The great barns of the medieval period were the first farm buildings to attract the attention of artists and antiquarians, from the 18th century. In the early 20th century this interest broadened out to studies of other iconic building types, such as Arthur Cooke’s A Book of Dovecotes (1920), and their inclusion in the famous regional landscape studies published by Batsford (The Face of Britain). A milestone in the serious academic study of the subject was the publication of a regional study by J.E.C. Peters (1969), which was followed a year later by Nigel Harvey’s inspirational general history of the subject (1970, 2nd edition 1984). Peters has usefully summarised his work in a booklet (1981, 2nd edition 2003) and studies examining farm buildings in their broader national and regional contexts have been taken forward by Brunskill (1982, revised 1987), Darley (1981), Lake (1989) and Wade Martins (1991). Individual studies have been publicised in the journal of The Historic Farm Buildings Group, founded in 1985. A major project by the Royal Commission for Historical Monuments in England, which targeted sample areas for recording, was published in 1997 (Barnwell & Giles 1997). There are a small number of county-wide studies, which are referenced in the Regional Character Statements.
Despite an increasing level of interest in historic farm buildings, some of the smaller, less impressive building types have not been subject to the level of study and research that buildings such as barns have received. Therefore there is a limited understanding of the regional variations that may be encountered. As a consequence, the National Overview texts provided in this document for farmstead and building types are sometimes longer than their regional summaries.
There are a number of sources that provide a good overview of agricultural history and the development of farm buildings, which are referenced alphabetically and available to view using the menu in the right-hand column.
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