Agricultural improvement

Georgian farmhouses are an easily overlooked architectural marvel of Britain's agricultural revolution in the 18th century. John Martin Robinson reveals the interest and importance of these buildings

- John Martin Robinson

IT is often said that big country houses are England's supreme cultural achievement. This accolade-overlooking as it does the surely superior claim of our great medieval churches ignores the fact that most of the domestic architecture of England is outstanding. Perhaps, also, in some ways, it is the smaller to middling houses in the countryside that are often truly remarkable internationally, the product of centuries of unparalleled prosperity and relative peace. Among the overlooked categories of these buildings are the 18th-century farmhouses built during the Georgian and early-Victorian agricultural revolutions. They are the equivalent of old rectories and vicarages, but there are more of them. Sometimes called 'model farms' (although that was a Victorian term; the Georgians named these new houses 'improved farms), they are a surviving witness to a significant aspect of the dynamic, enlightened economy of modern Britain.

‘Model farms', with their houses and associated buildings, constitute the architectural and formal aspect of 18th-century agricultural 'improvement', one of a tripos of spectacular entrepreneurial developments, alongside mechanised manufacturing industry and the expansion of large-scale global trade, which created the modern economy. At the present moment, it is the Atlantic trade, including the slave trade, one important strand of Britain's overseas commerce, that is attracting the lion's share of academic interest. Other economically and culturally significant areas of the Georgian economy-farming, manufacturing, and European and Asian trade -remain fertile, but largely untilled fields for serious scholarly research.