Queen Anne, pious, solid and dull, would certainly have been horrified to learn that her name would pass into popular history because of a shapely leg. The leg in question was not of course her own, but the sinuously curved "cabriole" support which first found its way under English chairs, tables and chests during 1702-1714, the years of her short reign.

In fact, the Queen Anne style was anything but English in its origins and was to be only the first of a whole series of styles which mark the golden age of British furniture, from the beginning of the 18th century to the death of King George IV in 1830.

Before Anne, even the finest English furniture was seldom more than a pale reflection of its more highly-polished Continental progenitors. From Louis XIV's newly-built Versailles came a passion for silvered or gilt furniture, often elaborately carved in the Baroque manner, and when Louis' Francophilic cousins Charles II and James II were replaced by the Dutch William and Mary, London was swept by a Low Country love of walnut and marquetry. Even the 17th century fashion of chairs with caned seats and backs had a foreign origin - caning had arrived with Charles II's Portugese bride, Catherine of Braganza.

England greeted the 18th century with a gratifying defeat of the French (due largely to Marlborough's tenacity and the largest navy in Europe) and English furniture makers began to look for inspiration not across the Channel, but across the world to the distant and quite mystical lands of the Orient. The English East India Company, granted a Royal Charter by Elizabeth I in 1600, had created a fashion for "Indian" goods of all types. Porcelain, silks, and fine lacquer became the emblem of wealth and refined taste. Large lacquer screens, shipped from the Coromandel coast of India when Chinese ports were closed to English ships, were especially sought after, used for protection from drafts in grand rooms, or cut up for elaborate chests, cabinets and window frames. True Oriental lacquer could not be made in Europe, the necessary laq, a tree sap, hardened during long sea journeys thus rendering it useless. But English craftsmen had long since mastered the art of 'japanning', imitating lacquer in resinous paint and gold powder. Numbering amongst the glories of Queen Anne furniture are large bureau bookcases with slant fronts and mirrored doors in black or the rare scarlet "Japan".

The flamboyance of lacquer was only a small part of the Oriental influence of the developing English - and after the Union with Scotland in 1707, British - furniture style. Some elements of Eastern design were so thoroughly assimilated that it is difficult to believe that they ever spoke with a foreign accent. The concave backs of chairs, so accommodating to the human anatomy, owe their comfortable posture to Ming ancestors, whilst we still open the drawers on our chests with Chinese post-and-ball handles hung from "bat-shaped" backplates. The cabriole leg itself is Chinese, and the claw-and-ball which ends it is that of an Imperial dragon clutching the Pearl of Wisdom. Even the prosaically named "pie-crust" table was descended from the poetic "cloud shaped" tray.

When Anne died in 1714, she was succeeded by a distant German cousin whose main recommendation to the British public was his Protestant faith. King George I thought so little of his British crown that he never even bothered to learn English, so it is not surprising that "Early Georgian" style was set not at the Court, but in the country houses or aristocracy and landed gentry who really ruled the nation. There was no sudden break with the simple lines and delicate proportions of the Queen Anne style. Instead, there was a growing trend towards increased ornamentation (shells at the knees of legs, claw-and-ball instead of simple pad feet, leafwork on the backs of chairs and "herring-bone" banding in the fronts of chests) and thicker, more voluptuous lines. The upper middle classes were prospering, and even the French seemed to be behaving themselves for the time being: it was a positive moment for the British, and a prosperous one.

One of the crucial events in the history of British furniture had almost passed unnoticed. In 1709, a bitterly cold winter had devastated the walnut trees throughout Northern Europe. Walnut was not native to Britain, having been introduced by the Romans, thus its name comes from the Celtic "wealhnutt", meaning "foreign nut". At first, the decimation of the trees posed no problem for the cabinet makers, they routinely aged their logs for five to eight years before using them anyway. But by 1720 however, the shortage of walnut was critical and to make matters worse, in that year, the French prohibited its export. British cabinet-makers found themselves without their preferred raw materials. The dilemma was speedily resolved, however, with the introduction of mahogany from the Caribbean. Mahogany had been known since Elizabethan times as a first-rate wood for ship-building - dense, available in extremely large sections and resistant to rot and wood-worm damage. These qualities proved to be equally desirable in the making of furniture particularly when coupled with its wonderful suitability for carving in a wide range of figures, or patterns in the grain. Supplies of the wood were readily available from Jamaica which the British had owned since 1655, and the Spanish islands of Cuba and San Domingo.

