As recently as 1954 the known works of Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (died 1775) of Shrewsbury ‘who from a mason and statuary became the principal architect of the county in which he lived’ were few indeed. All that had been ascribed to him was the rebuilding of St Julian's church, Shrewsbury, in 1749-50, and his third design in 1775 for Abraham Darby's famous Coalbrookdale cast iron bridge. His ghost must have been quite dispirited to have had even the bridge denied him in 1958, although happily this was rectified in the same year. A ‘principal architect’ in his county without a house to his credit is a paradox. Even if St Julian's church was Pritchard’s first commission - and this is unlikely - there are twenty-six empty years to account for.

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theorists made a clear distinction between ‘building’ and ‘architecture’; for them, a building became architecture when historical references were invoked.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.

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.

In summer 1823 John Rennie wrote to the Navy Victualling Board about the new depot he was planning for them at Plymouth. The future Royal William Yard would, as he put it, be ‘capable of embracing every requisite purpose’. The new facility would not just comprise thousands of square feet of stores. There would also be buildings for brewing beer, milling grain, and baking biscuit, a slaughterhouse and a cooperage for making casks to store the prodigious output (Figs 1, 2 and 3).

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.

Edinburgh's architecturally magnificent and much-admired historic school buildings, often set in opulent grounds, have come to symbolize the city's ongoing dichotomy between ‘normal’ state schools and ‘elite’ private schools. These schools are conspicuously sited in the most culturally prestigious locations in Edinburgh — the New Town, Old Town and Victorian bourgeois suburbs — and their architecture powerfully underpins their ideologies of longevity and tradition. The solidity of the built ‘heritage’ of these schools, however, obscures a story of great educational complexity and change. Many of the historic buildings are no longer used by the present school institutions; some now have alternative uses. Others have changed fundamentally their social and educational status (several, ironically, were originally built by wealthy donors as charitable orphanages for the ‘deserving poor’ and later converted to fee-paying day schools for the middle classes).

The complex history of these schools cannot be understood adequately without reference to the early history of their buildings. This article is intended as an initial exploration of these complexities. It focuses on two key Edinburgh case studies: the Edinburgh Academy (‘the Academy’), built to William Burn's design of 1823 and opened in 1824 (Fig. 1); and the Royal High School of Edinburgh (the ‘Royal High’), built to Thomas Hamilton's design of 1825 and opened in 1829 (Fig. 2). It examines the educational origins, brief, architectural design, and early use of these surviving purpose-built schools and, in particular, the associated negotiations and debate of 1822–23 that occurred at a municipal level, which links their controversial pre-histories.

When reinforced concrete was first used in Britain for framed buildings, it was treated in the same way as steel — that is, in terms of a simple grid of columns and beams. It took some time for one of the advantages of reinforced concrete to be realised, namely that it could be handled as a series of planes with walls and floor plates, which overcame the problem of intrusive beams and columns in domestic interiors. This essay explores the causes of this delay, as well as the work of the engineers who introduced architects to the architectural possibilities of reinforced concrete. In the immediate postwar years, when reinforced concrete was favoured over steel, there was a return to simple grid structures.

In an interview recorded shortly before his death in 1987, Maxwell Fry recalled the birth of Modern architecture in Great Britain around a half-century earlier. In the course of discussing the work of the Modern Architectural Research (MARS) Group — the society that he had helped to establish in February 1933 and of which he was then the last surviving founder-member — Fry highlighted the links between architects in Britain and their continental European counterparts. Observing that MARS was first established on the basis of an invitation that Wells Coates had received to form a British chapter of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), he noted that the Group had immediately gained an entrée into an international forum that functioned as a unique gathering point for the architectural avant-garde. At the same time, he asserted that membership brought with it commitments that conferred ‘a very serious responsibility’.

CIAM was not, of course, the only conduit for the links that MARS members had with the wider world, but in many ways it was the MARS Group’s relationship with the ‘international community of modern architects […] made visible in the foundation of CIAM’ which defined it and differentiated it from other architectural groupings of its day. Most other such bodies initially coalesced around a single manifesto or exhibition and then quickly fell apart when their members found that they had little in common apart from an enthusiasm for Modernism. By contrast, MARS retained an enduring purpose through its membership of CIAM.

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.

