When the Society of Architectural Historians visited Little Wenham Hall in September 1998 Edward Martin’s conference notes presented it in the light of a relatively new interpretation of such lordly buildings. This interpretation generally rejects the old view that they are ‘upper halls’ on the grounds that they are instead chamber blocks that have lost the hall ranges on which they once depended. While this seemed to offer a plausible explanation of Little Wenham Hall, it was not entirely convincing (Fig. 1). As a matter of record the Society also visited both Framlingham Castle, which contains the ruins of a possibly similar domestic structure, again now thought to be a chamber block dependent on a lost hall range, and Colchester Castle, of which more below.

There has always been something curious, if not exotic, in that all-embracing category of post-Conquest stone domestic building known as the ‘upper hall’. It rose from the wastes of the Dark Ages like a shooting star to glitter briefly in the twelfth century only to fade away slowly a century or so later. The new explanation that its function was different from that of the hall and was moreover dependent on an open hall is therefore compelling: after all, open halls and dependent chamber blocks have a well-established pedigree.

For a long time Victorian architecture was misjudged because it was criticized in twentieth-century terms. Then teleology fell out of fashion and nineteenth-century buildings began to be judged, rather more sensibly, not as precedents -pioneers or anti-pioneers - but as products of their own environment. Perhaps we are now in danger of carrying this process too far. We are already starting to look at the artefacts of the Victorian age through spectacles which are rosily and uncompromisingly High Victorian. This article sets out to redress that particular imbalance by explaining the Victorian architectural scene in terms of its Regency foundations. Its terms of reference are limited. It is primarily concerned with the attitudes of early nineteenth-century architects and the way these attitudes were conditioned by economics and by education. It deals with two interconnecting themes: firstly the survival of Regency characteristics into the mid-Victorian period; and secondly the explanation offered by these characteristics for some of the primary attributes of Victorian architecture -qualities or weaknesses, according to taste.

Thomas Rickman has been credited, perhaps for too long, as the first figure to ‘discriminate’ the styles of medieval architecture and create a chronological analysis of Gothic architectural forms. Not only were there several authors who published on the subject immediately before Rickman, but there was also, as early as the mid-seventeenth century, considerable interest in the discernment and classification of periods in medieval architecture. One of the chief figures in this was John Aubrey, who pioneered a method for deducing the date of a medieval building by analysing the shapes of its windows. This intellectual initiative, 150 years before Rickman, has been either overlooked or interpreted as a ‘false start’ in Gothic revivalism. It is, however, worthy of fresh appraisal as a significant development in historical method and as an indicator of one way in which architecture was understood in the seventeenth century. Aubrey’s idea was that objects of a given type, in this case medieval windows, had a particular shape during a particular historical period, and that their morphology could be used to create a system for establishing the date of any given building. The context for this scheme was the innovative proposal of several early modern antiquaries that shapes in themselves could convey historical information, and that specific historical periods had their own distinctive forms. These scholars, many of whom were associated with the Royal Society, took faltering steps towards taxonomies of historical form which foreshadowed the methods of analysis that became — and arguably remain — central to the discipline of architectural history. That their interest focused upon medieval architecture at a time when the Gothic was largely rejected as irregular and barbarous is also notable. Examining the origins of a technique for dating historic buildings through visual analysis reveals how an intellectual circle of the seventeenth century perceived and understood architecture at a time when in England architectural commentary and criticism were still in their infancy.

This article focuses on the relationship between ornamental iron and the civic in British market halls, a subject which has been overlooked in the existing literature on their architectural development. Like many other forms of nineteenth-century retail architecture — shops, bazaars, arcades and department stores — market halls embraced the new architectural possibilities suggested by iron: increased floor-spans were made possible by wrought-iron joists, which could span greater distances than timber ones; the strength of cast-iron columns allowed larger openings in the external walls; and the increased availability and lower cost of glass meant that these openings could be glazed, allowing greater visibility of commodities. Yet, unlike much Victorian retail architecture, which was usually privately financed, market halls were explicitly articulated as public spaces. As such, there were problems in assimilating iron-and-glass structures into established notions of public architecture. In 1878, The Building News, in a discussion of London’s market buildings, argued that they should be ‘different from huge railway sheds and Crystal Palaces’ because their status as public buildings required some form of ‘artistic’ treatment. For many architects of market halls — in common with other new building types in the Victorian period, such as pumping stations, railway stations, exhibition halls and warehouses — the solution lay in a dual architectural identity: an exterior structure built in conventional building materials such as stone and brick, harmonizing with existing urban architecture; and an interior space supported by an independent iron-and-glass structure.

