British Buildings

British architecture between the wars is most famous for the rise of modernism - the flat roofs, clean lines and concrete of the Isokon flats in Hampstead and the Penguin Pool at London Zoo - but the reality was far more diverse. As the modernists came of age and the traditionalists began to decline, there arose a rich variety of styles and tastes in Britain and across the empire, a variety that reflected the restless zeitgeist of the years before the Second World War.