At Beverley Minster, in the second bay of the south aisle west of the transept, there is a change in the character of the wall arcading. The first three arches rest upon four capitals of the ‘Early English’ pattern. They are typical of the eastern section of the church in which the high altar was dedicated in 1260, marking the completion of a stage in building the Minster. The two western arches of the bay are of a different proportion and the last two capitals are decorated with naturalistic foliage (Fig. 3). The hood moulds, instead of coming down to points, rest upon small pieces of sculpture. This pattern is continued along the south side of the Minster, echoed in the treatment of the north aisle and imitated in the alterations which were carried out under Hawksmoor's direction.

Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster, represents a solution to the problem of how to create a visually unified and consistently decorated interior. It also represents the transformation into architectural form of the tradition of epideictic rhetoric - the elaborate praising of personages of high degree. Furthermore, it was the most important structure built in the early sixteenth century in England. It is surprising, therefore, that little attention has been paid to it by modern scholars.

Professor Lethaby, writing in 1906 and again in 1925, attributed the design of Henry VII’s Chapel to Robert Vertue. More recently, Professor Webb and Mr Harvey have suggested that the vaulting was designed by William Vertue, c. 1510. These attributions to the Vertues are based on the fact, among others, that Robert Vertue was the first named in a list of the King’s three master masons who gave an estimate for a proposed tomb for Henry VII in 1506.

Four years ago Peter Draper, as your recently retired president, described his lecture as valedictory and therefore self-indulgent in its choice of topic. What a useful precedent. I hope I am not over self-indulgent to the extent of being too autobiographical, but the subject does relate to my personal experience of the practice of architectural history in the conservation of historic buildings. The history of building conservation is now developing its own quite substantial literature to which this is a small contribution. To some extent this lecture is as much about bureaucracy as about architecture, for much of my life has been spent as an official in the public service. But, so that the lecture is properly historical, most of what I will talk about happened before I was involved.

One major difference between the British and American Societies of Architectural Historians is that the American Society has always involved itself in building preservation issues, whereas the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain does not. This recognizes the different circumstances in each country. In Great Britain we have many amenity societies directed to conservation matters; most of us will belong to one or more of them and they are centres of quite extraordinary expertise. But in view of what I will say later, it is notable that in an account of a meeting in March 1941 in Washington, reported in the first volume of the American Society’s journal, Henry-Russell Hitchcock commented on the merits of the Historic American Buildings Survey, but added that selections by local groups often lacked historical perspective and ignored anything later than the Greek Revival; that there was excessive preservation of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses in New England without regard to architectural merit; and that primary monuments of modern architectural history were wantonly destroyed. As concerns the latter, he cited, among others, Richardson’s Marshall Field Warehouse, and a threat to Wright’s Robie House. The representative of the National Parks Service said that 1870 was about the date limit for a building to be regarded as of interest, though the Vanderbilt House of 1895 had recently been acquired, and that attention was also being paid to groups of buildings.

Francis Vernon (c. 1637-77) is not a particularly well-known figure in the history of British architecture, but perhaps he should be. In 1675 he became one of the first English people to have set foot in Athens and, the following year, published what was undisputedly the first account in the English language of the city and its architecture. Vernon was a member of the recently founded Royal Society and one of a group of English and French travellers who journeyed through central Greece and Turkey in the 1670s. He was murdered in Isfahan in early 1677. Vernon's account of the time he spent in Athens was published in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions, in 1676, and it included brief but illuminating descriptions of the Erechtheion, the Temple of Hephaestus and the Parthenon, the latter written over ten years before the bombing of the temple by a Venetian army in 1687. The Transactions often contained both travel writing and antiquarian material and, in this respect, Vernon's account was typical of the journal's somewhat eclectic content in its early years. Significantly, Vernon's publication predated more famous accounts of Greece from the period, such as those written by his travelling companions Jacob Spon (who released his Voyage d'ltalie, de Dalamatie, de Grèce et du Levant in France in 1678) and George Wheler, whose A journey into Greece was published in 1682. Unlike Vernon, both Spon and Wheler survived their journeys. The only European publication on Athens that preceded Vernon's was a French text of 1675 that would prove to be a fabrication. As this article will demonstrate, Vernon's initial exposure of this fabrication was one of the reasons why his account of the city became so important in English intellectual culture at the time.

This introduction to the special collection begins with a historiographical overview of the American Renaissance. Here we will see how both popular perception and academic study of the subject have been affected by wider forces, including the advent of modernism, the emergence of the preservation movement and the increased attention given to social inequalities in public discourse today. This is the context in which the articles in the collection are situated and introduced. The final section considers aspects of the subject requiring further work, in particular the American Renaissance as a transnational phenomenon linked to the notion of the ‘Angloworld’.

