The Architecture of the State

Abstract

Among the most persistent political metaphors of the period is that of the state as a work of architecture. For a country like England the image had a special appropriateness, as those who used it quickly realised. Unlike France, England had always been an architecturally conservative country, not merely in the sense that new fashions spread more slowly and were often modified by vernacular and traditional ways of working as they were absorbed, but also in the reluctance of the landowners who were modernising their country houses to pull down the existing buildings and start afresh. Whereas the glory of the great French chateaux of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was their architectural homogeneity, the distinctive quality of the English great houses was a historical variety that revealed the age and ancestry of the house — and, of course, by extension, the house-owner. Thus country houses like Penshurst or Knole, as well as even the main royal residence, Hampton Court, still retained their mediaeval great halls alongside the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-century additions. Then, as now, English people grew up surrounded by a visible sense of their own past, enshrined in their buildings.