Enfilade

From Apollo Magazine:

Rachel Stewart, The Town House in Georgian London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), ISBN 9780300152777, $65.

Reviewed by Conor Lucey, the editor of Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies.

On 16 May 1775, a notice in The Public Advertiser advised its readers that ‘the Right Hon. the Earl Temple is again much indisposed with an inflammatory Disorder in his Bowels, at his house in Pall Mall’. As a means of identifying the singular association between Britain’s aristocracy and their London residences, this very public announcement of the Earl Temple’s unfortunate medical circumstances, and the crucial specificity of location, represents a decisive example of the significance of West End property within the Georgian social arena. Deftly synthesising such illuminating anecdotal evidence with documentary fact, Rachel Stewart’s study of the 18th-century London town house provides valuable new description and interpretive analysis of this representative building type.

Critical of how architectural historiographies have underestimated both the practical and conceptual importance of town residences for the owner/occupier, Stewart’s narrative sets out to examine and, indeed, complicate the role, function and meaning of the city dwelling for those ‘who may have had some choice as to whether or not to take a town house, rather than the London-based middling classes whose town home was their principal and most often sole residence’. . . .

The full review can be found here»