Walnut did not disappear completely from fashion after 1720. The warmth of its colour and softer appearance was considered an advantage in pieces for 'private apartments' such as bedrooms, but for public rooms including the library, the parlour or the hallways, mahogany became the wood of first choice. Its structural strength made it possible to create larger, more architectural bookcases, and chairs were less dependent on the use of cross-stretchers to brace their legs. As the century progressed, the central splats on chair backs gradually lost their solid 'fiddle' shapes and became elaborately pierced and interlaced in patterns which were simply not feasible with the softer walnut. Even chests responded to the more fluid lines made possible with mahogany, and developed serpentine (curved) fronts flanked by carved columns or flat pilasters.

One description of early Georgian furniture, no longer in popular usage but nonetheless wonderfully apt, is 'decorated Queen Anne'. The bulk of furniture produced between about 1715 and 1760 falls into that category. But there existed at the same time, a more specialised, highly formal style: the Palladian. Named for the Italian late Renaissance architect, Andrea Palladio whose works in and around Venice had been particularly admired by British gentlemen whilst on the obligatory Grand Tour, the style united the pedant's love of classicism with the more snobbish appeal of ostentation. Its adherents, chiefly drawn from the very wealthiest peers in Britain, constructed the great country houses which still dazzle us today - Houghton Hall, Holkam, Chiswick House. Into these 'Roman' piles, their owners stuffed some of the most pompous, grandiloquent furniture ever made. Although encrusted with classical motifs, their general form was drawn from the Italian Baroque. Roman lions state from the frieze of a kneehole desk, and Roman eagles glow with gilded splendour under heavy marble slabs.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, a reaction was setting in against the increasingly old-fashioned Queen Anne types and the pretensions of the Palladians. A circle of designers gathered at the Slaughters Coffee House in London and looked back across the Channel for inspiration, and noted with approval the witty, romantic and - to its detractors - frivolous style of the French Roccoco. At the heart of the Roccoco was the curved line. William Hogarth, a leader of the circle at Slaughters, wrote an entire book exalting the virtues of the 'S Curve', the serpentine line he called the 'Line of Beauty'. The French love of asymmetry, C and S scrolls, natural elements used in unnatural ways and anything which reeked of the exotic began to influence the more advanced British furniture designers. At first, so fantastic a style was limited to 'carvers pieces' - mirrors, wall sconces, candlestands and the like whose functions made no real structural demands. But, in 1754, backed by some of those same aristrocrats who had previously pledged devotion to Palladio and ancient Rome, a Yorkshire cabinetmaker newly-settled in London proved that the 'French Taste' could be applied to virtually any form of furniture.

Thomas Chippendale's The Gentleman and Cabinetmakers Directors was an instant and durable success. Its 160 engraved plates were both a trade catalogue for Chippendale's firm and manifesto of the new style. In fact, it gave his name to the style itself: British Roccoco furniture is Chippendale furniture. There is a slight irony in the fact that Chippendale was neither the finest maker in London (that would be William Vile, by appointment to King George III), nor the most successful (that would most likely have been the firm of Ince and Mayhew which lasted well into the 19th century)., but despite these historical accuracies, it is Chippendale's name which has eclipsed all of his contemporaries.

The British added several twists of their own to the already complicated French Roccoco. One was the almost literal use of certain Chinese design elements, such as the geometric railings which became British fretwork, both open and 'blind', or closed. Gothic, which in France was synonymous with barbaric, found an influential British champion in Horace Walpole, one of the most literate and well-connected connoisseurs of the day, who had begun building a 'Gothick' villa at Strawberry Hill, outside London, in 1749. Soon, pointed arches, quatrefoils and cusps were everywhere. Even Aesops Fables provided inspiration for British designers in the mid-18th century with at least one mirror known to illustrate the story of the fox and the grapes. Giltwood, full of flashing light and shadow, was favoured for mirror frames, candelstands and console tables, while mahogany - whose strength and adaptability to elaborate carving were never more appreciated - continued to rule as the king of cabinet woods.