‘When you go abroad, begin with France’, George Gilbert Scott told his student audience at the Royal Academy. ‘It is the great centre of Mediaeval art.’ Scott himself was late in appreciating this. Apart from a day trip to Calais at the beginning of his career, the first visit he paid to France was in 1847, soon after securing his first cathedral appointment at Ely when he was 36 years old. ‘My eyes were at once opened,’ he later recalled:

Architectural settings of the early Tudor period, executed in terracotta and adorned with Renaissance ornament, have long attracted the interest of architectural historians. The surviving examples at Sutton Place in Surrey and Layer Marney in Essex are well known, as is the series of terracotta tombs across East Anglia, which date from the 1520s and likewise include Renaissance detail. A group of contemporary funerary monuments in Hampshire, that also exhibits Renaissance detail, has been largely overlooked by scholars. These monuments can be associated with the Renaissance work in Winchester Cathedral, and in particular with the well-known presbytery screens. The group includes the remains of a chapel at Thruxton, with a tomb chest for Sir John and Mary Lisle, built between 1524 and 1527. The Lisle chapel was demolished in the 1790s to provide material for the refurbishment of the church tower. An important series of Renaissance carvings were set into the tower at this time (Fig. 1). Long overlooked by scholars, their original position in the Lisle chapel will be reconstructed in this essay.

This paper is intended to achieve two aims, first to rescue from semi-oblivion a major London building of the early seventeenth century, and secondly to disentangle a little further that obscure and knotty problem, the manner in which Inigo Jones’s ideas on architecture were disseminated in England.

The Goldsmiths’ Company, one of the leading craft companies in the City of London, rebuilt its Livery Hall in the second half of the 1630s to the design of Nicholas Stone. Goldsmiths’ Hall was again rebuilt almost two centuries later when, in 1829, it gave place to the present hall, Philip Hardwick’s noble classical essay. Stone’s hall is familiar from several indifferent prints, but the drawings here reproduced for the first time provide a reliable record, full enough to allow a serious assessment of Stone’s design. Since the publication in 1896 of Sir Walter Prideaux’s Memorials of the Goldsmith’ Company it has been known that it was the King’s Surveyor, Inigo Jones, who advised the Company in 1634 not to patch up its medieval buildings but to erect a complete new hall. The Memorials, extracts from the Company’s Court Minute Books, have formed the basis of the so far very limited discussions of the seventeenth-century hall, yet the Court Minute Books themselves tell a much fuller and more revealing story. They also make it clear that the shell of Stone’s building survived the Great Fire of 1666, as George Vertue had noted. Prideaux’s introduction misleadingly raised doubts whether the prints did not show a post-fire rebuilding of Nicholas Stone’s façade.

The emergence of Irish architecture in the classical fashion may seem to have started with the appearance of Edward Lovett Pearce’s Palladian buildings in the late 1720s and 30s, followed by the tidal-wave of classical architecture by architects such as Richard Castle, Thomas Ivory, James Gandon, and many others. Was wide acceptance of classicism in eighteenth-century Ireland due to the architects’ persuasion of their patrons, or had the patrons already been predisposed to classical styles of art? Were Pearce’s patrons the first to be confronted in Ireland with all the paraphernalia of classicism, or could the parents of his patrons have taught them the essence of classical art?

Classical Irish architecture of before the eighteenth century is little known nowadays because so little has survived to the present day. A succession of internal revolts, ending with the 1922 burnings, eradicated much of the evidence of early classicism. Also the damp Irish climate and the decline of landed families heavily contributed to this toll. Only within the last thirty years, the important country house Eyrecourt Castle in Co. Galway lost its princely staircase and wainscotting (sold to the newspaper millionaire William Randolph Hearst), and has itself been left to collapse. Of the numerous houses known to have been built in the late seventeenth century only Beaulieu, Co. Louth, survives intact. The countryside is also scattered with the ruins of the plantation houses of the early part of the century. Again, the survival of any of these buildings with its interior is extremely rare.

The evidence of inventories has played a significant role in studies of the smaller houses of Tudor and Early Stuart England; important publications on vernacular architecture and certain regional studies have, with inventories as their major source, defined the extent and nature of low- and middle-income housing in England where often much of the physical evidence is now lost or fundamentally altered. These studies have made an important contribution to our understanding of consumer culture at this period, including the amount people were prepared to spend on building materials and the permanent fixtures of their houses. Their conclusions have often been cited in more general commentaries to corroborate the famous comments of William Harrison, first published in 1577, on rising living standards as evidenced in the buildings and their appointment that he saw around him. It could also be argued that studies emanating from the United States, examining American inventories from the seventeenth century and later and sometimes in comparison with English evidence, have explored, in considerably greater depth than those who have worked with purely English material, the potential embedded in the inventories of relatively modest households for the discussion of wider issues arising from the study of buildings, concerning space, material culture and gender.

