Technology in the Country House

The country house has long been an important part of British cultural heritage, beloved not just for its beautiful architecture, furniture, and paintings, but also a means to reconnect with the past and the ways in which families and their households once lived.

With Technology in the Country House, Marilyn Palmer and Ian West explore how new technologies began to change country houses and the lives of the families within them beginning in the nineteenth century. A wave of improvements promised better water supplies, flushing toilets, central heating, and communication by bells and then telephones. Country houses, however, were often too far from urban centers to take advantage of centralized resources and so were obliged to set up their own systems if they wanted any of these services to improve the comfort of daily living. Some landowners chose to do this, while others did not, and this book examines the motivations for their decisions.