Uvedale Price

Who was Uvedale Price?

Sir Uvedale Price, 1st Baronet, author of the Essay on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and The Beautiful, was a Herefordshire landowner who was at the heart of the 'Picturesque debate' of the 1790s. Apart from the landscape and garden design debates described below, Price's theory resurfaced in architectural and urban design concepts of the mid-twentieth century, being a source of inspiration for the Townscape Movement conceived by Hugh de Cronin Hastings, editor of the Architectural Review, and his colleagues in 1949. As much as The Picturesque was meant to be a middle ground or synthesis of the Beautiful and the Sublime for Price, for Townscape theorists, the Townscape movement was meant to be a middle ground or alternative approach to what were perceived by Hastings as two branches of Functionalism, the Rational and the Organic approaches to architecture and urban design.