This article considers the position of the Anglo-Portuguese architect Edward Reynolds (1926–59) in the British avant-garde of the 1950s. In Modern Architecture: A Critical History (1980), Kenneth Frampton suggested that Reynolds's student projects at the Architectural Association in London ‘exerted a decisive influence on the development of Brutalism’. This article scrutinises that claim through the lens of Reynolds's interactions with his peers, including the so-called French House group, an informal network that included his tutors John Killick, James Gowan and Peter Smithson. Notable characteristics of Reynolds's work — chiefly the use of complex and irregular geometries to articulate patterns of activity and movement — are discussed, as are contemporary projects by other members of the group and trends such as the New Brutalism, biomimicry and the revival of pre-war strands of Modernism.

The architect Maxwell Fry (1899–1987) is widely recognized as one of the key protagonists in the development of Modernist architecture in Britain. Discussion of this role perhaps inevitably tends to focus on Fry's early involvement in the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group and his inter-war work, particularly his prestigious partnership with the Bauhaus-founder Walter Gropius. Post-war, emphasis shifts to Fry's advancement of ‘Tropical Architecture’ in former British colonies with his wife and partner, the architect Jane Drew (1911–96). Despite a string of important commissions on home soil, their post-war work in Britain has been sidelined due to a historical narrative focused on the rise of ‘New Brutalism’. This article contributes to a reassessment of Fry, Drew and Partners’ work in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It uses the Pilkington Brothers’ Headquarters (1955–65) in St Helens as a case study to examine post-war industrial patronage and how this affected the architectural approach of the project's lead designer, Maxwell Fry. In particular, it investigates his background in civic design at Charles Reilly's Liverpool School of Architecture. Furthermore, it examines Fry's reassessment of pre-war Modernist theory and practice during the mid-1950s and his response to the younger generation of MARS members, such as the Smithsons and Denys Lasdun.

Commencing in the late 1760s, cork models of classical monuments in Italy were purchased by wealthy British collectors while on their Grand Tour. Initially commissioned by tourists with specific antiquarian and architectural interests, the models were an expression of the collector's knowledge of classical history and of their Neoclassical sensibility. Models soon appeared in the Society of Antiquaries of London and the British Museum, in the private displays of Charles Townley and John Stuart, Earl of Bute, and in George III's royal collection. In the early 1800s, architect John Soane began purchasing models from the secondary market for his house museum. Interest in cork architectural models waned during the Nineteenth Century. Descendants of the original owners transferred them to public institutions, while museums that had at first enthusiastically welcomed the donations or made their own purchases, relegated the models to storage. In the twentieth century the majority of the models were discarded or lost. This paper explores the reasons for the enthusiastic acquisition of architectural cork models and their subsequent demise.

This article explores the provenance of the first draft of Sebastiano Serlio’s sixth book, on dwellings, written in the 1540s. It was acquired by the Avery Library at Columbia University, New York, a century ago and published for the first time in 1978. The article proposes that the manuscript and drawings remained in the vicinity of Paris until the late seventeenth century, when they were mounted and bound into an album that may have been sold by a descendant of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau I, either in Paris or the Netherlands. It goes on to demonstrate that, in the early eighteenth century, the manuscript was owned by Francis Bird, a leading British sculptor of his day, who collaborated with leading architects including Christopher Wren, James Gibbs and, possibly, Nicholas Hawksmoor.

The history of English medieval architecture is so well explored a subject that it is easy to forget how much we do not know about the buildings of medieval England. What survives is only a part of what once existed, and the accepted story might be materially different if (to give only three examples) Winchcombe Abbey had been preserved instead of Gloucester, Oseney instead of St. Frideswide's, Oxford, Nottingham Castle instead of Windsor. We shall never know whether the surviving sample is truly representative, and there are many problems in the history of English Gothic whose solutions lie buried in the ruins of our dissolved abbeys and demolished palaces. Chief among the latter was the palace of Westminster, for five centuries the principal residence of cur medieval kings and the centre of their government. All that now remains of its many and often magnificent buildings are the great hall, the crypt of St. Stephen's Chapel, and the Jewel Tower, the last now admirably restored and displayed by the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works.

