The interpretation of the country house through stylistic development, and the builders and designers who brought them into existence, has a long history. For some time now this approach has been supplemented by alternative methods of analysis as a means of establishing new insights. For example, economic and social historians have suggested other distinctive methods of assessment.

At Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, reference has been made to architectural historians of the past who have considered ‘style (how buildings look)’ but who are today likely to consider ‘function (how buildings work)’ (Carson and Lounsbury Reference Carson and Lounsbury2015, 12). This is the vantage point developed by Mark Girouard back in Reference Girouard1978 and his work is appropriately quoted in the conclusion of Technology in the Country House. As such, some chapters cover familiar ground (see ‘Food Preparation and Storage’), but other sections, on less fully researched themes, have resulted in the discovery of important evidence based on documentation and fieldwork. In this respect, important research on the generation of gas and electricity is particularly valuable. Nevertheless, the organisation of the book has resulted in some inevitable duplication – for example, water power found many applications.

One feature that emerges from these pages is the way in which some owners of these large houses demonstrated an early interest in the application of technology. In the nineteenth century, the dukes of Westminster, Northumberland and Portland were very advanced in this respect, but so too were a number of industrialists. Indeed, the latter, having installed mechanisation in their factories, were well placed to provide their homes with similar equipment. Of these princes of industry, the most notable was the Tyneside manufacturer Sir William Armstrong at Cragside, Northumberland. Another was Theodore Mander, the paint manufacturer, who, in addition to being a patron of various luminaries in the Arts and Crafts Movement, also deployed technology in his West Midlands home, Wightwick Manor (1887–8).

Despite exemplars such as these, technology was slow to be adopted in many households due to the wide availability of servants. Much the same was true in the antebellum American South where slavery inhibited industrial development. In Britain the first hints of change were brought about by the agricultural depression, which began in the 1870s. Curiously, Palmer and West note this situation without offering likely causes. One explanation was the introduction of refrigerated shipping, which could now transport meat from Argentina and North America – a revolution that caused Danish farmers to switch from beef production to dairy products. Despite this lacuna, the authors have much to say about domestic refrigeration: a tradition that, in large establishments, goes back to the use of ice houses in the eighteenth century. In Victorian Britain, ice from North America was favoured rather than that which was harvested from nearby lakes as this was considered ‘less pure – at least for direct use’. It was something of a surprise to learn that the vapour compression system of refrigeration used today was understood as a scientific theory in the early nineteenth century before it was used in ice cabinets in the 1850s.

The development of heating is outlined from the down-hearth of an open hall to the introduction of the grate served by ‘funnels’. However, the real subject of this section of the book concerns issues of convection and radiation by various systems. In this respect more could have been provided on the introduction to Britain of American stoves – although a related variant provides the cover illustration. These stoves almost certainly owed their origins to German and Swedish traditions in Pennsylvania and Delaware, which presumably inspired Benjamin Franklin’s version and it was he who introduced these stoves to London at some point in the ten years he lived here. By the 1780s, ‘American Stoves’ were manufactured and sold in the British capital by James Sharp and by the Carron Ironworks in Falkirk, Scotland.

The various sources of fuel used for cooking are fully discussed. For example, the charcoal stoves that were not connected to flues were placed close to windows so as to disperse noxious fumes. A good example of this, not cited here, may be seen in the kitchen at Barrington Court, Somerset. Timber and its cousin charcoal were primary types of fuel that were in turn followed by coal. This choice of fuels resulted in some houses being provided with one cellar for ‘Coals’ and another for ’Charcoal’, as at Montague House, Whitehall, in 1746 (Murdoch Reference Murdoch2006, 114).

In kitchens, the transition from open to closed ranges began to occur in the 1780s. Here, as in other aspects of household technology, the old and the new could co-exist. This was partly due to ‘old school’ chefs favouring traditional methods, but also because some types of range were best suited for specific forms of cooking. In particular, an open range was necessary for roasting on a spit. At Petworth House, Sussex, the kitchens are equipped with a wide variety of ranges as well as stoves using gas and electricity. Contrary to expectation, gas was generally introduced for lighting before it entered service in the kitchen. Similarly, the use of hot water systems for heating were, at times, introduced to the greenhouse and conservatory before being deployed in the house.

