Architectural historians and the wider public have reason to be grateful for the day in 1963 when John Newman, a young classics master at Tonbridge School with an enthusiasm for the historic architecture of Kent, wrote to Nikolaus Pevsner to ask if he could do anything to advance the Kent volume of The Buildings of England series. ‘Come and see me’, replied Pevsner, who normally looked for researchers at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Within months John had enrolled for an Academic Diploma in the History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute, and within four years of graduating with a distinction in 1965 had researched and written the two Kent volumes — ‘the best of the whole series’, wrote Pevsner. Since then he has published in almost every subject area of architectural history, trained countless graduates and post-graduates in the field, played a pivotal role as Advisory Editor of The Buildings of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, served as honorary editor of Architectural History from 1975 to 1985 (longest tenure in the Society’s history), and supported an astonishing range of activities in architectural conservation. These essays, from colleagues, friends and ex-pupils, are presented by the Society in his honour, as a mark of our respect and affection, and in gratitude for his outstanding contribution to architectural history and architectural conservation.

For over thirty years John Newman has been the human face of the Courtauld Institute. Whenever the Courtauld was accused of being, like other metropolitan institutions, upstage or arrogant, there was someone to demur, ‘Ah, but there’s John Newman.’ And, indeed, his modesty and kindness highlight the human side of the Institute, of which there were of course many other representatives.

John took Greats at Oxford in 1955–59 and then went on to teach Classics at Tonbridge School. However, by 1963 he had firmly decided not to pursue schoolteaching as a career. He had become more interested in art history and, as he wrote to the Courtauld when he applied for a place on the Academic Diploma course, ‘especially in architectural history’. He passed the Diploma with distinction in 1965 and began work on a Ph.D. under John Summerson on English seventeenth-century architecture. But as early as 1966 he was appointed full-time Assistant Lecturer, which left him insufficient time to complete his thesis.

Language has been equated with the visual arts or used to raise their status throughout the Western tradition. This is so, for example, in Antiquity with Horace’s ut pictura, poesis erit, in the Renaissance with Vasari’s relating of painting, sculpture and architecture to the work of the humanists, and in the twentieth century with the formation of groups such as Art & Language. While these explorations are on what might be called a philosophical level, language has also affected our understanding of the nuts and bolts of the arts, especially architecture, through the terms used to identify such things as styles, building types and parts of buildings. This terminology is controlled largely through glossaries, from Viollet-le-Duc’s Dictionnaire, which is in effect a collection of essays, to a series of points like those accompanying Pevsner’s Buildings of England volumes. There are also polyglot compilations such as the Glossarium Artis volumes or the Glossaire in the Zodiaque series. Despite the existence of these publications confusion and errors occur, both within individual languages and more frequently in the transfer of terms from one language to another and between disciplines. The situation between languages has improved beyond all recognition since the middle of the nineteenth century when John Parker could translate the German Kloster as ‘cloister’ instead of ‘monastery’, Kreuzgang as ‘transept’ instead of ‘crossing’, and Spaziergang as ‘ambulatory’ instead of’stroll’, though even the Glossaire in 1965 translated the French term tribune, a tribune gallery, as ‘loft’, and stylobate, a pedestal, as ‘basement table’. In the interdisciplinary sphere, the adoption by Stephen Jay Gould of the term ‘spandrel’ as a metaphor for a feature in evolutionary biology (one which is not adaptive but rather arises as a by-product of other processes) has led to the wrong element (he meant a pendentive) becoming a standard term in the science.

In the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum is a drawing on two attached pieces of parchment measuring 68 by 44 cm, clearly carried out entirely by one hand (Fig. 1). The image is drawn in pen, with some applied wash, but it is possible that some silverpoint technique has also been used. Sharply incised lines around many of the figures suggest the intention of getting back to the ground beneath the preparation, to create the effects of highlights or perhaps to float colour or gold into these indentations. It is signed ROBERTUS PYTE on two of the steps at the bottom left and dated 1546 on the step at the far right. At some point in its history, perhaps when it was framed for the first time, it would appear that the drawing was trimmed on both sides, the topmost architectural element (likely to have been a shaped gable with curved sides) cut through, the upper piece of parchment cut into a triangular shape and dark brown-coloured strips added with a later owner’s monogram. The drawing came to the Museum in 1864 for the price of one guinea, thanks to the good offices of C. J. Richardson, and is mentioned in the Bulletin of the Acquisitions of the Museums of Sciences and Arts at the end of the 1860s. Given the remit of collection policy at that time, it was undoubtedly acquired as an example of English mid-sixteenth-century design in the classical style. Its original function and purpose were never properly investigated.

