No one knows better than Howard Colvin how luck can play an uncanny role in architectural detection. A number of hitherto disparate documents may suddenly make sense by the appearance of a missing link. In the Royal Library at Windsor Castle is a volume of measured drawings by Antonio Visentini containing some drawings by Roger Morris of Eastbury House, Dorset, and for Wilton House, Wiltshire, together with an engraving by Fourdrinier of the Palladian Bridge at Wilton and one of the Green Park fireworks of 1749.

Sussex is not normally considered a particularly rewarding county for the historian of eighteenth-century architecture. In terms of great house building its heyday was the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a period which produced a notable string of mansions along the northern foot of the Downs — Glynde, Danny, Wiston, and Parham, among others. To the more refined sensibilities of the eighteenth century the county was little short of primeval. Thomas Fuller’s judgement in 1662 (‘A fruitfull County, though very durty for the travellers therein, so that it may be better measured to its advantage, by days journeys then by miles’) was endorsed with interest in the next century by Horace Walpole, who reckoned that ‘the whole country has a Saxon air, and the inhabitants are savage, as if King George the 2nd was the first monarch of the East Angles’.

The opening of Putney Bridge in 1729 and the attractions of Richmond Park combined to establish Roehampton as a favoured place for rural villas in the eighteenth century. By the 1770s its popularity was assured and land commanded high prices. In 1770 George Clive, cousin of Lord Clive, acquired a small estate and began building his country retreat. It has for some time been thought that the contract drawings for Lord Clive’s house, Claremont, were lent to George when he was planning Mount Clare.

Two drawings have recently appeared at Christies for Fawley Court in Buckinghamshire. They are not signed or dated, but their stylistic technique (not to mention stains of claret) combined with the statement of MrsLybbe Powys in 1771 that Wyatt had recently worked at Fawley makes it almost certain that they are by James Wyatt. One of the drawings is for a ceiling and the other for the interior of the temple on an island in the Thames (Plsia and b).

When a house on the scale of Crichel, near Wimborne in Dorset, has passed by descent it is never really credible that no evidence about its building should have survived; but it was almost as a last throw that I asked Mrs Marten where her forbears had banked in the past. She replied that they had been to Hoare’s Bank for over 300 years; and so that sent me to 37 Fleet Street in pursuit of the accounts of Sir William Napier and Humphrey Sturt, the two men responsible for the building of the eighteenth-century house. There the ledgers soon produced a number of names made more familiar by Howard Colvin.

Most of the Denison family were Leeds wool merchants, but one branch established itself as county gentry on an estate at Ossington, six miles north-north-west of Newark, Notts., bought in 1768. Between them their architectural patronage was extended to leading architects from William Thornton in the early eighteenth century to Ernest George and Peto in the late nineteenth century.

Antiquarians have long known that the brick tower at the north-east corner of Crondall church, Hants. (PI. ib), erected in the year 1659 to replace a recently dismantled medieval central tower that had become unsafe, may owe at least something of its appearance to that of another tower that had been built twenty years earlier beside the Thames at Battersea (PI. 1a), but which was destined to perish in the wholesale destruction of earlier fabric which preceded the building of the present Battersea church by Joseph and Richard Dixon in 1775-77.

Writers on the history of local government from Sidney and Beatrice Webb to Esther Moir have commented on the slow rate of appearance of the county surveyor as a salaried officer. The justices of the peace only with the greatest reluctance admitted the necessity of appointing a permanent and professional skilled architect or engineer instead of farming out jobs to small local craftsmen. Unlike the clerk of the peace, the county surveyor has not hitherto attracted the attention of county or architectural historians. A recent study of bridge-building in Kent by Christopher Chalklin has drawn attention to the factors behind the increasing expenditure on this class of work from the 1770s leading to the employment of a regular surveyor to deal with bridges and county buildings in West Kent from 1796, although a specialist architect, D. A. Alexander, was subsequently employed for major bridges and the County Gaol at Maidstone.

Joseph Pickford was probably the first London-trained architect to establish a practice in the East Midlands. He moved up to Derby about 1760, when he is first recorded working on the building of Foremark Hall, as an agent for the architect, David Hiorne of Warwick.1 He quickly established himself in the area and two years later married Mary, the daughter of Thomas Wilkins, the principal agent of Wenman Coke of Longford Hall.

Henley Bridge spans the Thames between the parish of Remenham in Berkshire and the town of Henley in Oxfordshire. A wooden bridge had stood here from at least the early thirteenth century, but in 1782-86 it was replaced by the present five-arched stone bridge (Pis ia and b), designed by William Hayward of Shrewsbury, who died before the building work began.