Paul Thompson’s monograph on William Butterfield set out to challenge the bizarre misconceptions which had previously warped appreciation of his work. These included Sir John Summerson’s accusation of ‘purposeful sadism’, Ian Nairn’s view of him as an ‘unexpected Heathcliff, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s description of him as uncivilized, ‘a man who never wrote a book or an article’ and who rarely travelled. Mendacious anecdotes suggested a puritanical and antisocial character, lacking in humanity. Thompson effectively refuted such absurdities, but Butterfield’s letters — very few of which have been published, even in part — provide fascinating evidence of his character. They reveal his humour and his affection for old friends, and his strongly held, but eminently sensible, religious views, as well as his pragmatic and conscientious practice of architecture. This evidence bears out and adds much useful detail to Thompson’s depiction of the man, refining our understanding of him and allowing his personality to come to the fore.

John Stow the historian, writing in the 1590s about his own neighbourhood, described ‘a frame of three fayre houses, set up in the year 1590 on the high streete’, that is, what was then part of Aldgate High Street but soon to be called Leadenhall Street, ‘between Billiter lane and Lyme streete’, that is, on the south side. The way from the Royal Exchange to Aldgate along Cornhill and Leadenhall Street is one of the most ancient principal ways of the City. The site of the three houses, now of an office building called Baltic House, lies almost opposite the church of St Andrew Undershaft.

Bid Harbours open, Public Ways extend;
Bid temples, worthier of the God, ascend;
Bid the broad Arch the dang’rous flood contain;
The Mole projected break the roaring main;
Back to his bounds the subject Sea command,
And roll obedient Rivers thro’ the land;
These Honours, Peace to happy Britain brings,—
These are Imperial Works, and worthy Kings.

Fortified by Pope’s century-old call for the use of royal riches to civic ends, John Soane’s Designs for Public Improvements in London and Westminster of September 1827 culminated a summer-long campaign on the part of the 74-year-old architect to bring his works to the notice of George IV. Both were men entering their last years under the cloud of public disapproval, for the King a nearly lifelong state of affairs but for Soane the result of pointed criticism of his recently completed Law Courts at Westminster. He was determined to defend and enhance his reputation as a public architect and set about doing so with a flurry of publications produced from 1827 to 1834. Principal among these was the enlarged ‘second impression’ of 1828 of Designs for Public Improvements in London and Westminster. Dedicated to the King, this folio consists of a thirty-six-page-long descriptive text followed by fifty-five line engravings depicting a variety of Soane’s works both public and private. However, the first twenty-four plates form a distinct group presenting a coherent programme of royally sponsored public works that, I will argue, delineate Westminster as a civic space symbolic of the Crown’s historic legitimacy and continued relevance to contemporary society. This programme combines three of Soane’s recently completed public works projects, including the Law Courts, with three projected designs to constitute a royal processional route through Westminster which I shall analyze as employing narrative, expressive, and numinous symbolic modes.

Among the records transferred to the Public Record Office from the Commissioners of Crown Lands in 1961 is a plan [PI. 17] for ‘roads, fences, water and plantations’ proposed for Marylebone Park, signed by John Nash and dated March 1811.1 This is the earliest known version of Nash’s design for the park, but in spite of its obvious importance has never been adequately published or described. Its interest is enhanced by the fact that it is the only plan which relates to the two well-known scenic panoramas [Pis20-35], also now in the PRO-2 Of these, only small sections have hitherto been reproduced. It therefore seems worth while to bring the three drawings together here, reproducing both panoramas in extenso.

It was ironic that Scotland, which Robert Adam had regarded in the 1750s as ‘a narrow place where scarce will ever happen the opportunity of putting one noble thought in execution’, should have provided most of his commissions towards the end of his life. After the financial troubles, frustrations and decline in his practice that marked the later 1770s and early 1780s he spent an increasing amount of time north of the Border on a growing number of commissions which, besides some public works, included the distinctive castles and restrained villas that appealed to a crop of Scottish clients, bankers and merchants, lawyers and soldiers. The year 1785 saw the resumption of work at the Register House. In 1786 he did battle with the South Bridge Trustees over their reluctance to adopt his plans for that scheme in full, travelling back to London in November in company with Sir Samuel Hannay, for whom he was shortly to design Kirkdale House in Galloway. In September 1788 he visited Culzean Castle, accompanied on the journey from Edinburgh by his brother-in-law, John Clerk of Eldin.

Victorian architects and architectural theorists made a clear distinction between ‘building’ and ‘architecture’; for them, a building became architecture when historical references were invoked. The development of new constructive materials, in particular cast iron, directly challenged this perceived distinction. A new material possessed no history; how, therefore, could it be architectural? This paper will address this question by focusing on the treatment of cast iron in a particular building – the Abbey Mills pumping station, of 1865–68 (Fig. 3) – assessing, for the first time, the contribution of its architect Charles Driver (1832-1900). By also referring to Driver’s published writings, this paper will assess how he sought, in this building, to invest cast iron with architectural, and therefore historical, meaning.