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Department of Architecture

 

Biography

Timothy Brittain-Catlin is an architect and architectural historian who has been teaching for many years. After more than a decade working in Britain and abroad on both historic buildings and masterplanning, he returned to Cambridge in 2000 to research the buildings of A.W.N. Pugin and the domestic architecture of early Victorian England. His book The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century was published in 2008 and since then he has published widely on houses and churches, as well as critiques in the Architectural Review, Architecture Today and many other magazines and journals.
 
While at the University of Kent from 2007-2020 he twice won the Faculty of Humanities teaching award for innovative and effective team teaching. In 2020 he published The Edwardians and their Houses, the first radical appraisal of the subject for 40 years. He is a member of Historic England’s national Advisory Committee.
 

Publications

Key publications: 

JOURNAL ARTICLES

  • ‘Good Fairies’ [on Great Maytham Hall, by Edwin Lutyens], AA Files, 73 , 2016 
  • ‘Picturesque, Modern, Tudor-Style: Edgar Ranger in Thanet’. Twentieth Century Architecture: Houses: Regional Practice and Local Character (12) , 2015 
  • ‘The Talented Mr Paget’ [on the architectural practice of Seely & Paget], AA Files, 67 , 2013 
  • ‘Downward Trajectory: Towards a Theory of Failure’. Architectural Research Quarterly, 15 (02) , 2011 
  • ‘Horace Field and Lloyds Bank’. Architectural History, 53 , 2010 
  • ‘A.W.N. Pugin’s English Convent Plans’, in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians [of the US] 65, 3 (Sept) , 2006 

BOOKS

  • The Edwardians and their Houses: The New Life of Old England. Lund Humphries , 2020 
  • Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture The MIT Press , 2014 
  • Leonard Manasseh & Partners RIBA Publishing / English Heritage / C20 Society , 2010 
  • The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century Spire Books , 2008 

BOOK CHAPTERS

  • ‘Great Britain 1837-1914’, in: Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture, 21st edition, edited by Murray Fraser Athlone Press (Bloomsbury) / RIBA Publishing , 2019 
  • ‘Realism in Nineteenth-Century British Architecture’, in: The Companions to the History of Architecture. Wiley Companions 3, edited by Harry Mallgrave, Martin Bressani and Christina Contandriopoulos, Wiley , 2017 

OTHER

  • Gothic Revival Worldwide: A.W.N. Pugin’s Global Influence (with Martin Bressani and Jan de Maeyer) KADOC- Artes series. Leuven University Press , 2017 
  • Introduction to Heritage Assets: 19th- and 20th-Century Convents and Monasteries. Historic England (commissioned when English Heritage) , 2014
Course Leader, MSt Architecture Apprenticeship
Associate Teaching Professor
Director of Studies for Architecture in Gonville & Caius College
Acting Director of Studies for Architecture in Queens’ College (2023-4)
Dr Timothy  Brittain-Catlin