Architecture of England

Each of these foreign modes became assimilated within English architectural culture and gave rise to local variation and innovation, producing distinctive national forms.

[1] The earliest known examples of architecture in England are the megalithic tombs of the Neolithic, such as those at Wayland's Smithy and the West Kennet Long Barrow.

Radiocarbon dating has shown them to be, as historian John Davies says, "the first substantial, permanent constructions of man and that the earliest of them are nearly 1,500 years older than the first of the pyramids of Egypt.

The structure is an annual calendar, but the reason for the massive size is unknown with any certainty, suggestions include agriculture, ceremonial use and interpreting the cosmos.

Megalithic burial monuments, either individual barrows (also known, and marked on modern British Ordnance Survey maps, as Tumuli,) or occasionally cists covered by cairns, are one form.

Due to the systematic destruction and replacement of English cathedrals and monasteries by the Normans, no major Anglo-Saxon churches survive; the largest extant example is at Brixworth.

Characteristic features include quoins in "long-and-short work" (alternating vertical and horizontal blocks) and small windows with rounded or triangular tops, deeply splayed or in groups of two or three divided by squat columns.

[6] Romanesque churches are characterised by rounded arches, arcades supported by massive cylindrical piers, groin vaults and low-relief sculptural decoration.

In the wake of the invasion William I and his lords built numerous wooden motte-and-bailey castles to impose their control on the native population.

[11] Rickman excluded from his scheme most new buildings after Henry VIII's reign, calling the style of "additions and rebuilding" in the later 16th and earlier 17th centuries "often much debased".

[12] This last Gothic style was typified by large windows, four-centred arches, straight vertical and horizontal lines in the tracery, and regular arch-topped rectangular panelling.

[18] The Tudor period constitutes a transitional phase, in which the organic continuity and technical innovation of the medieval era gave way to centuries in which architecture was dominated by a succession of attempts to revive earlier styles.

Characteristic features of the early Tudor style included imposing gatehouses (a vestige of the castle), flattened pointed arches in the Perpendicular Gothic manner, square-headed windows, decoratively shaped gables and large ornate chimneys.

Outstanding surviving examples of early Tudor palatial architecture include Hampton Court Palace and Layer Marney Tower.

During the 17th century, the continuing advance of Classical forms overrode the eclecticism of English Renaissance architecture, which gave way to a more uniform style derived from continental models, chiefly from Italy.

The Great Fire of London in 1666 forced the reconstruction of much of the city, which was the only part of the country to see a significant amount of church-building between the Reformation and the 19th century.

The later 17th century saw Baroque architecture – a version of Classicism characterised by heavy massing and ostentatiously elaborate decoration – become widespread in England.

Among the notable architects practising in this era were Robert Adam, Sir William Chambers, John Wood and James Wyatt.

This ongoing historicism was counterposed by a resumption of technical innovation, which had been largely in abeyance since the Renaissance but was now fuelled by new materials and techniques derived from the Industrial Revolution, particularly the use of iron and steel frames, and by the demand for new types of building.

The rapid growth and urbanisation of the population entailed an immense amount of new domestic and commercial construction, while the same processes combined with a religious revival to bring about a resumption of widespread church building.

It had begun on a small scale in the 18th century under the stimulus of Romanticism, a trend initiated by Horace Walpole's house Strawberry Hill.

The first great ideologue of this movement was Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, who together with Charles Barry designed the new Houses of Parliament, the grandest work of Victorian Gothic architecture.

This High Victorian Gothic was driven chiefly by the writings of John Ruskin, based on his observations of the buildings of Venice, while its archetypal practitioner was the church architect William Butterfield.

It was characterised by heavy massing, sparse use of tracery or sculptural decoration and an emphasis on polychrome patterning created through the use of different colours of brick and stone.

The Victorian period saw a revival of interest in English vernacular building traditions, focusing chiefly on domestic architecture and employing features such as half-timbering and tile-hanging, whose leading practitioner was Richard Norman Shaw.

Normally they adopted the style of architecture fashionable when they left England, though by the latter half of the century, improving transport and communications meant that even quite remote parts of the Empire had access to many publications, such as The Builder magazine.

The last great exponent of late Victorian free Renaissance eclecticism was Edwin Lutyens, and his shift into the Classical mode after 1900 symbolised a wider retreat from the stylistic ferment of the 19th century to a plain and homogenous Classicism based on Georgian exemplars, an approach followed by many architects of the early 20th century, notably Herbert Baker and Reginald Blomfield.

Some architects responded to modernism, and economic circumstances, by producing stripped-down versions of traditional styles; the work of Giles Gilbert Scott illustrates this well.

Significant recent buildings, in a variety of styles, include: Will Alsop: Peckham Library, North Greenwich tube station; David Chipperfield: River and Rowing Museum, Hepworth Wakefield; Future Systems: Lord's Media Centre, Selfridges Building, Birmingham; Zaha Hadid, London Aquatics Centre; Ian Simpson: Beetham Tower, Manchester, Beetham Tower, Birmingham.