So sang John Humphreys Parry in November 1810, celebrating the Jubilee Tower whose foundation stone had just been laid on the summit of Moel Famau, the highest mountain (1,820 ft) in the Clwydian Hills, between Flintshire and Denbighshire.

Sleaford, a small town in the Parts of Kesteven, Lincolnshire, is not well known for any building apart from the church of St Denys. Its attractions are unspectacular, but among them is a harmony of scale and style which is the result of much public building in the middle decades of the last century.1 Some of this building, which is in a mixture of Late Gothic and Tudor styles, is by Henry Edward Kendall and much by Charles Kirk. Kirk settled in Sleaford and Kendall was much employed in Lincolnshire.

From 24july to 31 October 1866 a first ‘Yorkshire Fine Art and Industrial Exhibition’ was held at a site in the grounds of the Bootham Asylum, York. The exhibition proved a considerable success with the attendance by 400,000 people yielding a net profit to the sponsoring committee of £1,866. At a meeting on 10 April 1867 the committee was continued in office in order to ‘apply this surplus in providing some permanent building to be devoted to the encouragement of Art and Industry’.1 The result was to be the opening of a second exhibition on 7 May 1879, with a permanent building by the local architect Edward Taylor (1831-1908) that now forms the York City Art Gallery.

The chronological extension of Howard Colvin’s Dictionary from its starting point of 1660 in the first edition of 1954 to the earlier date of 1600 in the second edition of 1978 enabled him to assess the career of Inigo Jones and that in itself provided him with sufficient justification. It also, inevitably, brought in a group of practising craftsmen who were capable of producing original designs as the occasion demanded but whose livelihoods depended to a greater or lesser extent on their manual and administrative skills. They were usually masons by training, such as Nicholas Stone, Robert Stickells, William Arnold, William Edge and the Yorkshire company of Akroyd, Bentley and Clark who migrated to Oxford in 1609, but they included notable carpenters such as Francis Carter, Robert Lyming and John Scampion, the bricklayer Peter Mills and the glazier Barnard Dinninghof.

Apart from the records of individual clients, two main sources help us to understand Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s financial affairs: his account book in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society in London, and his bank account with Drummonds in Charing Cross which stretches unbroken from 1753 (some four years after Brown left Stowe to start an independent career as a landscape designer) to his death in 1783. Thanks to the research of Miss Dorothy Stroud, the account book in the Lindley Library has long been familiar, but the material at Drummonds, now the Drummonds Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, deserves to be better known.

Apart from the records of individual clients, two main sources help us to understand Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s financial affairs: his account book in the Lindley Library of the Royal Horticultural Society in London, and his bank account with Drummonds in Charing Cross which stretches unbroken from 1753 (some four years after Brown left Stowe to start an independent career as a landscape designer) to his death in 1783. Thanks to the research of Miss Dorothy Stroud, the account book in the Lindley Library has long been familiar, but the material at Drummonds, now the Drummonds Branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland, deserves to be better known.

Obscure sons of famous fathers are a common enough feature of artistic as of other walks of life but it is equally a natural response to seek some specific explanation for this relative failure in the face of the advantages bestowed by parental instruction, example, standing and contacts. James Paine junior (1745-1829), the only son of the architect whom Thomas Hardwick described as having ‘divided the practice of the profession’ with Sir Robert Taylor ‘till Mr. Robert Adam entered the lists’, is a typical case, with only a single executed architectural commission which can be credited unambiguously to his name.

The architectural collaboration between J. Gillespie Graham and A. W. Pugin was more productive and extended over a longer period of time than has hitherto been suspected. It is, however, surprising that the relationship has not been investigated previously as it has long been known to scholars, particularly to those interested in the career of the English architect. For example, it was noted at the time that the drawings entered by Gillespie Graham for the Houses of Parliament competition in 183 5 were by the same hand as those entered under Charles Barry’s name. As Benjamin Ferrey, the first biographer of Pugin, put it: ‘the hand of Pugin was so evident that its real authorship could not be doubted’.

No special claims can be made on behalf of William Francis Caldbeck except the fact that his personal account-book for the years 1844-60 has survived and affords an unusually clear picture of the early career of a very typical practitioner during what, for Ireland, were still the formative years of the organized profession of architecture. Of his remoter antecedents nothing is known, though it is tempting to wonder whether William Caldbeck, mason, employed at Trinity College, Dublin, in about 1712 was some kind of forebear.

‘Mr A. T. Bolton, An Architectural Historian’ was the heading to The Times obituary of 18 January 1945. No mention was made of Bolton’s career as an architect and it is that aspect of his life and work that is sketched here.