Queen Anne

London, 1875. The cloth merchant Jonathan Carr buys 24 acres of land in Chiswick. A new suburb is to grow here. It is to be called Bedford Park. The very next year the first residents move in.

The architect E. W. Godwin is first on the scene but gives up. Money is too tight. In 1877 Carr turns to Richard Norman Shaw, who becomes the estate's architect for three years. Shaw is asked for two house designs and then varies them. Carr buys the drawings – and keeps the right to simplify them to save money.

The result is something new all the same. Red brick. Decorative motifs. Some thirty house types. In 1880 the church, the Tabard inn and the stores open, all designed by Shaw. By 1883 there are 490 houses on 113 acres.

Bedford Park is called the parent of England's garden suburbs. It is also called the home of the aesthetes. The architect Charles Voysey lives here. The poet W. B. Yeats. The painter Lucien Pissarro. Carr himself goes under in 1886, with half the land built on.

And the name? It refers to Queen Anne, who reigns from 1702 to 1714. But the houses have more in common with Elizabethan and Jacobean England than with her time. The style is named after a queen whose architecture it barely resembles.

Then it crosses the Atlantic. Newport, Rhode Island, 1875: Henry Hobson Richardson designs a house for William Watts Sherman. Pattern books do the rest – along with America's first architectural magazine, The American Architect and Building News.

In America the style gains something of its own: turned wood. Posts, spindles and delicate trim – mass-produced in factories and shipped by rail. Between 1880 and 1900 Queen Anne is the most popular style for houses in the country. What begins as a quiet suburb in London ends as a firework display in wood.

Victorian architecture. The umbrella above. Victorian is an era – Queen Victoria's – with many styles beneath it. Queen Anne is one of them, and for many the one that has come to stand for the whole era.