On the second of September 1895, the anniversary-day of the battle of Sedan — the decisive victory of the Prussians over Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 — the consecration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche took place in Berlin (Fig. 1). Like many other nineteenth-century churches the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche was as much a political as an ecclesiastical monument: a fortress against the destructive forces of anarchy and socialism — this is the German emperor’s own statement — and, needless to say, an expression of the national spirit. Such intentions on the part of the leading forces of the German monarchy had their impact on the choice of the style for this imperial memorial. This style had to fulfil several conditions: it had to look genuinely German, it had to be decently religious and it had to recall the imperial past of the medieval Empire. Franz Schwechten’s building is one of the last great examples of nineteenth-century eclecticism in Berlin. Combining Gothic rose-windows with Romanesque towers, it is a rehearsal of the so-called Rhenish transitional style, which was so much cherished by the newly-founded German empire and especially by the emperor Wilhelm II himself. The church was largely destroyed in the Second World War. Its original effect must have been rather like Hollywood: at the end of one of the most elegant nineteenth-century boulevards of the modern capital stood a monument looking like a Rhenish medieval church — St Peter’s at Sinzig or St Mary’s in Gelnhausen. Oberhofmeister Ernst von Mirbach, who was the leading force behind the project, wrote in 1897: ‘Die Kirche ist im spätgermanischen, dem sogenannten Übergangsstil entworfen. “Germanisch” und nicht mit dem falschen Worte “Romanisch” sollte man den Stil bezeichnen, welcher sich bei germanischen Volksstämmen eigenartig und grossartig herausbildete und in deutschen Gauen seine lieblichste und vollendetste Blüte erreichte.’ [’The church is in the late Germanic, the so-called transitional style. One should describe it as German and not use the inappropriate term Romanesque for this style, which was formed particularly and most splendidly by the German people and reached its fullest and most beautiful flowering in the German-speaking lands.’]

Monuments of the Timurid period, erected in Iran and in Turan between 1370 and 1506, display inscriptions in Arabic and Persian which contain the names of ninety artisans, nearly all of which are followed at the end of the line by the Muslim lunar date. Many of the names are followed by occupations and about half by the addition of a nisbah, or place of birth. The occupations include master workman, architect, builder, carpenter, cabinet maker, stone carver, painter or decorator, tile cutter, mason working with mud brick, blacksmith and potter. In many cases the names were preceded by expressions of humility, such as ‘poor servant’ or ‘weak slave’ and followed by terms of religious piety.

The Townshend Archive at Raynham Hall, Norfolk, which is currently being catalogued by the Norfolk Record Office, contains some interesting material not only for social and political historians, but also for their architectural counterparts. Apart from important new information on the extensive building activities of the 2nd Viscount Townshend at his seat, Raynham Hall, during the period 1703 to 1732 (which in itself merits publication) another set of documents has emerged which throw light on the building of an equally intriguing country house, Ramsbury Manor.

The mansion house at Easton Neston is Nicholas Hawksmoor’s first masterpiece. It was substantially complete in 1702. The first of these two statements is supported by the architect’s own claim; the second is inscribed on the entablature of the east front as well as on rainwater heads. But few documents or drawings have ever been found, and the house reveals only limited evidence of its early history. The name of Sir Christopher Wren also has consistently been linked with it, but the meaning of this connection needs re-examining. It is now possible to trace most of the stages by which a drawing by Wren became a building by Hawksmoor, and to show that the building begun in the early 1680s was not designed by Wren; that possibly Sir William Fermor having rejected Wren’s good advice was offered that of his assistant Hawksmoor and accepted it; that while the author of the service wings is unknown, the body of the house, as Hawksmoor called it, is his alone; that it was built only once and is not a stone cladding of an already completed house. Some further evidence is added of the rôle of the Arundel Marbles in the adornment of the house. Although dates are still extremely hard to find, there seem still to be good reasons for, and none against, the view that the main house was begun in or soon after 1695.

