The development of Modernism in Britain has been presented, depending on the writer's outlook, as either constituting the importation of an alien European style, inappropriate for the true national style, or as the rehabilitating and revitalizing element of a decadent British design philosophy. Writers such as Nikolaus Pevsner in Pioneers of Modern Design, first published in 1936, and The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design of 1968, suggested that Britain's influence in the development of twentieth-century architecture lay primarily in the work of William Morris and the proto-Modernist phase pre-1900. It then became dormant from the turn of the century until the arrival of European emigrés in the early 1930s. Pevsner claimed that

Pevsner goes on to construct a theory which suggests that the work of Gropius, Morris and Ruskin forms a neat historical unit. Outside this unit, whole design philosophies such as Art Nouveau, as well as the developments of entire countries such as England, could be discounted. For Pevsner,

Such a theory of nationalistic determinism suited Pevsner's own agenda well. However, subsequent writers have taken a rather more pluralistic approach, which attempts to address the variety of expressions of proto-Modernism and Modernism during Pevsner's ‘lost period’.