It was Walpole himself who most clearly foresaw the death of the Roccoco. After a trip to Paris at the end of the Seven Year's War, he had noted the coming fashion for all things 'a la Grecque' and gleefully wrote a friend that "No fashion is meant to last longer than a lover". British fashion had found a new favourite as early as 1750, in the person of a young Scottish architect named Robert Adam. Adam had returned from his own Grand Tour in 1758, loaded with drawings of classical Roman temples, villas and the curious Roman houses mistakenly called 'grottoes'. It was thought that the Romans had deliberately built these underground as a sort of jolly but in fact, they had simply been buried over the course of the centuries. Their fabulous wall decorations in fresco or stucco inspired Adam to emulate the 'grotesque' style of ornament, full of arabesques, scrollwork, sphinxes and putti, or cherubs. The Adam style of the 1770s and 1780s was, like Palladianism, a 'high style' strictly for the wealthy. Its emphasis on linear patterns ushered in an age of painted, inlaid and low-relief ornament; of clear geometric forms such as the oval, circle and variations on the square; and of pale woods such as golden liquid grained satinwood from the West Indies.

Cabinetmakers such as Chippendale or the great John Cobb worked to Adam designs, or at least in the Adam manner, to create some of the finest furniture ever made. For many, such innovations as the half-round commode or the oval-back chair mark the very apogee of British elegance.

Not everyone appreciated Adam's work, however. Walpole, always with something to say, complained of "Mr. Adam's ginger-bread and snippets of embroider", but for conservative patrons and clients there were alternatives. One, based on the French Louis XV/XVI 'Transitional' style of the 1770s retained the curves of the Roccoco, but slowed them down and drew them out. Other even more conservative pieces retained the old early Georgian formulas and use of dark-toned mahogany, augmenting them with an assortment of classical motifs. This "domestic Adam" tradition is epitomised by the second of the great British furniture pattern books, George Hepplewhite's 1788 The Cabinet-maker and Upholsterer's Guide. Hepplewhite himself had died in 1786 (the book was brought out by his impecunious widow) and the designs themselves reflect the middle-market tastes of the previous two decades. Hepplewhite, in fact, was not a cabinet-maker but earned his living selling such designs to lesser London cabinet shops. There were in essence, "Adam" but translated downstream. The curves of the French transitional style are still much in evidence (the British equivalent is often called 'French Hepplewhite') and there is an emphasis on practical pieces such as washstands, dressing tables and bedside cupboards designed to conceal the chamber-pot. New types such as the two-flap Pembroke table also appear. Pembrokes, on slender legs with casters for greater mobility, were to become an important part of the furnishing schemes in the latter 18th century, used for informal dining, card games or as an occasional writing table. Hepplewhite's name is most closely associated with chairs featuring oval or shield-shaped chairs, often centering a Prince-of-Wales feather or other similarly delicate ornament. Also clearly in evidence are a whole range of new-classical features such as oval or rectangular panels of highly figured wood on tabletops or cabinet doors, inlaid or painted huskwork or floral swags, and ribbon-tied mirror frames. It is, above all else, an eminently pretty style.

Thomas Sheraton was far more severe. Younger than Hepplewhite, Sheraton began to publish its famous Drawing Book in 1791, only three years after the appearance of Hepplewhite's Guide. Sheraton's designs are fully rectilinear; shield or oval back chairs are replaced by combinations of rectangles or squares, and all traces of the cabriole leg are banished in favour of round or square tapering legs either fluted (channeled in) or reeded (ridged out). Sheraton's designs acknowledge both the austerity of wartime - Britain was to battle Napoleon for almost two decades - and the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Caning, inexpensive and practical, returned to favour for chair seats, and there was a new vogue for japanned decoration - this time neo-classical, not chinoiserie - which could be expected on cheap native woods such as beech or pine. As the population began to shift from rural areas to urban centres such as London, Birmingham and Manchester, furniture became smaller in scale to accommodate townhouses and city flats. At the same time, there was a fascination with mechanical furniture. Tables suddenly opened to reveal writing compartments at the press of a button, and dressing tables featured a whole range of lift-up and fold-out mirrors and candlestands. As British metalworking improved, due to a French embargo on their superior products and a wartime necessity for "hard" materials, brass inlay became popular, and even modest pieces began to feature brass and gilt-brass mounts. Until the end of the Napoleonic conflict in 1815, British cabinet-makers found themselves alternately glutted with imports including exotic timbers such as; rosewood from Brazil, amboyna from the East Indies and thuja wood from North Africa, or forced to fall back on native woods such as oak and yew. It depended on whether British ships were actively fighting the French, or free to resume commercial trade.

