Across the early decades of the seventeenth century, Englishmen and women moved through a physical, social, and mental world organised into a carefully maintained balance of motion and pause. This book examines how seventeenth-century English architectural theorists and designers rethought the domestic built environment in terms of mobility, as motion became a dominant mode of articulating the world across discourses. These discourses encompassed philosophy, political theory, poetry, and geography. From mid-century, the house and estate that had evoked staccato rhythms became triggers for mental and physical motion-evoking travel beyond England's shores, displaying vistas, and showcasing changeable wall surfaces. The book sets in its cultural context a strand of historical analysis stretching back to the nineteenth century Heinrich Wolfflin. It brings together the art, architectural, and cultural historical strands of analysis by examining why seventeenth-century viewers expected to be put in motion and what the effects were of that motion. Vistas, potentially mobile wall surface, and changeable garden provided precisely the essential distraction that rearticulated social divisions and assured the ideal harmony. Alternately feared and praised early in the century for its unsettling unpredictability, motion became the most certain way of comprehending social interactions, language, time, and the buildings that filtered human experience. At the heart of this book is the malleable sensory viewer, tacitly assumed in early modern architectural theory and history whose inescapable responsiveness to surrounding stimuli guaranteed a dependable world from the seventeenth century.
In the long process of making this book, I have accrued many debts of gratitude. Undoubtedly the largest I owe to Jeremy Aynsley: my PhD supervisor, mentor and colleague for twenty years, firstly at the Royal College of Art and, latterly, at the University of Brighton. The completion of this manuscript coincides with Jeremy’s retirement and I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge his enormous academic generosity to me, as well as the many others who have been fortunate enough to work with him.
This book has grown through countless conversations with friends and colleagues at the University of Brighton’s School of Humanities and Social Science; Centre for Design History; Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories; and Centre for Spatial, Environmental and Cultural Politics; and my magnificent students at the University of Brighton across History of Art and Design and Graphic Design and Illustration. I am so grateful to so many at my university for their capacity to nurture research despite the increasingly hostile financial and regulatory climate in which post-’92 universities like mine function. I want to mention some key people in research who have helped me: Ingrid Pugh, Stuart Hedley, Jo Allen, Lauren Greenslate, Andrew Church, Andrea McKoy, Rupert Brown, Emmy Sale, Chris Matthews, Laura Shockley and the Brighton Bid Support and Post-Award teams.
Several generous people read parts of this manuscript while in progress: Jeremy Aynsley, Monica Bohm-Duchen, Sue Breakell, Cheryl Buckley, Elizabeth Darling, Henry Irving, Zeina Maasri, Annebella Pollen and Claire Wintle. To all of them I owe a huge debt of thanks for improving it immeasurably (although, it goes without saying, all remaining errors and shortcomings are my own responsibility). I am indebted to the research and insights of many people and have enjoyed discussing this project, and the wider research interests in which the work sits, in many places over the years, from conference and seminar rooms to pubs, cafés, libraries and kitchens, over Zoom and by email, with Leah Armstrong, Nicola Ashmore, Richard Atkinson, Jenny Black, Valeria Carullo, Verity Clarkson, Becky Conekin, David Crowley, Clare Cumberlidge, Barry Curtis, Liz Farrelly, Andy Friend, Lisa Godson, Robert Harland, the late Clifford Hatts, Zoe Hendon, Max Henrion, Josie Kane, Jessica Kelly, Lucy Kimbell, Yunah Lee, Grace Lees-Maffei, Gill Levin, Sarah Lichtman, Jo Littler, Aasiya Lodhi, Anna Lovell, Jessica Lovell, Sam Lyons, Anne Massey, David Matless, Tania Messell, Lynda Morris, Sorcha O’Brien, Peter Peri, Megha Rajguru, Will Rea, Irit Rogoff, Michael Rosen, Cat Rossi, Linda Sandino, Adrian Shaughnessy, Jana Scholze, Daniel Snowman, Ceri Smith, Dora Souza Dias, Penny Sparke, Deborah Sugg Ryan, Annie Sutherland, Lou Taylor, Claudia Treacher, Martha Turland, Michael Tymkiw, Vanessa Vanden Berghe, Gillian Whiteley, Lesley Whitworth and Jonathan Woodham.
