The art historian Dan Cruikshank tells the story of the English house through eight very different buildings and, in the process, tells the story of the Jews in England
November 16, 2025 13:36
Just when the question of British identity is front and centre of so many current conversations, along comes architectural historian Dan Cruickshank with the most delightfully reassuring of books – which, though he may not initially have intended it, has a soothing effect on how we describe ourselves.
In The English House, Cruickshank lovingly and methodically dives into the history of eight different buildings in England. To those Jewish readers who are wondering quite what these buildings have to do with them, we learn that a house on Steep Hill in Lincoln has not only long been known as the “Jew’s House”, but is probably, having been built in or around 1170, “one of the oldest houses in England”.
Not only does Cruickshank outline the architectural features of the Lincoln building, which indicate it was home to a wealthy family, probably a banker, but he tells us that “any building association with a Jewish banker who served the Norman king would have been doubly at risk, as was amply demonstrated by the events of 1190, when simmering resentment sparked by Crusader reversals in the Holy Land… turned to attacks on Lincoln’s Jewish community”. Plus ça change, the modern reader may well conclude.
Cruickshank tours England to highlight the stories behind some of the country’s most intriguing buildings, from Chichester’s Pallant House, built for aristocrats, to a “two-up, two-down” in Liverpool’s Toxteth neighbourhood.
But he is most detailed on the building he calls “a home for immigrants”, 19 Princelet Street in the Spitalfields district of London. Originally built in 1718, it became a focus for the first wave of Huguenots fleeing persecution in France. Mainly, though not exclusively, talented and creative silk weavers, they quickly established a community whose skills were much in demand by the English aristocracy and the emergent middle class.
Princelet Street was a Huguenot stronghold right up to the mid-1850s. But in 1862, Ashkenazi Jews from Russia began arriving in the neighbourhood and in 1870 a Jewish Friendly Society took out a 20-year lease on 19 Princelet Street, turning it into an Orthodox synagogue.
Cruickshank, who is today a trustee of 19 Princelet Street, is fascinating on its early history.
He tells us, for example, that it became a “favoured venue for cut-price and semi-communal marriages”, which cost half a guinea rather than the usual three guineas.
As a result it attracted large and often “riotous” wedding parties – apparently there could be up to eight or nine weddings a day and frequent fights broke out as one family vied for its place over another.
The synagogue itself finally closed in 1962, after which it was solely occupied by a “hermit scholar”, David Rodinsky, who had lived there since 1929 when he was a child.
In 1969 he left abruptly and died in hospital after collapsing in the street.
Cruickshank guides the reader through 19 Princelet Street wearing his social history hat rather than his architectural one. He does so with great charm and a keen sense of the resonance of the building, which – like all the buildings in the book – he brings beautifully to life.
The English House: A History in Eight Buildings, by Dan Cruickshank
Hutchinson Heinemann
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