Tastes in the last decade of the 18th century were dominated by one man. King George III's eldest son, the Prince of Wales (the future Regent and later King George IV) was unquestionably the most artistic British Royal since Charles I was beheaded in 1649. Only three British sovereigns had ever shown much of a taste for art. The first two, Edward II and Charles I were put to death. The third, George IV was subject to having his carriage stoned by an angry mob and suffered the indignity of having his debts discussed in Parliament. Clearly, a taste for art was a dangerous attribute in the Royal family.

In 1783, the Prince was given a London house of his own and for the next three decades, Carlton House as it was called, became a visual symbol of advanced design. The Prince's architect, Henry Holland, rebuilt and refurnished it in a combination of French neo-classicism, chinoiserie and even Gothic, but his most enduring contribution was in the form of a rigidly archaeological style, based on drawings he had made of authentic Greek and Roman sculpture. The mid 18th century excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii were beginning to bear strange fruit. Chairs and even tables with X-frame supports sometimes constructed from iron (in the Roman manner) began to appear. The Greeks had marble furniture, and so the London cognoscenti would too - or at least furniture carved and painted to look like marble. And when Greek vases and gravestones were seen to depict young women in high-wasted gowns, seats on chairs with concave bar backs and sabre legs. Lest anyone miss the learned reference, they were named Klismos chairs from the Greek word for chair.

If the prince had started the style, it reached its greatest, and perhaps its most absurd expression in the work of two British designers of the early 19th century. One, Thomas Hope, was an amazingly wealthy dilettante, and the other, George Smith was a practising cabinet-maker and designer. Hope's peculiar fancy was to design his London townhouse as a series of classical rooms, each depicting a different ancient culture. To display his Egyptian statues, funeral vases and papyrus strips, he built an Egyptian Hall and filled it entirely with his own conception of Egyptian furniture. That it bore almost no resemblance whatsoever to the real thing was inconsequential. Who would know? Or for that matter, who would care? For his Greek vases, a room with Greek couches, and for his dining room, why not two massive pedestals, modeled, he claimed, on a Roman pedestal he had seen at the Villa Borghese in Rome itself, discreetly hiding a system of grates constructed to warm plates. An equally massive serving table seemed necessary, and it could be made classical by carrying winged representations of Aristotle as its legs. Hope's eccentric designs were so popular that they began to inspire poor imitations, and in 1807 he published Household Furniture and Decoration, not simply illustrating his furniture, but providing measured diagrams in addition. If people were going to imitate his work, he felt, they might as well do it properly.

Within a year, George Smith brought out his own version of this fantastically classical style, in his Household Furniture and Interior Decoration of 1808. There is no question that Smith was riding Hope's coattails, but he had no use for Hope's pedantry. Smith's designs make no pretense of archaeological accuracy, but are simply free assemblages of Greek, Roman, Egyptian and even Persian ornaments which were "in the air", fueled by the formation of the British Museum and its collection. Smith, for example, could skillfully combine the klismos from the lotus flower decoration at the back, and add arms formed as Persian ceremonial vessels known as rhytons.

This unlikely combination of elements is called 'Regency', after the Prince. In 1810, the aged George III was finally declared insane. A reluctant Parliament had no choice but to declare his wayward son, Acting Regent, to rule in his father's place. The Regency lasted politically from 1811 of George IV in his own right, but the term is loosely applied to the entire first quarter of the 19th century. It is the equivalent of the sterner, more morally irreproachable Empire style in France.

The personal taste of the Regent had one last colour with which to endow his namesake style - a sort of manic Orientalism. In the first years of the new century, the Prince had begun to augment his seaside cottage at Brighton, on the Channel coast. For the next two years, he would indulge every artistic whim at Brighton which gradually grew "hindoo" domes, Chinese wallpapers, bamboo and faux bamboo furniture, and even sets of Klismos chairs, as the fancy struck him. It is this almost free form "Indian" taste, expressed in a renewed use of lacquer and gilt which contributes so much to the charm of the Regency style.

The opening decades of the 19th century witnessed the introduction of virtually every modern woodworking machine. The replacement of the hand-tool by the machine - essentially the triumph of the Industrial Revolution, marked the end of the great days of cabinetry. By the time of the death of George IV in 1830, "bench made" pieces crafted by the hands of a worker instead of the assembly line, were coming to an end. The idea that machinery could generate its own valid style was not to be understood until well into the 20th century, and however superficially charming the Victorian era might seem in retrospect, it is difficult not to mourn the close of the "golden age" of British furniture.