There are two paintings by the younger John Griffier in the collection of the Earls of Portsmouth. They are views of the house, canal and park at Hurstbourne Priors, Hampshire, taken from opposite points on the same axis. The house, with its elaborate baroque side pavilions and formal garden (Figs 1 and 2) is assumed to have been created after 1712 for John Wallop who was to become 1st Earl of Portsmouth in 1743 after a lifetime of assiduous politicking. The date of 1712 has not been suggested merely on stylistic grounds but because of the existence in the Clarke Collection at Worcester College, Oxford, of a plan inscribed ‘A house designed for Mr. Wallop at Husbourne, Hants, by Mr Archer 1712’.

The appearance of the Octagon today (Fig. 1) is frequently seen as owing rather more to Sir George Gilbert Scott than to its medieval designers, and disparaging comments about its fidelity to the original structure suggest a widespread ignorance as to the real nature of the two great restorations which the building has undergone. It is the aim of this paper to delineate the precise extent of, and to examine the motives for, James Essex’s work in the eighteenth century and that of Scott in the nineteenth. Far from reiterating the usual condemnation of the latter’s restoration, it will be argued that Scott’s work closely adheres to the appearance of the fourteenth-century building and, except in a few details, conforms to his avowed intention to return the Octagon to its medieval form. A number of newly discovered drawings made in connection with the project reveal Scott’s meticulous attention to detail and incidentally throw much light on the work undertaken by Essex. In contrast with their works on the Octagon, both architects, and the deans and chapters who commissioned them, are shown to have been inspired by very different motives in their relocations of the medieval choir-stalls.

At his death in October 1886, E. W. Godwin was described as ‘A brilliant if somewhat eccentric character, who might. . . have become the first architect of his age’. If he is remembered today, it is as a rather fey figure, a Bunthorne of an architect, building Queen Anne houses for aesthetes. But this view ignores the breadth of his activities which ranged from Roman archaeology to theatre design, and the diversity of his architectural designs, from the doctrinaire Ruskinian Northampton Town Hall to the startlingly avant-garde first design for Frank Miles’ house. Between these two seemingly incompatible extremes, chronologically and in many ways stylistically, lies Dromore Castle.

The nineteenth century was a golden age for public architecture in Britain. Grand edifices such as Paxton’s Crystal Palace and innumerable lesser public buildings helped to engender in their patrons and in the public a sense of glowing civic and national pride. However, it is an irony of the laissez-faire Victorian era that, despite the vast creative energy expended upon such public buildings, so little architectural effort was spent in tackling the single severest problem faced by the municipal authorities — the generally appalling condition of working class housing. Indeed, even when, in response to the growing body of public health and similar legislation, the first urban improvement schemes were enacted, they tended to eschew progressive architectural ideas, being instead strictly sanitary and technical in nature, with often far from satisfactory results. It was not until the turn of century that architects and new architectural ideas began to have a widespread influence on the design of workers’ housing. This influence was demonstrated in such factory villages as Bourneville and Port Sunlight, and by the birth of the Garden City movement, but it was through the work of Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, the first British architects to gain a widespread reputation for the design of workers’ housing, that the housing of the working classes became firmly established as an architectural as well as a social problem.

It is surprising that an architect of the standing of John Soane should have taken on, in October 1801, work as trivial as cleaning and blackening the letters on a mural tablet memorial. This he did for Elisha Biscoe in the church of St Mary, Norwood Green in Middlesex. This can be explained only by relating it to more significant work in progress at precisely the same time on a site adjacent to the church; Norwood Hall was being built to designs by Soane, but for John Robins not Elisha Biscoe. The two clients are intimately linked, and had much to do with other commissions from Soane in the years around 1800. At the turn of the century Soane had a very successful architectural practice. Large as well as small jobs were coming his way steadily, as Dorothy Stroud’s chronological catalogue clearly shows. The remodelling of his own new house at Pitzhanger became one of Soane’s major preoccupations in 1800. The important work at Pitzhanger and the unimportant work on the mural tablet are both relevant to this study which is concerned with John Robins’s new house at Norwood and works for Elisha Biscoe at Micklefield Hall, near Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire.

My treatment of this subject falls into two parts. In the first (and longer) part I shall look at the three major theories of the role of history in architectural education that have held sway in English architectural education this century: what I term the ‘realist’ (derived from Lethaby), the classicist and the modernist. In the second I shall criticize all three, discuss the ideas that have guided the teaching of history at the Bartlett School in the past ten years and make some broader proposals for the development of architectural history as a discipline.