Still sparking joy: the lasting appeal of Georgian homes 

From a rectory in the Cotswolds to an Edinburgh townhouse, a Georgian residence can be a joy to behold – and to own. “Large or small, town or country, most of us would be proud to possess a Georgian home,” says Crispin Holborow. As joint head of the Private Office at Savills, Holborow has seen many wonderful houses. But as a judge for the Georgian Group’s annual architectural awards for 20 years – since Savills started sponsoring the event – he has visited a great many Georgian ones, sometimes several times over. 

Over the years, there have been occasions when a house he has sold has been nominated for the prize. “You know the way the property started,” Holborow says, “and it’s so exciting to look at it again because it’s up for a Georgian Group award.” The prize has now become “a nationally recognised mark of quality and of achievement for architects, builders – and obviously for the owners of the properties”. 

“Elegance, refinement, good proportions” is how Holborow sums up the appeal of the architectural style that prevailed in Britain from the early 18th century until 1830, across the reigns of Georges I to IV. These days Georgian residential properties are what Holborow calls “an absolute banker” in terms of returns on investment – if they’re in the right location and sensitively restored. So it is hard to imagine that such buildings ever needed defending. Yet they surely did when the Georgian Group was founded back in 1937. 

The great Hungarian modernist Ernö Goldfinger described Georgian buildings as “the great contribution of England”, but after arriving in London in the 1930s and setting up his studio in a handsome townhouse on Bedford Square, the émigré was appalled to hear that “ignorant vandals” – actually the British Museum – were considering demolishing them. Well before the Luftwaffe started bombing the capital, gems of Georgian architecture were being knocked down. Mayfair mansions such as Devonshire House were lost, along with Sir John Soane’s fine Bank of England building in the City and John Nash’s Regent Street terraces. And it is said that only the intervention of Mary of Teck, wife of George V, saved Carlton House Terrace from a similar fate. Meanwhile, countless Georgian country houses were being demolished because landed families could no longer afford the upkeep.

With all this destruction came a backlash, led at first by a founder member of the Georgian Group, poet and scholar Robert Byron. Early supporters included poet John Betjeman, writer Osbert Sitwell and architectural scholar Nikolaus Pevsner – while Queen Mary lent her name to a number of Georgian fundraising balls.

The story of those early days is fascinating, as recounted in the group’s journal many years after by the late Gavin Stamp, an architectural historian who had championed the preservation of everything from Georgian Glasgow to the 20th-century power station that today houses Tate Modern. 

Britain’s postwar mood was much given to knocking things down and starting from scratch, which meant that many a Georgian terrace was swept away. Yet alongside the group’s campaigning work, an enduring popular affection for such buildings helped to save many – and their restoration played a key role in the upward mobility of London neighbourhoods such as Camberwell, Canonbury and Islington. Holborow argues that the volume and sense of space that come with their handsomely proportioned rooms is key to their appeal. And if today some might prefer the more manageable scale of an old rectory to a vast mansion – Mr Collins’s neat parsonage rather than Mr Darcy’s splendid Pemberley – there remains an appetite for the grandeur of the Georgian country house. 

This year’s awards featured several: Brockfield Hall in North Yorkshire took the main Restoration prize for a makeover led by Rupert Cunningham, a director at Ben Pentreath’s historically inclined architectural practice. It was praised for regaining the “clarity” of the original scheme by “removing less prudent 20th-century design interventions”. At Sparsholt Manor in Hampshire, Adam Richards combined the restoration of a Grade II listed house with new additions, striking “a creative balance between the rigours of classical architecture and the abstraction of contemporary design”. And the award for a New Georgian Country House went (for the second time) to the neoclassicist Quinlan Terry.

So far, so very grand. But Holborow also admires owners who, simply out of passion, “will take a Georgian townhouse and restore it back to its 18th-century elegance”. Whatever the motivation, he recommends that owners work with architectural practices who have won the group’s awards and commendations: “They will know the right specialist craftspeople and guide the makeover through the planning process.” It will mean you preserve another Georgian house – and, who knows, you might even land an award.

Read more about the Georgian Group award winners 2024