We have all come here this morning, to this fine church of 1853 which he described as built ‘on a Cathedral scale and in a Cathedral style’, to honour the memory of a great man, a good man, and a wonderful — and indeed in one respect an incomparable — friend and lover of England.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s paternal grandparents were Russian — Russian Jews. Towards the end of the last century they moved west, first to Poland and then to Germany.

His father, Hugo Pevsner, built up a very successful business in furs at Leipzig, where Nika, the younger of the two sons, was born in 1902. His mother was an intellectual, the friend of writers, painters and musicians — Paderewski, for example — who gave her son, after 1918 her only surviving son, every encouragement to become an art historian. Not very long after her husband’s death in 1940, she took her own life, to escape the concentration camp.

Despite periodic attempts to reassess John Webb’s role in the development of seventeenth-century English architecture, he has remained something of an enigma. Born in London in 1611 of a Somerset family, Webb was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School in the City. In 1628 he was taken as a pupil into the office of Inigo Jones. By that date Jones had been Surveyor of the King’s Works for well over a decade and, with his design for the Banqueting House, Whitehall, had introduced a revolutionary style of architecture into England. Jones’s earlier travels in Italy, his study of antiquities and of the architecture of Andrea Palladio had made him the first true Renaissance architect in this country, and his reputation was such that soon after his death he was credited with many buildings designed by others. Webb and his work were overshadowed by the legend of Jones. Drawings in Webb’s hand were already in the 1680s assumed to be by Jones, and Kent’s Designs of Inigo Jones (1727) consists mainly of engravings derived from drawings by Webb. More recently, while Webb’s draughtsmanship has been recognized, it has often been assumed that he was transcribing ideas of Jones’s.

‘The house is a sad thing, & stands as ill as ‘tis possible’, was the Duchess of Marlborough’s unpromising verdict on Holywell in the 1720s; although she did add that ‘if one went thro some green fields to it, I could live very contentedly in such a place if I had no better’. The property lay on the southern outskirts of St Albans, below the Abbey slope: a modest-sized house with extensive gardens, bounded on the west by the road which is now Holywell Hill, and on the south by the river Ver. By the 1720s, as the Duchess’s comment suggests, it had been hopelessly outclassed as a country house by Windsor Lodge and Blenheim Palace. But for many years before this happened it had been her family home, and evidence concerning its building suggests that William Talman’s name can now be added to the number of distinguished architects whom she employed, not always to her satisfaction, in the course of a long and combative life.

The Jervoises of Herriard, happily for the historian, rarely discarded any of their papers. The result is a vast and fascinating archive, one quarter of a million items, now the property of the present owner of the Herriard estate, John Loveys Jervoise, but deposited at the Hampshire Record Office in Winchester. Of particular interest to the architectural historian is a box of drawings (Box Pl) catalogued here. It contains over one hundred items, most of which relate to the building of Herriard House, near Basingstoke, Hampshire, the outbuildings and offices on the estate, the gardens and the church. The remainder show Jervoise property elsewhere, with a few sheets of miscellaneous drawings. When considered in conjunction with the other documents in the Jervoise collection — correspondence, accounts, bills, memoranda, etc. — these drawings form a very full record of the progress of the project to build the new Herriard House early in the eighteenth century, and of the maintenance of the estate and improvements made to it over a period of more than a century (c. 1690–1825). In the main, they are the work of local builders and craftsmen whose names, when recorded, are not familiar. Two men, however, stand out in connection with work on the early eighteenth-century house and gardens. They are John James and George London, and a clear picture of their involvement emerges.

When Josiah Wedgwood put his chimneypiece plaques on the market, he complained bitterly to his partner Bentley that ‘we could not prevail upon the architects to be godfathers to our child’. It would have caused him even more pain to realize that his contemporary Eleanor Coade had succeeded where he had failed, in obtaining commissions from practically every major architect of her time. This happy relationship continued after her death when the firm was owned by her distant relation William Croggon. The extent of their work has been little appreciated, because it is normally mistaken for carved natural stone. In a short article it is only possible to include a minority of the architects from Sir Robert Taylor to Sir Charles Barry, or to put it alphabetically from Adam to Yenn, who used Coade stone or Coade scagliola. A selection has to be made, and those architects chosen who either used Coade stone particularly lavishly, or used it in unusual and characteristic ways.

