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.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century more buildings were erected in Russia than in any previous period of the country’s history. These ranged from palaces (both royal and private) and banks to country houses, churches and shops. On 23 August 1779 Catherine the Great wrote to her faithful correspondent and artistic adviser Baron Grimm: ‘Vous saurez en passant que la fureur de bâtir chez nous est plus forte que jamais et guère tremblement de terre n’a plus renversé de batiments que nous en elevons’.

Foreign architects were eagerly welcomed. Of varying talents and abilities to conform to the main stylistic currents, many of these have been overshadowed by the more distinguished personalities of the time and consequently have been forgotten by posterity. Such has been the fate of William Hastie, a Scotsman by origin, who played a considerable part in Russian architecture at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. There has not hitherto been any comprehensive study of him and we have to rely therefore on brief references scattered in various Russian publications on different aspects of the architecture of the period. It is not until 1967 that the first English reference to him is found in the discussion of the Bahchisarai Palace in the Crimea in the catalogue of the Cameron exhibition at Edinburgh.

‘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.