The idea that the old building fabric of a building has value because it is old is, mainly, a twentieth-century innovation. At the start of the century, some of the finest houses built in England were created by architects who valued design quality over age. They designed buildings which freely mixed old and new fabric, and paid especial attention to the junctions between the two. There is very little writing about this phenomenon, but it was spotted and promoted by writers in the magazine Country Life – possibly the first professional architecture critics in the modern sense.

Timothy Brittain-Catlin is the author of The Edwardians and their Houses: the New Life of Old England and directs the graduate architecture apprenticeship course at the University of Cambridge. In 2014 he published Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture.