Rate My Professor Timothy Brittain-Catlin

Professor Timothy Brittain-Catlin is Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge's Department of Architecture, where he serves as Course Leader for the MSt in Architecture (ARB Part 2) apprenticeship programme, which he launched in 2020. He is also Director of Studies in Architecture and Design at Gonville & Caius College. Holding an MA in Architecture from Cambridge, a Diploma in Architecture from UCL, and a PhD from Cambridge on the domestic architecture of A.W.N. Pugin under the supervision of Andrew Saint, he qualified as an architect in 1988. Following over a decade in professional practice working on historic buildings, conservation, remodelling, and masterplanning in Britain and abroad, he restarted his academic career at Cambridge in 2000. From 2007 to 2020, he was at the University of Kent, where he twice received the Faculty of Humanities teaching award for innovative team teaching. He returned to Cambridge in 2020 to develop the new apprenticeship route.

Brittain-Catlin is an architectural historian specialising in nineteenth- and twentieth-century English houses, Edwardian architecture—particularly the remodelling of older houses for new uses—Gothic Revival, Victorian and twentieth-century church architecture, and building conservation. He is a member of Historic England’s national Advisory Committee (2018–2025) and has been active for many years on the casework committees of the Victorian Society and Twentieth Century Society. He founded and chairs the editorial board for British architectural history at Lund Humphries. His key publications include The English Parsonage in the Early Nineteenth Century (Spire Books, 2008), Leonard Manasseh & Partners (RIBA Publishing/English Heritage/C20 Society, 2010), Bleak Houses: Disappointment and Failure in Architecture (MIT Press, 2014), The Edwardians and their Houses: The New Life of Old England (Lund Humphries, 2020; shortlisted for the William M.B. Berger Prize, 2021), and Edwin Rickards (Liverpool University Press, 2023). He has contributed numerous articles to journals such as Architectural History and AA Files, and chapters to major reference works like Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (2019). He teaches a lecture course on British architecture since 1800 and supervises students across all levels.