses that are gone, he is able to explain why such a large number were destroyed in the last century. He discusses how many houses were lost as great landowners, responding to economic and political changes, sold off secondary estates and demolished palatial houses of the 19th century. He also examines how chance played its part, with fire emerging as one of the chief causes of destruction.

Giles Worsley (1961?2006) was the architecture correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, an architectural editor of Country Life, and the editor of Perspectives on Architecture. He is the author of The British Stable and Inigo Jones and the European Classicist Tradition.