The fact that so few of the private papers and drawings of Thomas Hope (1769–1831) have so far come to light makes the recent purchase by the RIBA of a small sketchbook all the more interesting. The book, measuring 10.5 cm by 16.0 cm, is bound in green paper-covered boards containing 86 pages and is initialled T.H. The attribution to Hope is confirmed by the fact that 12 of the drawings (those on pp. 14–15,60, 62, 66–67 and 72–77) were subsequently used for the engravings in An Historical Essay on Architecture by the late Thomas Hope, illustrated from Drawings made by him in Italy and Germany (2 vols, 1835). The sketch-book and its drawings are not dated but a loose page inserted at the end, with drawings in a similar style, is watermarked 1812: this seems a likely date for the whole book since Hope refers to the Villa Aldobrandini in Rome as the Villa Miollis (the villa was occupied by General Miollis who was Governor of Rome from 1808–13). The book seems to be the record of a single journey proceeding from Rome to Florence, Siena, Parma, Modena, Piacenza, with a few drawings made on the way home in Dijon, Auxerre and Paris. A label on the cover reads: Italy 1. Rome, Siena, Florence, Parma, Placenta, Rivoli, France Dijon Auxerre.

The Melville Monument, which stands at the centre of St Andrew's Square in Edinburgh, was erected between 1821 and 1823 in memory of the Tory statesman Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville (1742–1811). The design for the monument, more than 150 ft tall, was provided by William Burn (1789–1870). The 15 ft statue of Dundas that stands on top, added in 1827, was carved by Robert Forrest (1789–1852), a Scottish sculptor from Lanarkshire, from a design by Francis Chantrey (1781–1841). The Melville Monument, imperial in character and context, is part of a series of highly visible monuments built in Edinburgh in the early nineteenth century to celebrate such figures as Horatio Nelson, Robert Burns, William Pitt, King George IV and the dead of the Napoleonic wars (National Monument). This article examines the commission and construction of the Melville Monument, and analyses the choice and significance of St Andrew's Square as a locus for commemoration. The monument is shown to be part of an emerging commitment to enhance the more picturesque qualities of the city, a reaction against the exaggerated formality of the first New Town and its grid pattern.

This article is tended to draw attention to the existence of a house, Woodhall House, Lanarkshire, which until 1981 was unknown outside its locality. Since then a series of early twentieth-century photographs has been discovered and an early nineteenth-century gouache has been purchased by Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow, which shows a general view of the house in its setting. Publication of some of the only known views of the house may help to identify the designer.

In 1974, Andy MacMillan and Isi Metzstein, of the leading Glasgow practice of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia (GKC), were announced as the winners of the competition to design the new Robinson College, Cambridge, which had been endowed by the businessman David Robinson. The first (and principal) phase of their design was completed in 1981. Robinson remains the most recently created college in Cambridge, which had seen a flurry of new foundations since the mid-1950s, including Churchill College, Clare Hall, Darwin College, Fitzwilliam College, New Hall, and Wolfson (originally University) College. In addition, Robinson was the last major project by its architects, who had assumed the creative lead at GKC in the early 1950s and were subsequently responsible for a series of significant religious and institutional buildings in both Scotland and England. The firm was wound up in 1987, a move that has been described as ‘a tragedy for Glasgow and for Scottish architecture’.

In March 1946 Rudolf Wittkower read a seminal paper on ‘Lord Burlington and William Kent’ to the Royal Archaeological Institute. Whilst it paved the way for a reassessment of Lord Burlington’s achievements as an architect in his own right, it also unequivocally reduced Kent to a subservient role, denying him any real degree of autonomous creativity in the field of architecture. Kent was said to have turned his hand to architecture only relatively late in his career, thus his education in this field had taken place under the scrutiny of the Earl of Burlington, a purist and uncompromising disciple of Palladio and Jones. Wittkower, and after him all the major British scholars in the field have asserted that as a style British neo-Palladianism was entirely dependent upon Palladio, Scamozzi and Jones. It was in the works of these masters that the ‘academic’ architects of the Burlington circle believed they had discovered the eternal rules of architecture. So Wittkower, and those writing after him, postulated a privileged relationship between the British architectural innovators of the early part of the eighteenth century and the architectural tradition of sixteenth-century Veneto. Kent was forced into this straightjacket, even though many aspects of his work jarred with this overall interpretation of the period; indeed in 1945 Wittkower himself had acknowledged the presence in English architecture between 1720 and 1760 of elements which are not Palladian at all. But after this initial admission of complexity and contradiction Wittkower chose to concentrate on Burlington, on whom he planned to publish a monograph. Kent had vanished from his horizon.

In the best room of an otherwise unpretentious house in Lincoln is a ceiling ornamented with octagonal plaster coffering modelled on that of the first-century Temple of Bel, at Tadmor (the ancient Palmyra), in Syria. The most frequently copied antique coffering is composed of octagons whose cardinal sides are each adjacent to, and parallel with, the cardinal side of another octagon. The residual space between any four octagons in this arrangement is a small square. In the Palmyrene variant the octagons meet each other only at their angles. The residual space is a four-lobed star, which always (though not of necessity) inscribes a small square.