The House Trilogy

The House Trilogy follows the same Suffolk house and the families bound to it across more than five centuries of English history. The Town House begins with Martin Reed, a runaway serf born in 1381 whose refusal to accept inherited status eventually gives him the means to build the house and establish a family line. The House at Old Vine carries that inheritance through six generations from the first Tudor decades to the Restoration, while The House at Sunset continues from the eighteenth century into the post-war twentieth century.
Lofts uses the changing ownership, fabric and reputation of the house as a continuous witness to social change. Religious upheaval, civil war, class mobility, industrial and imperial wealth, world wars and modern redevelopment enter through the lives of successive inhabitants rather than as detached history. The trilogy is therefore both a family saga and a long history of England seen through one place, where each generation inherits stories and consequences it only partly understands.