In relationship to water closets, Palmer and West discuss Sir John Harrington’s (1561–1612) very early device, but they do not consider the importance attached to these conveniences by his later kinsman, the Duke of Chandos (1673–1744), in his speculative housing in Bath and in his own homes. Consideration is given to both bath-houses and bathrooms and reference is made to examples at Wimpole Hall, in Cambridgeshire, Beningborough Hall (1920s), in North Yorkshire, and Eltham Palace (c 1935), in south-east London. Portable showers also make an appearance with John Leech’s splendid cartoon of 1850, which shows a procession of small boys, each wearing a dunce’s cap and lining up for their turn in the shower as a form of punishment.

The work of laundries, and indeed the buildings designed to house them, are fully considered. The high-ceilinged space for drying linen at Beningborough Hall is a particularly good example. Mention is also made of the drying grounds. At Badminton, the laundry stands close to the house and although this outbuilding includes high-ceilinged drying rooms, it is also designed with an internal courtyard where washing could be dried out of sight – a worthy example that could have been included. From about 1860 some rather labour-intensive washing machines were developed, and these are visible in an old photograph (fig 3.38) showing the mechanised laundry at Holkham Hall, Norfolk.

Back in 1992, Temple Newsam House, in Yorkshire, organised an exhibition on ‘Country House Lighting’. The cut-off date for that enterprise was 1890 and the emphasis on lighting inevitably resulted in less consideration being given to the various sources of power, and the generation of gas and electricity. One of the great strengths of this book is that it examines these issues, and the science and technology on which they are based. Although urban gas works were operating in most English towns by as early as 1826, country houses were, by definition, generally too far distant to tap into the ‘town gas’, and ‘the big house’ was compelled to be self-sufficient in this respect. In townhouses these plants could be quite small, such as the one illustrated in F A Winsor’s London trade-card of c 1810 (Metropolitan Museum). In contrast, most country-house gas works were on a very large scale, as demonstrated by the examples shown here at Welbeck Abbey, Sudbury Hall and Culzean Castle. The authors cover this whole subject very fully and even consider the alternative acetylene system of gas production – scientific details that are well beyond this reviewer’s comprehension.

This technical expertise extends to the generation of electricity by means of water power, and later by steam. To ensure consistency of supply, a household would employ large numbers of chemical batteries that were deployed in a room reserved for this purpose. On the use of electricity as a source of light, the authors are firmly of the opinion that the Newcastle-based chemist Joseph Swan was the first to invent the incandescent electric lamp in 1878 (pat 1880), although the American Thomas Edison later went into partnership with him. The presence of a supply of electricity was used to power a whole series of technologies including refrigerators, telephones and ‘ascending rooms’, as early lifts were often known. Manually operated dumb waiters that conveyed food up from the kitchen to the dining room have a long history. Man-powered lifts were also used for human passengers in the early seventeenth century (Frederiksborg Castle, Denmark, not cited). Passenger lifts, powered by hydraulics, were installed at Osmaston Manor in 1846–9 – a technology that has once again found favour as it is not dependent upon visually intrusive winding gear. Electrically powered elevators by the American Otis Company were built into Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, in 1898.

Throughout the book, reference is made to the separation of the servants from the family and their guests. This was a trend in social organisation that may be seen to have begun in early modern Britain and was further developed in the long eighteenth century, reaching its most extreme manifestation with the Victorians. In this exaggerated form, some country houses were served by underground railways so that neither the servants and their activities, nor the materials they transported, were visible. This, and the green baize door, established a separation that provoked a need for communication between the two communities that ostensibly lived under one roof. The answer to this problem was the provision of a complex system of servants’ bells, and bell-pulls were placed in the various rooms occupied by the family. Below stairs, the servants’ corridor was the location for ranks of bells each hung on steel springs, which quivered for some time so as to identify the source of the command. At Calke Abbey, Derbyshire, steel spring campanology of this type is attached to the inside face of the closed shutters in the hall to act as a form of intruder alarm. There is evidence for a similar precaution at Newton Park, Somerset, although security provisions of this type are omitted here.

The intra-mural nature of this system of communication persisted when telephones were first installed, as these could not address the outside world. One of the many curiosities that emerge here is that Scandinavia seems to have been in the vanguard of the extra-mural use of telephones. Indeed, the production and installation of these instruments by the Swedish firm of Ericsson offers an explanation for their introduction in 1898 to Marlborough House, in London, for the Danish Princess Alexandra. By the 1930s, the Courtauld family at Eltham Palace were in possession of an extraordinarily elaborate telephone system with a sophisticated switchboard – although guests were expected to use a pay-phone.

The scope of this excellent book is so wide that some compression was evidently necessary, and the focus is on the 150 years from c 1785 to c 1935. In the gaps between the themes that are represented in these pages, Palmer and West have provided a stimulating open-ended account that will doubtless inspire future research.