Gordon Fairclough

Research Topic

The Commercial Gentleman's House in the English Lake District: Architecture, Commerce and Society, 1740-1830

Supervisor: Perry Gauci

My doctoral project focuses upon the gentleman’s houses of the English Lake Counties and their builders and owners. It builds upon work which I submitted for an MA in Antiques, and a subsequent Postgraduate Certificate in Architectural History at Oxford, both of which were awarded Distinction.

Locally controversial when built, these houses, their grounds, and estates have left a legacy which now helps to define the landscape of the region and formed an important element in securing World Heritage status for the Lake District.  Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, my thesis seeks to place the gentleman’s house within its broader context of eighteenth-century middling-elite consumption and society and aims to gain wider insights into the enduring impact of these houses on English architecture, landscape, and material culture.

Until recently, the gentleman’s house had been widely overlooked reflecting a literary bias towards the larger country house and urban housing. However, an increasing body of eighteenth-century scholarship has demonstrated the importance of such houses as a means by which newly emerging commercial elites asserted gentle social status within English society. Knowledge is developing in the light of this recent research, to which this work seeks to contribute.