Country House Technology

The owners of country houses, together with the vast armies of staff they employed, formed the background of rural society in Britain until at least 1914. They had the wealth and the ambition to be at the forefront of developments in new ideas to improve the comfort and convenience of their homes.

The decline of many country house estates from the early 20th century means that considerable physical evidence has survived to show the impact of technological innovation on the building fabric, landscape of the estate and artefacts within the house, which the project team of Professor Marilyn Palmer and Dr Ian West are using to assess how these changes affected the social structure of the country house and its household in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.