It's no surprise that arts and Crafts architecture should be one of the most enduringly popular of domestic styles. The soundness of the building, the excellence of the details, and the mellowness of homes that look as though they have emerged from the soil on which they are built, would ensure a following.  But, perhaps, they offer something more. at a time of anxiety, disapproving of the glitz of financial excess, they offer a moral bulwark. The favourite word of the architects who built them was "honest".  Honest meant straightforward construction; if something looked as though it were stone or wood, it had to be solid, not a surface dressing. No short cuts were permitted: the whole thing had to be done by labourers and craftsmen, without the machinery that would often have produced the same result and saved time. Materials were not to be hauled from factories half way across the country but found as near to the site as possible. Localism wasn't invented by the Localism Bill now going through Parliament.  There was an element of madness to it, a very British King Canute-like eccentricity, seeking to hold back the tide that brought us shopping centres, motorways and urban sprawl. The movement's founders, John Ruskin and William Morris (above), had seen what the Industrial Revolution did to people, forcing them to live in squalid, smoke-blackened mill towns and work long hours at soullessly repetitive tasks.  They saw an antidote in nature and handwork. It seemed to them that the medieval craftsman must have been happier than the mill worker because he had some control over the ornament he produced. Folk traditions still persisted in agricultural areas of the country, but were disappearing fast.  Living outside Farnham, George Sturt, who gave up teaching to run a family business making farm carts, lamented, like many, "the invasion of a new people", unsympathetic to the old ways. The lights from their villas impinged on the primordial darkness of the night, the sounds of their pianos dispelled the immemorial silence, it was impossible to ignore "the affected excitement" of tennis parties and the "braying" of motor cars. I think he would have got on well with the Prince of Wales.  They knew they were fighting a losing battle - and their response was the same as that of many people today who feel helpless in the face of globalisation, climate change and the banks. They sought to turn home into a personal arcadia. They hoped their revolutionary example would be followed by the world; until that time, they rejoiced in doing - and being seen to do - the right thing. There was a degree of Puritanism, if not smugness: C Fa Voysey, one of whose houses, The White Cottage, in Wandsworth (through Knight Frank and aylesford) had little time for soft furnishings. Observe the name: even a house now valued at ?5m could partake of the noble simplicity of the cottage. Bare, unvarnished wood rather than upholstery was the note: austerity to a fault. It took the decorative genius of MH Baillie Scott to blend exposed wood, hand-wrought metalwork, tiles and stained-glass into a harmony that both seduced the eye and expressed a new way of living.  The Oak House at Iwerne Minster (Strutt & Parker, ?1.55m) is a good example of his planning: better to have one big "living hall", where all the activities of the house could take place, than a huddle of meaner rooms, some of which would only be used at Christmas.  The arts and Crafts architect par excellence was Detmar Blow. as a student on a travelling scholarship to France, he happened to meet the aged and intermittently mad Ruskin, who took him under his wing. He abandoned conventional architecture to become a builder, staying in Leicestershire with an old farm labourer whose trousers he would sometimes borrow - Blow was so handsome he could get away with it.  When he eventually began to design houses in his own right, they were shot through with idealism. One of the earliest was Happisburgh Manor, 1900, on the North Norfolk coast, bringing the maximum of sunlight into the house through an X-shaped or butterfly plan, and built of flint, brick and Norfolk reed thatch: only the glass did not come from the immediate surroundings. Blow appears also to have built the Pyghtle, a couple of years after the Manor, from similar materials (Savills, ?425,000). It radiates a happy zaniness; this was architecture that sought to change the world.  By comparison, Lynton,