‘A bicycle shed is a building: Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.’ With that certainty Nikolaus Pevsner opened his Outline of European Architecture, and with such certainties many of John Newman’s generation began their studies of architectural history. A cathedral was a cathedral, a castle a castle; but bicycle sheds were for bicycles, not historians.

The history of church architecture in seventeenth-century London lacks threads of continuity. It is dominated by two great men, Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, whose contributions could not and did not straddle the whole metropolis or the whole of the century. Besides, the devising of a new church was too significant an act to be left entirely to those capable of architectural design. There is a related misconception that churches were seldom built in London between the Reformation and the Great Fire of 1666. Yet even within the City of London, numerous parish churches were rebuilt during this period, while Jones substantially remodelled Old St Paul’s Cathedral. Beyond the City, much more was happening. London’s earliest seventeenth-century suburban churches were broadly Gothic in style and medieval in type, while those built at the end of the century were entirely classical auditories. The same could be said of church building in a national context, although not without hefty qualification. What is fascinating, important, and insufficiently studied, is the nature of this transition and its wider historical meanings.

It is becoming clear that the Neo-Classical movement known as English Palladianism had complex origins: or, to put it in other terms, the triumph of Burlingtonian Palladianism was preceded by several false starts and private initiatives which for one reason or another failed to accomplish the revolution in taste over which Lord Burlington was to preside in the course of the 1720s.

Let us look for a moment at some of these pre-Palladians. In Oxford there was Dean Aldrich of Christ Church (died 1710), whose Peckwater Quadrangle might easily be mistaken for a Georgian square in John Wood's Bath. Aldrich's architectural revolution was almost confined to his own college, but he also had a programme of Palladian publication. It is not I think generally known that although his Elementa Architecturae- a treatise strictly based on Vitruvius and Palladio - was not published until forty years after his death, 44 pages were printed in his lifetime, and that before his death he had set a young Oxford don called Fairfax the task of translating Palladio's Antichità di Roma. But the translation, characteristically, was not from Italian into English, but from Italian into Latin. We may conclude that Aldrich's initiative was too academic to be influential on a national scale, too local to affect the general course of English architecture.

In 1950, the year California returned Richard Nixon to the United States Senate, Arts and Architecture put Raphael Soriano’s Case Study House on display to the public (Fig. 1). This programme, promoted during the post-war years by John Entenza’s adventurous magazine, sought to provide exemplars for contemporary living.

From the first years of its establishment in June 1857, to the end of the nineteenth century, the South Kensington Museum had amongst its collections over a hundred architectural models. First they were acquired through a policy of encouraged loans and gifts, followed by pro-actively commissioning model makers; other models, however, were at South Kensington through default, having remained on site where they had been made by ‘sappers’. The models, which included examples of Western, Asian and Far Eastern buildings and monuments, were first shown in displays under the headings of Ornamental, Architectural, Economics, and Educational. To give an indication of their initial importance to the museum, the early guidebooks feature architectural models amongst the ‘principle objects in the gallery’. Twenty years later most models had been transferred from what were essentially style galleries to the more utilitarian displays concerned with architectural and engineering practices, and within them they were merely included as part of the broader contextual themes. By the turn of the century, with the exception of the 1901 handbook to the models of Italian Renaissance painted interiors, they were rarely referred to at all in museum publications. By 1912 (soon after the Science and Art collections had been divided on either side of the Exhibition Road) most of the models were no longer on display and were thought by senior keepers to be of little use to museum collections. Many had been de-accessioned by the 1970s, when their position in the doldrums was reversed and models were once again included in the museum displays and exhibitions. This article explores the changes in attitude towards architectural models during the first 120 years of the V&A, focusing on the models of Western buildings.

The Romanesque revival, like the Gothic revival, was an international movement. It passed easily across national boundaries and its effects were felt throughout Europe and across America. In Britain it was overshadowed by the Gothic revival out of whose historiography it grew, and is easily confused with the Norman revival that enjoyed considerable popularity in the 1830s and 1840s. Both the Norman revival and the study of the Romanesque were the fruit of British antiquarianism, because in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was in this country a well developed scholarly interest in pre-Gothic, round-arched buildings.

