In Jethro Marshall’s new book, Building Society, his rural photographic eye is turned to alternative views of the countryside environment & architecture, with an artful critique of the West Country bungalow.

This typology describes and applauds the well preserved, fit for purpose, humble new builds of the 60s-80s. Often belittled for their repetitive monotony, the single storey structures populating greens and cul de sacs are their own ideals for modern living.

In an introductory essay by Architecture writer Jan Carlos Kucharek, he describes the varying history of the ‘bangalo’ –

““But there was the schism too; the variant that gestated in a slower yet more robust way, in the permafrost soil of Scandinavia. Simpler, crisper, more empirical in nature, these subjugated themselves to the English landscape, bungalow modernism baptised in the fjords and tested in Jutland. Classless, socialist anomalies that insinuate themselves amongst their jostling, more ostentatious neighbours”

Like the previous books in the series, Marshall finds alternative landmarks in the Devon/ Dorset countryside to present an ‘anti-bucolic’ but pro-rural depiction of country life. He swaps romantic thatched cottages for terracotta-tiled, proto modernist, low profile houses, for a timely affectionate study on the English home.

Click here to purchase the book, £12.50