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Model farm buildings of the Age of Improvement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 April 2016

Extract

‘A variety of buildings are necessary for carrying on the business of field culture; the nature and construction of which must obviously be different, according to the kind of farm for which they are intended. Suitable buildings … are scarcely less necessary to the husbandman than implements and machinery … There is nothing which marks more decidedly the state of agriculture in any district than the plan and execution of the buildings.’ These words, written in 1844 but paraphrasing remarks made by Arthur Young in the 1790s, emphasize the importance that well-designed buildings held in the eyes of the improver-landlords and agricultural theorists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when the farmsteads on most great estates were rebuilt to ideal plans. Surprisingly, these buildings have received little attention from architectural historians despite the fact that many of the leading architects of the period including Robert Adam, Sir John Soane, Henry Holland, James and Samuel Wyatt and Thomas Cundy Snr were all involved to a greater or lesser degree in the design of model estate buildings.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1976

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References

Notes

1 Loudon, J. C., Encyclopaedia of Agriculture (1844), p. 442.Google Scholar

2 The best accounts are: J. D. Chambers & G. E. Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution 1750-1880 (1966); W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (1955); Lord Ernie, English Farming Past and Present (4th edn, 1927); J. C. Loudon, op. cit.; Thorold Rogers, J. E., History of Agriculture and Prices in England 1259–1793 (8 vols 18661902)Google Scholar; E. L. Jones, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution (1974); Handley, J. E., The Agricultural Revolution in Scotland (Glasgow 1963)Google Scholar.

3 Ernie, Lord, op. cit., p. 196.Google Scholar

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6 Sold by his descendants at Christies in 1896.

7 Young, A. (ed.), Annals of Agriculture II (1784), p. 382 Google Scholar; N. Kent, General View of the Agriculture of Norfolk (1796); Marshall, W., Rural Economy of Norfolk (2 vols, 1787)Google Scholar; R. Beatson, On Farm Buildings; Communications to the Board of Agriculture (1796).

8 E. Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason (1955), ch. 5 & 6.

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10 Young, A., Tour in the North (1771), pp. 100101.Google Scholar

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12 Loudon, J. C., op. cit., p.443.Google Scholar

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15 Loudon, J. C., op. cit., p. 1164.Google Scholar

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17 Ex inf. the late Earl Spencer.

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25 Holland, H., Communications to the Board of Agriculture (1797).Google Scholar