Tax in the Historic Landscape

In February 2021 Professor Chantal Stebbings delivered a public lecture on ‘Tax in the Historic Landscape’, hosted by the Worshipful Company of Tax Advisers. The presentation can be viewed at Home (presenta.co.uk).

In the illustrated talk she examined the relationship between tax and the physical landscape, from two distinct perspectives. The first was how far there existed an ‘architecture of tax’ in the sense of particular styles of architecture adopted for the purposes of tax administration, as was seen in other areas of public life, and to see what that tells us about the imperatives of the tax system in Britain. The second was how the taxes on construction in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – bricks, stone, slate and windows – had a material effect on the developing industrial and urban landscape.