Comments on: John Thomas Smith’s Rural Cottages

By: Peter Holford

Peter Holford — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 08:24:32 +0000

Lovely to look at and great to live in provided the weather is like Summer 2018. But if it was Summer 2017 – bloody awful. I’m also certain that this style of building didn’t transfer to the Pennines where I now live.

By: Colin Cohen

Colin Cohen — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 17:21:07 +0000

Just shows that for many people the good old days had certain limitations

By: gkbowood

gkbowood — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 17:14:09 +0000

I liked the Hop Cottage but in a good downpour all the rainwater would funnel right into her front door! In fact, some of these homes seem like they would disintegrate with a good rain. I wonder what the inhabitants did to keep dry?

By: Elizabeth Olson

Elizabeth Olson — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 17:07:44 +0000

Love these etchings! Firm romantics, we’ve been living in a English cottage facsimile on Galiano Island for the past four years – chopping wood, tending the honeysuckle and roses and wearing lots of cardigans most of the year. That’s me in the last photo, sitting outside our front door watching the robins!

By: Helen Breen

Helen Breen — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 11:31:20 +0000

Greetings from Boston,

GA, what a charming collection of rural cottages in John Thomas Smith’s book. So many seem to become part of the surrounding vegetation.

The first one “Near Battlebridge, Middlesex” reminds me of Silas Marner’s cottage just before the Industrial Revolution.

By: John Barrett

John Barrett — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 07:35:26 +0000

GA beautiful illustrations shown here today. The poet John Wooderidge lived in one Clandon cottage I expect lots of poems were written here. Poet John, Poetry Soc Bristol

By: Jill Wilson

Jill Wilson — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 06:58:14 +0000

Great etchings – beautifully observed and rendered! I found the drawings of Chelsea and Millbank particularly interesting when you consider what it there now. I also agree about the faux cottage style of a lot of suburbs, and wonder how much the horrors of the First World War made people yearn for this rural fantasy?

By: JohnB

JohnB — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 05:58:07 +0000

Totally absorbing. Great fun to draw I’m sure, but some of these would not have been such fun to live in! And how London used to gobble up England. It’s still trying.