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The English House
  • Published: 13 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529152463
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512
Categories:

The English House

A History in Eight Buildings

Formats & editions
EBook
13 Nov 2025
Hardback
13 Dec 2025
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A brilliant new history of the English house, encapsulated in eight buildings

This is the story of the superbly elegant early eighteenth-century Pallant House in Chichester. It’s the story of 19 Princelet Street in Spitafields, built for a Huguenot silk-weaver, ultimately a synagogue. It’s also the story of – among others – a row of two-up, two-downs in Toxteth, a block of flats in London’s East End, and what Ideal Home’s magazine described in 1926 as Britain’s ‘first modern house’ – in Northampton.

Together these buildings reveal the ways in which English homes have developed and changed over the past few centuries. At the same time, as Dan Cruickshank shows, they have much to tell us about the lives of their first occupants: their aspirations, their struggles, their place within society and relationship with their local community. The English House brilliantly weaves these two strands together, blending architectural and social history to create a series of brilliantly observed portraits of fascinating buildings.
  • Published: 13 November 2025
  • ISBN: 9781529152463
  • Imprint: Penguin
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 512
Categories:

About the author

Dan Cruickshank

Dan Cruickshank is an architectural historian and television presenter. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, a member of the Executive Committee of the Georgian Group, and on the Architectural Panel of the National Trust. His recent work includes the BBC television programmes Civilisation Under Attack (2015) and At Home with the British (2016), and the books A History of Architecture in 100 Buildings (2015) and Spitalfields (2016). He lives in London.

DC

Also by Dan Cruickshank

Cruickshank’s London: A Portrait of a City in 13 Walks
Spitalfields
The London Nobody Knows
The Secret History of Georgian London
See all

Praise for The English House

Cruickshank’s enthusiasm for England’s vernacular architecture shines through every infectious sentence of this glorious book. His great skill is to dig down into details so that no building’s hidden corner, crooked window or clever keystone goes unremarked. At the same time, he situates these idiosyncratic details in a wider reading of the social and economic conditions which gave rise to every brick, strut and gurning gargoyle. A triumph

The Times

A mine of information presented in an effortlessly accessible style. Unlike many books that merely convey stories attached to buildings, this is social and architectural history delivered with forensic insight

Country Life

The English House condenses the intriguing story of how English homes have developed.

The Independent, Books of the Month

The most delightfully reassuring of books. In The English House, Cruickshank lovingly and methodically dives into the history of eight different buildings. Fascinating. Cruickshank guides the reader through 19 Princelet St […] with great charm and a keen sense of the resonance of the building, which – like all the buildings in the book – he brings beautifully to life.

Jewish Chronicle

Diverting and illuminating

Observer