The English House is a history of English architecture and social history told through the stories of eight buildings, and the people who designed, built and lived in them.

Written by architectural historian and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, the book reveals the ways in which English homes have developed and changed over the past few centuries.

They range from the elegant early18th-century Pallant House in Chichester, to the story of 19 Princelet Street in Spitalfields, built for a Huguenot silk-weaver, and on to a row of two-up, two-downs in Toxteth, Liverpool, and the birth of a council estate in Shoreditch, London.

Each house, as Cruickshank shows, has much to tell us about the lives of their first occupants, their aspirations, their struggles and their place within society and their local community.

“Cruickshank’s enthusiasm for England’s vernacular architecture shines through every infectious sentence of this glorious book. A triumph.”

The Times