When Henry VIII finally took full possession of Hampton Court in 1529 he inherited a house already much embellished by Thomas Wolsey. In 1515 Wolsey had taken a lease from the Order of St John of Jerusalem on the modest manor house of Hampton Court and during the next fifteen years he turned it into one of the largest if not the very largest house in the kingdom. Attached to Wolsey’s lease there is an inventory, and this, together with the results of recent excavation, have revealed much about the earliest house on the site. Wolsey’s additions to this house seem to have been undertaken in two distinct phases. The first group of additions (1515–25) included the vast base court, new kitchens and a remodelling of the main first-floor reception rooms. In a second phase (1526–29) another storey was added to the main range of reception rooms for the queen, a new range was built on the south side of the second court, and the chapel was begun. The chapel, it appears, was still under construction when the king began his first building campaign. Eventually it was to be finished with materials that Wolsey had set aside at Sonning in Berkshire, for the building of the chapel at Cardinal College, Oxford.

This article argues that Richard of St Victor's twelfth-century architectural drawings for his historical exegesis of Ezekiel's vision of the Temple of Jerusalem is more sophisticated than the historiography has suggested to date. In his commentary, Richard provided plans and elevations for a number of different buildings, including the Temple's gatehouse. When attempting to convey the dimensions of the gatehouse, he made a distinction between measurements taken as if along a flat plane and those that take the slope of the mountain into account, calling these planum and superficies respectively, words that indicate a strong correlation to contemporary practices in geometry. When he wished to illustrate the dimensions of a gatehouse's interior, he included a lateral section of the building, which is possibly the earliest in existence. The use of the term planum (similar in meaning to the subsequent word ‘plan’) and the appearance of a section are unusually early, although there is still no evidence that Richard's work directly influenced later architectural drawings.

‘Within the last fifteen or twenty years, a larger field has been opened for architectural talent, than at almost any period in our modern annals; a greater number of bridges and churches, and of both public and private works, upon an extended scale, have been completed, than in a hundred years before. [However] the taste and style of some of the public edifices do not indicate such a state of improvement as might have been desired and expected from the increased opportunities which have been thus afforded.’

The above statement well expresses the general dissatisfaction with contemporary public architecture so prevalent in the periodical criticism of the late 1820s and 30s: a feeling so widespread that Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine of 1828 referred to it half-seriously as a ‘fashion’. It was a relatively recent phenomenon. In the previous decade a strong mood of optimism characterized prospective thinking about metropolitan architecture. The renewal of extensive government patronage of architecture after the Napoleonic wars, together with the profusion of privately financed major works being erected or planned, led contemporaries to envision and hope for a favourable transformation of the topography and architectural image of London.

Bound into the back of the volume known as Gough Drawings A3 in the Bodleian Library are ten leaves from the notebook of an architect or surveyor. They have been used on one side and depict the floor plans of two large town houses and two elevations of the smaller house. Both sets of drawings are in ink with some use of wash for filling in the walls — in the case of the larger house it appears that the wash has been used to distinguish masonry walls from those of lighter construction which are left blank. An unusual feature of the drawings is that the paper has been cut away to show the open light wells above courts and staircases. The page size is 14½in by 11½in and the drawing scale of the larger house is one inch to 12 feet and of the smaller house one inch to 16 feet.

During 1971 two new books were added to the immense amount of published work on Wren’s architecture, one written by Margaret Whinney and the other by Kerry Downes. This evidence of a continuing interest in the critical appraisal of Wren’s buildings seems to invite a contribution from the neglected study of his natural philosophy. A number of articles have been published on various aspects of Wren’s ‘scientific work’, but we are still without a general critical account and, as a result, this valuable source of knowledge about Wren has remained largely untapped. The present article can only be a beginning, but it will aim at an understanding between two separate academic disciplines, the histories of science and of architecture. As such it risks censure by either or by both. Wren’s natural philosophy is more properly the subject of a book than of an article and we must be extremely selective, drawing on examples from his work which illustrate general conclusions. On the other hand there is, of course, a great deal of published material on Wren the architect. Any attempt to summarize the ‘results’ of this work, by giving what purport to be representative conclusions, will seem naive to anyone who has studied the changing expression of Wren’s remarkable talent. In order to minimize these difficulties, we will concentrate on the solution of one problem, namely the interpretation of Wren’s theory of beauty, as it has been preserved in his first tract on architecture. This is a single problem, but I will try to show that it is also a central one, having implications which involve our whole approach to Wren’s work. It also seems to raise more general questions, concerning the historiography of the history of architecture.