The architecture of C. R. Cockerell was remarkable for its vigorous eclecticism and its freedom from the shackles of convention. His brilliance was based upon a depth of assimilation and a range of observation not known in an architect since ‘old Sir Wm Chambers’. Chambers was Cockerell’s idol and, like Chambers, he left for posterity a daunting mass of papers. Without a single building to his credit these would establish Cockerell as an important architectural writer and theorist. The astonishing variety of his interests is clearly displayed in the diaries which at present belong to Mr and Mrs B. J. Crichton of Plas Trefor, Isle of Anglesey - lineal descendants of S. P. Cockerell.

This paper is intended to achieve two aims, first to rescue from semi-oblivion a major London building of the early seventeenth century, and secondly to disentangle a little further that obscure and knotty problem, the manner in which Inigo Jones’s ideas on architecture were disseminated in England.

The Goldsmiths’ Company, one of the leading craft companies in the City of London, rebuilt its Livery Hall in the second half of the 1630s to the design of Nicholas Stone. Goldsmiths’ Hall was again rebuilt almost two centuries later when, in 1829, it gave place to the present hall, Philip Hardwick’s noble classical essay. Stone’s hall is familiar from several indifferent prints, but the drawings here reproduced for the first time provide a reliable record, full enough to allow a serious assessment of Stone’s design. Since the publication in 1896 of Sir Walter Prideaux’s Memorials of the Goldsmith’ Company it has been known that it was the King’s Surveyor, Inigo Jones, who advised the Company in 1634 not to patch up its medieval buildings but to erect a complete new hall. The Memorials, extracts from the Company’s Court Minute Books, have formed the basis of the so far very limited discussions of the seventeenth-century hall, yet the Court Minute Books themselves tell a much fuller and more revealing story. They also make it clear that the shell of Stone’s building survived the Great Fire of 1666, as George Vertue had noted. Prideaux’s introduction misleadingly raised doubts whether the prints did not show a post-fire rebuilding of Nicholas Stone’s façade.

The Edinburgh Town Council minutes for 6 June 1767 record that: ‘On Wednesday last the Magistrates of Edinburgh conferred on Mr James Craig, Architect, a gold medal with the freedom of the city in a silver box, as a reward of his merit for having designed the best plan of the New Town.’

Despite the importance of this plan (Fig. 33a) unfortunately little is known of its architect’s background. Born c. 1740, James Craig’s father was an Edinburgh merchant, his mother a sister of the poet James Thomson, best remembered as the author of Rule Britannia and The Seasons. No record survives of his early education and though he is supposed to have received his architectural training under Sir Robert Taylor, this would appear to be a confusion with a namesake. An obscure young man then, the New Town Competition of 1766–67, was to bring him sudden fame.

The Albion Mill was built during the years 1783–86 on the Surrey bank of the Thames at the foot of Blackfriars Bridge. Designed to grind corn on a large scale, the mill was outstandingly the most advanced industrial building of its day and the first to be planned, from the start, to incorporate the newly invented Boulton & Watt double-acting rotative engines. The mill was also one of Samuel Wyatt’s major works and one to which he devoted a great deal of attention as architect and builder and as the principal promoter of the undertaking. By good fortune many of his letters relating to the mill have survived and can be studied in the Boulton & Watt Collection at the Birmingham Reference Library and in the Tew MSS at the Assay Office, Birmingham. Letters on the mill written by Matthew Boulton, John Rennie and James Watt also exist in these collections. There are structural drawings in the Reference Library; several views of the mill were published as engravings, and in the Public Record Office drawings can be seen of two schemes by Wyatt for rebuilding the mill after its destruction by fire in 1791. All these sources have been used in the present paper.

The year 1770 may seem an arbitrary date to take as a starting point for this list of architects, sculptors, designers and craftsmen whose work is still to be seen in Chester Cathedral. It might be thought that 1541 would be the more natural date to begin the list, the year in which the former Benedictine Abbey of St Werburgh, dissolved in 1540, became the cathedral of the new diocese of Chester. But much of the work in the cathedral between 1541 and the early nineteenth century disappeared in the restorations of R. C. Hussey (q.v.) and Sir George Gilbert Scott (q.v.). Apart from monuments, the surviving seventeenth- and eighteenth-century work in the cathedral and its precincts belongs chiefly to the time of John Bridgeman, Bishop of Chester 1619–44, and to the years round 1760. In neither case is evidence in existence as to who designed or executed the work, but it is important in the architectural history of the cathedral and the precincts and therefore listed here in the foreword.