At Manchester University Press (MUP), effusive thanks to my insightful and patient editors Emma Brennan and Alun Richards; to the editors of the Design and Material Culture series, originally Christopher Breward and James Ryan, subsequently Elizabeth Currie, Sally-Anne Huxtable, Livia Lazzaro Rezende and Wessie Ling. Series founder Paul Greenhalgh’s 1988 book Ephemeral Vistas, which made linkages across exhibitions over several decades, has had a talismanic quality whenever I have questioned my own wisdom in setting out to unite a disparate series of exhibitions in one account. I can’t express warmly enough my gratitude to MUP’s brilliant, anonymous peer reviewers, whose patient and generous advice at the book proposal and draft stages was utterly invaluable in shaping and improving the book. Warm thanks, too, to Ellie Howard for excellent picture research.
I have been helped and advised by archivists, curators and librarians at New York Public Library; National Archives Washington; National Archives London; Design Archives at University of Brighton (in addition to those already mentioned, also by Sirpa Kutilainen and Jen Grasso); Victoria & Albert Museum’s Archives of Art and Design; Victoria & Albert Museum’s RIBA collection; Caterina Tiezzi at the London Transport Museum; RIBA library and reading rooms; Caitlin Condell at the Cooper Hewitt Museum; Ian Carter and John Delaney at the Imperial War Museum; Whitechapel Gallery archives; Tate Archives; Henry Moore Institute; Peter Suschitzky; Kurt Kaindl and Stefanie Pirker from FOTOHOF, Salzburg; Churchill Archives; Museum of Domestic Architecture. I have been sustained through regular visits to the British Library (BL) – which is amongst my favourite places in the world – and am grateful to the stimulating conversation of my brilliant fellow BL worker Rachel Wrangham, to the BL’s consistently friendly staff, including expert baristas at Origin coffee, whose chat and excellent coffee punctuated long and sometimes lonely research days, and to the librarians who smiled sympathetically whilst issuing another stack of books.
I have presented fragments of this material at various events over recent years: ‘Reconfiguring Relations: Britain and the Bauhaus’, Tate Britain, October 2019; ‘Lessons to Learn? Past Design Experiences and Contemporary Design Practices’, ICDHS conference Zagreb, October 2020; ‘The Writer as Psychological Warrior: Intellectuals, Propaganda, and Modern Conflict’, Durham University, July 2021; ‘Media Building: Architecture, Communications and the Built Environment from Fleet Street to Facebook’, Salford University, July 2021; ‘Lloyd Corporation Today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity’, Brighton CCA, March 2022; ‘Exhibitions, New Nations and the Human Factor, 1873–1939’, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, April 2022; ‘Art Exhibitions as Intersections in Post War Europe’, Södertörn University, Stockholm, May 2022; and ‘Exhibitions as Interiors?’, Modern Interiors Research Centre at Kingston University, February 2023. Related elements have been published as ‘Exhibitions as Political “Demonstrations”: Artists International Association’s For Liberty Exhibition, London 1943’, ICDHS Conference Proceedings, 2020 and ‘Visual storytelling in the Ministry of Information’s wartime exhibitions’ in Beatriz Lopez, James Smith and Guy Ward (eds), British Writing, Propaganda, and Cultural Diplomacy in the Second World War and Beyond (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024). I am indebted to the University of Brighton for awarding the Rising Stars grant in 2017–18 that allowed me to develop the seed of an idea that led to this book and am deeply grateful for the Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship Project Reference: AH/S001883/1, during which I wrote this book. As part of that project, I was lucky to have an excellent and insightful project advisory group comprising Professor Jeremy Aynsley (Chair, University of Brighton), Dr Frank Gray (Director, Screen Archives South East), Professor Annebella Pollen (University of Brighton), Carla Mitchell (Development Director, Four Corners film), Dr Rafal Niemojewski (Director, Biennial Foundation) and Sue Breakell (Archive Leader, University of Brighton Design Archives). As part of my AHRC Fellowship I was fortunate to collaborate with Four Corners London on making the short documentary film Art on the Streets, which draws its ideas from the research in this book, working with Jane Dibblin, Elena Reimeryte, Giacomo Baraldi, Nicholas D. Celano, Carla Mitchell, Hugh Hartford and Kate Bilbow.
Finally, big love to all my family and, in particular, V, J, M & S.