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.

The eighteenth-century interiors surviving in parts of Raby Castle, Co Durham, are not well known. Though the building was extensively repaired from the 1740s to 1788, and embellished with a suite of Palladian and Rococo Gothick rooms, its subsequent remodelling, from 1844 to 1850 by William Burn, left it so conspicuously Victorian that the surviving Georgian work has been largely ignored. The immediate impression offered by Raby today is either of a medieval fortress impressively massive and surprisingly intact, or of a nineteenth-century house with a rich Jacobethan drawing-room and an immense Baronial hall. Between these two Rabys, the medieval and the Victorian, stand the architectural developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Of the earlier period little is now known, but a series of architectural drawings dating from the opening of the eighteenth century until Burn began his remodelling permit the Georgian schemes for the castle to be followed in some detail. The work of four architects may be identified: Daniel Garrett, Thomas Wright, James Paine and John Carr. Their drawings, though generally incomplete and not in good condition, are valuable as a record of the renovation and improvement of a medieval castle in the mid-Georgian age. And they reveal a surprising concern for authenticity in Gothick restoration design.

The early lives of John Soane (1753–1837) and Thomas Hardwick (1752–1829) ran remarkably parallel courses. Both could claim similar family backgrounds in the building trade: Soane's father was a humble Berkshire bricklayer, while Hardwick's progressed from the practice of mason to that of self-styled architect at New Brentford, Middlesex. Both young men entered prominent architectural offices of the day around the same time, 1767: Sir William Chambers's in the case of Hardwick, George Dance the Younger's, and subsequently Henry Holland's, in the case of Soane. Both also enrolled among the first students in architecture at the newly founded Royal Academy of Arts. Soane and Hardwick, in that institution's cramped quarters at Old Somerset House, must have known one another, even though there is no evidence that they were on particularly friendly terms.

The history of the building of New Scotland Yard (Fig. 31a), the most important public work of architecture of its date in London, is dominated by two men: the architect Richard Norman Shaw and the then Receiver for the Metropolitan Police District, Alfred Richard Pennefather. Both were at the height of their professions at the time of building. In 1887 Shaw, a senior Royal Academician, was already an acknowledged giant among Victorian architects. Of his great country houses, Dawpool, Cheshire, was completed and Bryanston, Dorset, not yet begun. Pennefather’s term of office as Receiver from 1883 to his retirement and knighthood in 1909 spanned the two stages of the Yard’s development, from its conception and the opening of the north block to the completion of the south block in 1907. He is revealed, in the Home Office papers now in the Public Record Office, as a man determined, against official prejudice, delay and opposition, to erect an architectural monument for the police worthy of its purpose - to accommodate a rapidly expanding force - and its position on one of the grandest sites in London. New Scotland Yard is perhaps as much his achievement as it is the culminating masterpiece of Shaw’s life.