CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 51 in the interwar period. And at last the publisher Lund Humphries seems to have hit its stride and is producing books with good quality printing and paper that you want to own. The only reason I found to put it down occasionally was sheer intellectual exhaustion and delight. All I would question, but more as an interesting debate, is the extent to which the argument relies on the assumed pervasiveness of the idea of the picturesque. Can this have been so potent at the time to have marshalled the power of the cottage-myth as Entwistle argues? This was, as the author demonstrates, a revival of an 18th-century aesthetic theory, dissected and popularised in a book of 1927 by the notable Country Life author Christopher Hussey entitled The Picturesque: studies in a point of view. You will think, dear reader, that your reviewer has lost his marbles. Admittedly I have a great interest in the topic. But reviewers are meant to make a balanced judgment so let me at least try and point out some minor negatives. I can’t. In 18th century aesthetic theory, the notion of the picturesque was countered by that of the sublime. And that’s what this book is. Julian Holder teaches architectural history at the University of Oxford. Hardy’s county Dorset Houses: from Bronze Age to 21st century John Lowe, JLP, 2025, 120 pages, 250 colour drawings and photographs, ISBN 978 1 399995 08 5, £20 from the author: www.john-lowe.co.uk As Michael Pitt Rivers remarks in the Shell Guide to Dorset, the county’s architecture is centred on domesticity, and while there are no palaces and few settlements of any size, it has a profusion of handsome and elegant houses of moderate size. It is the development of this domestic architecture over 3,000 years that John Lowe, former heritage environment manager for Dorset County Council and IHBC member, has traced with knowledge and enthusiasm to make a good case for its national importance. The format of Dorset Houses runs chronologically, from the Rowden Bronze Age House to King Charles’s Poundbury, with exceptional houses from the Norman, Tudor and Elizabethan periods. With the earlier periods – prehistoric, Roman and medieval – Lowe explores the scope for conjectural reconstructions, which he explains through his own drawings. For example, for Constable’s House at Christchurch (1185), owned by English Heritage and on which Lowe has done much research, he provides a cutaway perspective showing how the house might have looked with a roaring fire, servants at work and homing pigeons fluttering around the roof, all depicted in bright colours. Reconstructions of other medieval buildings include the Gloriette at Corfe Castle (1201–1204), Cranborne Manor (1207–1208), built by King John, and the engaging story of Silk Hey, Stalbridge, on which Lowe provides a compelling argument regarding its survival as part of a substantial manor house belonging to the Abbots of Sherbourne. Athelhampton Hall is the finest medieval house in the county, with a complex history involving many changes right up to the 1920s. Lowe considers how the house would have looked prior to around 1495 when it was substantially enlarged by Sir William Martyn. The chapter on early Stuart houses includes Warmwell Manor (1618), which has a butterfly plan, a curiosity that Lowe compares with Yaffle Hill, a house of 1936 by the architect Edward Maufe. The following chapters on the late 17th and early 18th centuries feature some remarkable houses, in particular Kingston Lacey by Sir Roger Pratt (1663) and Kingston Maurwood House by Thomas Archer (1717). Both were later refaced, allowing Lowe to provide strongly coloured perspective drawings of how they looked when originally built. The later chapters, mid Georgian, Regency and Victorian are more straightforward, covering urban as well as country houses. The architectural evolution of Weymouth terraces is demonstrated in a series of attractive elevation drawings by Lowe. Dorset’s hero Thomas Hardy makes an appearance with his own house, Max Gate, and there are dwellings by some of the greatest Victorian architects: Norman Shaw, ES Prior and CR Voysey. Perhaps the most unusual house of this period is Minterne Magna by Leonard Stokes for the 10th Lord Digby, vaguely Tudor in style with a huge and forbidding tower. The post-war period saw some interesting modernist houses, including Wildwood by Richard Horden (1974), designed in accord with the golden section, and Hooke Park by Frei Otto and Buro Happold for the furniture-maker John Makepeace. Poundbury gets a chapter to itself and receives a glowing endorsement. Finally, Brewery Square, Dorchester, a very different type of development, is described. This is a large mixed-use scheme on the site of the former Eldridge Pope Brewery, masterplanned by CZWG, which involves refurbishment of some of the original brewery buildings, but the postmodernist new development could really be anywhere. Peter de Figueiredo, reviews editor, Context
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