Interwar: British Architecture 1919-39

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'Elegant, erudite and entertaining ... a superbly detailed picture of an architectural era' The Times'A magnificent monument in itself to a fine architectural writer' Simon Heffer, TelegraphBritish architecture between the wars is most famous for the rise of modernism - the flat roofs, clean lines and concrete of the Isokon flats in Hampstead and the Penguin Pool at London Zoo - but the reality was far more diverse. As the modernists came of age and the traditionalists began to decline, there arose a rich variety of styles and tastes in Britain and across the empire, a variety that reflected the restless zeitgeist of the years before the Second World War.At the time of his death in 2017, Gavin Stamp, one of Britain's leading architectural critics, was at work on a deeply considered account of British architecture in the interwar period, correcting what he saw as the skewed view of earlier historians who were unable to see past modernism. Beginning with a survey of the modern movement after the armistice, Interwar untangles the threads that link lesser-known movements like the Egyptian revival with the enduring popularity of the Tudorbethan, to chronicle one of Britain's most dynamic architectural periods. The result is more than an architectural history - it is the portrait of a changing nation.As an account of the period that still shapes much of Britain's towns and cities, Gavin Stamp's final work is the definitive history of British architecture between the Great War and the Blitz.

Reviews

'Elegant, erudite and entertaining ... rich ... offers a superbly detailed picture of an architectural era chiefly defined by its multiplicity of styles' - Richard Morrison

'Majestic ... [an] excitable, illuminating and sure to be enduring work' - Financial Times

'His greatest work ... When so much of our built environment is unlovely, Stamp shows why it is worth looking again, and harder' - New Statesman

'Simple and elegant ... never doctrinaire, [Stamp] is an accessible gentleman-scholar guide to his subject ... Interwar is a riposte to the standard narrative about the emergence of modernism' - Times Literary Supplement

'A masterful revision of the history of interwar architecture, no longer as a barren seedbed of modernism but as an era of stylistic diversity, invention and delight' - Simon Jenkins

Author Bio

Gavin Stamp was an architectural historian and scholar, one of Britain's leading experts on pre-war building and design. 'Brought up in a Tudor bungalow on the Orpington by-pass', as he recalled, he was educated on a scholarship at Dulwich College. Prolific as an author, curator and journalist, as 'Piloti' he wrote Private Eye's 'Nooks & Corners' column from 1978 until his death in 2017. He was chairman of the 20th-Century Society from 1983-2007, and wrote more than twenty books on topics including Edwin Lutyens, George Gilbert Scott, brutalism and telephone boxes.