Synopses & Reviews
The end of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth saw, in Britain, an astonishing growth in population and a corresponding tremendous boom in building. Within these years, more houses, offices, factories and other buildings were built each year than ever before in the country's history. This was when London's Victoria and Albert Museum took its present form, when the whole western part of Piccadilly Circus was designed, when the Ritz Hotel, Claridge's, Selfridge's, the Coliseum Theatre, the Prudential Assurance building, New Scotland Yard, the Institute of Chartered Accountants, County Hall, the Royal Automobile Clubm the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Horniman Museum, Cardiff City Hall, the Liver Building in Liverpool, Mackintosh's exquisite Glasgow School of Art and countless other magnificent and exciting buildings were constructed.
This book is the first concise study to be published on the subject. The many style and developments of the period the late Gothic and Byzantine church architecture, the Arts and Crafts revolution of house design, the attempts to create a new style free from historical precedents, the English Baroque of the big town halls, the revival of a purer Classicism combined with the use of new structural techniques are seen through the work of Norman Shaw, Arthur Mackmurdo, John Belcher, Beresford Pite, John Francis Bentley, C. F. A. Voysey, Edward Prior, William Lethaby, Reginald Blomfield, Edwin Lutyens, Charles Rennie Mackintosh and many others. Private houses, public buildings, churches and palaces are presented and discussed in sufficient detail to make it possible for the reader to use this book (which also includes a list of the most important architects of the period with their principal buildings and the addresses of these) as a guide.