British Architecture

Have you noticed that there doesn't appear to be a British idiom anymore in domestic architecture? Travel to the Netherlands, Germany, France and a host of other countries and you know immediately where you are by the style of the new buildings, but not in the UK. The last time we had a national idiom was in the inter-war period with the iconic suburban semi. Modern housing in the UK, however, is faceless - or is that very facelessness the British style?

Sure you get some domestic architecture that harks back to a bygone era, such as the mock Tudor or Bradstone Cotswold, but it's an attempt to recapture something that's been lost, and usually very badly. 

With public or corporate buildings, there's no national idiom anywhere - an office building in London is indistinguishable from any other office, anywhere in the world. Modern public architecture is truly international and free from the prison of national idiom. There again, even the Victorian Gothic public building was a fake recreation of an imagined medieval past and the neo-classicism of the Georgian Palladian period harked back to ancient Greece and Rome.

You'd think in this time of Brexit and rampant nationalism, someone, somewhere would create a truly British style of architecture. Perhaps we already have it and we just don't notice - cramming as many people into as small a space as possible. In the public sphere is could be something redolent of Albert Speer's Nuremburg...

There has been a recent penchant for going 3 storey's high with housing estates? More bang per square metre of ground space. This is usually accompanied by a postage stamp garden to the rear and no garden to speak of at the front, but is it uniquely British?