Building Britain: Eight Styles from the Anglo-Saxons to the Tudor Revival

The tradition of England from the mid 5th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. Secular buildings were rectangular timber structures with thatched roofs, and surviving churches such as Escomb in County Durham and Earls Barton show long and short quoins, narrow round arched openings and herringbone stonework.

The 1066 conquest brought massive walls and round headed arches. Durham Cathedral, begun in 1093, covers a large nave with ribbed stone vaults, while the White Tower of the Tower of London, begun around 1078, shows the same heavy vocabulary applied to a keep.

Building under Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603, looked to northern Europe more than Italy. Its clearest expression is the prodigy house, with mullioned windows and Flemish strapwork, seen at Hardwick Hall, Burghley House and Longleat.

The reign of James VI and I, from 1603 to 1625, began with little break from Elizabethan building. Houses favored symmetrical H and U shaped plans with strapwork carving, and the style ended when Inigo Jones led a turn toward Italian classicism after 1625.

From the 1760s Robert Adam and his brothers brought a lighter classicism drawn from Roman sources, including his 1764 study of Diocletian's palace at Split. Syon House and Kedleston Hall show him controlling architecture, plasterwork and furniture as one program.

The late phase of Georgian building, named for the regency of 1811 to 1820, is the white stucco world of terraces and crescents. John Nash's Regent Street and the Royal Pavilion in Brighton are its best known works, and Cheltenham and Bath keep whole Regency streets.

A nineteenth-century Gothic Revival that revived Scotland's late medieval and early modern building, with conical roofs, tourelles and battlements in asymmetrical plans. William Burn and David Bryce were among its Victorian architects, and it is seen as the Scottish counterpart of the English Jacobethan Revival.

Emerging in the second half of the 19th century, it drew on humble Tudor building with steep roofs, half timbering and tall chimneys. Norman Shaw's Cragside and the half timbered Liberty store of 1924 mark its range, and it grew partly as a reaction against Victorian excess.