And yet the Elizabethans built medieval castles, so did the Georgians. Castles sprang up everywhere through the Regency and Victorian periods, and medieval castles were still being built after 1914 as anyone who visits Sir Edwin Lutyens’ masterpiece Castle Drogo in Devon – which went up between 1910 and 1930 – knows.
Or, to take another instance. The Gothic style didn’t die with the Middle Ages. Gothic churches were erected in the 17th century and Gothic took off again in the 18th, rising to a floodtide in the Victorian period.
If Prescott and Hill had their way, all those Gothic country house masterpieces such as Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, Arbury Hall in Warwickshire, Strawberry Hill in Twickenham or Tyntesfield in Somerset – which has just been bought by the National Trust – would never have been built.
Or, to expose the absurdity even further, Inigo Jones’s 17th century Queen’s House at Greenwich – the foundation stone of the Renaissance classical style in England and based on the architecture of ancient Rome – would have been vetoed. You could even say that Chatsworth and Blenheim would not have been allowed.
There is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in an architectural style which offers a strong evocation of the past. Almost everyone feels comfortable with something that recalls our common history.
The last time the Government exercised this kind of control was in the post-war period when, under the aegis of Labour, the modernists dominated local planning.
We now lament the horrors perpetrated during the Sixties by architects driven on by disastrous social-engineering projects which resulted in hideous tower blocks, the wiping out of historic town centres and horrendous shopping malls and community centres.
Let me say at once that I have nothing against modernist architecture if it is good. But, like New Labour, it is and has always been essentially urban – a style not easily transported to rural locations.
The Tories introduced legislation known as Gummer’s Law, which allowed new country houses to arise in whatever style the owner opted for, whether classical, gothic, modernist or indeed post-modernist.
As a consequence there was a renaissance in country house building – beautiful houses which often utilise the classical repertory of the past but are, at the same time, very much of their own day. They epitomise the way that we have always built country houses.