To contemporaries living in late eighteenth-century Dublin it was apparent that a major architectural transformation was taking place in the Irish capital (Fig. 1). Fine squares and streets of brick-parapeted terraced housing were being built faster than ever, particularly to the north-east and south-east of the city. Many of the public buildings were being either rebuilt or reclad in the garb of the latest neo-classical fashion. The explanation offered by subsequent commentators for this surge in Dublin’s development — that it was the display by the Anglo-Irish élite of the prosperity and national pride they had recently forged for Ireland, and that it arose directly from the legislative freedoms won in 1782 by ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ (named after the great Patriot leader) — still persists in recent architectural histories. Whether this interpretation is satisfactory, or whether more emphasis needs to be placed on the colonial condition of Ireland at the time, requires investigation. Recent Irish historical writing has questioned the traditional assumptions about ‘Grattan’s Parliament’, and has instead suggested that the closer system of ‘management’ begun under the viceroyalty of Lord Townshend (1767–72) represented the decisive break in late eighteenth-century Irish history. This change in colonial policy sought to return effective rule to the Westminster government and its representatives in Dublin Castle, and was achieved by regaining control over the Irish Revenue Board and by buying a loyal party in the Irish Parliament.

The Rev. William Gilpin, prophet of the Picturesque, visiting the Cumbrian town of Cockermouth in 1766 wrote enthusiastically of its charms:

Wordsworth had a special affection for his birthplace and later travellers and architectural writers right up to John Cornforth in 1982 have expressed a similar feeling for this market town, in spite of changes brought about through its closeness to industrial west Cumberland. This is the setting for two villas of the second quarter of the nineteenth century which have their origin in Francis Goodwin’s Domestic Architecture.

Bishop Gillis of Edinburgh has never been made the subject of a full and scholarly biography: those printed sources which are more than mere chronologies are largely given over to eulogy, and the one dissenting voice — a manuscript life written by a contemporary — inclines to the other extreme. All writers, however, recount the following facts: in 1802 James Gillis was born in Montreal; in 1816 his Scottish parents returned with him to their homeland, and the following year he began his training for the priesthood, first in Scotland and subsequently in France; ordained in 1827, he was consecrated titular Bishop of Limyra in 1838, and acted as auxiliary to Bishop Carruthers, at that time Vicar Apostolic of Scotland’s Eastern District; he soon assumed direct responsibility for the congregation in Edinburgh, and eventually succeeded Bishop Carruthers as Vicar Apostolic on the latter’s death in 1852; Gillis himself died in 1864.

The notorious tale which surrounds the competition of 1856–57 for the British government offices is part of the mythology of the Gothic Revival. In the saga of the so-called ‘Battle of the Styles’, it has generally been regarded as the fiercest skirmish, fought between the perfervid Gothic architect, George Gilbert Scott, and Lord Palmerston, the Liberal prime minister and a staunch classicist. However, the actual politics of the design was not this fabled, clearcut Liberal-versus-Conservative schism, nor was the heart of the architectural question — Scott’s Gothicism — unambiguous. The real complexities of the story were defined by two great, imbricated cultural forces which matured in the 1850s: the Reform movement in political life and the High Victorian movement in architecture. These established the environment in which unexpected political alliances could be made — most notably that between Palmerston’s chancellor of the exchequer, W. E. Gladstone, and Scott — and in which an exceptionally broad-based architectural theory could be forged, and then tested to its breaking point.

Lion Chambers in Hope Street, Glasgow, an eight-storeyed shop/office building, is of interest as an early example of entirely reinforced concrete construction as well as a curious example of reinforced concrete architecture (Pl. i). It was designed and built in 1904–07 for William George Black, a Glasgow lawyer and writer, in Hennebique’s system; foundations, frame, floors, roof, chimneys, stairs and outer panel walls were all reinforced concrete.