In his essay on William Beckford’s Vathek, Jorge Luis Borges mentions a joke about a biography of Michelangelo that makes no reference to the works of Michelangelo. ‘So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasising different facts,’ Borges wrote. This notion was often on my mind while reading The English House: A History in Eight Buildings by Dan Cruickshank. Eight is not a large number; back in 2008 Clive Aslet wrote a similar history and he allowed himself twenty-one houses. There’s no overlap between the two selections. Is the history of the English house a singular thing that could be revealed through any choice of examples, or is it possible to imagine an endless variety of histories, drawn like Tarot hands from the national housing stock?

Whatever the answer, we can be sure that Cruickshank knows what he is doing. He is an architectural historian, broadcaster and prolific author, and a doyen of architecture and heritage organisations, including the National Trust, the Georgian Group and the Spitalfields Trust. The story he tells begins in 1712 at Pallant House in Chichester, West Sussex, at the height of Palladian classicism and the age of reason. But Cruickshank finds a building haunted by much older ways of doing things, and mysterious hints at forgotten superstitions – a grotesque face among the elegant carvings and mouldings might be a ward against evil, or possibly a craftsman’s comment on quarrelsome, mercurial patrons. The story ends a little more than two hundred years later at Peter Behrens’s New Ways in Northampton, ground zero for English modern architecture. A preface and afterword fill out the rest. 

Cruickshank revels in details, both historical and architectural. We know when something has caught his eye, such as the horrid offcuts of meat that would have been enjoyed by late Victorian residents of the ‘two-up, two-down’ terraced houses of Toxteth in Liverpool, including ‘“stink” (prematurely born calves), “broxy” (meat from