'Zero Carbon' is an abstract concept for most people, but we have lived energy-profiligate lifestyles for too long on finite fossil-fuel resources. We now face potential environmental catastrophe from climate change and global warming, with a continuing exponentially expanding global population that doubles every four decades. The capacity of the planet to reabsorb carbon dioxide is about two to three tonnes of carbon equivalent per person at current population levels of seven billion and therefore there is a desperate need for us to reduce our carbon footprint. One way of helping to achieve this is to live in a zero-carbon house, and this will become legislation in the UK for new homes by 2016.

Edward Schroder Prior designed the cathedral of the Arts and Crafts Movement (St Andrew's Church, Roker), perfected the popular butterfly plan in his houses, and published what is still the seminal work on medieval gothic art in England in 1900. Highly regarded by critics such as Ian Nairn, Prior is sometimes considered to have narrowly missed out on a place in the architectural pantheon of his age, alongside contemporaries such as Charles Voysey and William Lethaby. The result of extensive archival and field research, Edward Prior - Arts and Crafts Architect sheds new light on Prior's architecture, life and scholarship. Extensively illustrated, it showcases Prior's work in colour, including many of his architectural drawings and photographs of most of his extant buildings. Prior is the missing link of the Arts and Crafts Movement, in both a theoretical and a practical sense, as he was possibly the only practitioner who genuinely translated the artistic theories of Ruskin and Morris into architectural reality. He went on to found the School of Architecture at the University of Cambridge in 1912.