Among the Harleian manuscripts in the British Library is a document in the hand of John Webb, headed ‘Notes of Practise uppon the Gate at Temple barr. 1638’. It refers to a design commissioned from Inigo Jones in 1636, never built, on which Webb also worked. Several drawings by Jones and Webb survive, and the ‘Notes’ complement them and fill out our knowledge of the commission. A transcript of the document (noticed since the nineteenth century but unpublished) is offered here, with an introductory discussion of Jones’s idea for rebuilding Temple Bar as a triumphal arch (Fig. 1).

As the architect of the Greek Doric Temple at Hagley, it has long been acknowledged that James ‘Athenian’ Stuart was a pioneer of the neo-classical movement in Britain; yet his career is not well documented, and, until the restoration of Spencer House, scholarly attention had focused upon the publication of The Antiquities of Athens and its influence on the development of the Greek Revival. Recent research has revealed, however, that Stuart’s source material was eclectic, ranging from ancient Greek and Roman motifs to those derived from the Renaissance and baroque. Without doubt, one of his formative influences was Andrea Palladio, with whose publications and buildings he was thoroughly familiar by the end of his sojourn in Italy in 1751. Indeed, one of the reasons Stuart gave for publishing The Antiquities of Athens was the dearth of examples of the Doric and Ionic orders given in the Quattro Libri dell’Architettura, while his visit to Pola in 1750; must have been made with Palladio’s description of the Istrian monuments in mind. Presumably Stuart hoped to establish his own credentials by publicizing Palladio’s mistakes in measurement, much as Desgodetz had done some seventy years earlier with the antiquities of Rome.

A sketchbook, which has recently been acquired by Sir John Soane’s Museum, is one of the very few known to have survived by Joseph Michael Gandy (1771–1843), the architectural perspectivist and architect, and the only one to show him working ‘on the spot’ as architect, artist, surveyor and antiquarian. There are many sides to Gandy: he was a visionary, a complex theorist, a brilliant perspectivist and a highly original architect who produced a handful of pioneering works, as well as two separate pattern books entitled The Rural Architect and Designs for Cottages, Cottage Farms and Other Rural Buildings, both published in 1805. That he was also a ‘scientific antiquary’ is well demonstrated in this sketchbook which provides within its modest format the source material for his architectural schemes at Lancaster Castle and Storrs Hall as well as for his illustrations of Roslin Chapel in Britton’s Architectural Antiquities and his great perspectives of Roslin, Merlin’s Tomb and Melrose Abbey.

The publication at Bruges in 1850 of Les Vrais principes de l’architecture ogivale ou chrétienne by the English Catholic convert and Bruges resident Thomas Henry King (1822–92) has always been considered an epoch-making event in the Gothic Revival in Belgium. Its English reputation on the other hand is merely that of a pirated edition of Pugin’s works such as The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture (1841) and The Present State of Ecclesiastical Architecture in England (1841– 42). But it contains extra interpolated illustrations, some signed by Pugin’s Catholic rival Charles Francis Hansom; others, unsigned, arq presumably by King. A close study of certain of the unsigned extra illustrations points to a Puginian source; these are the subject of this paper.

The early years of the twentieth century were ‘the period in which Victorianism became the target of ridicule, in which the search for free contemporary architectural expression was finally abandoned, in favour of forms of classicism, which having been laid aside for a great many years, possessed an adventitious novelty.’ For a cautious or conservative young architect, these years must have offered a confusing array of traditions within which he (or occasionally she) was expected to work. A set of drawings by Michael Waterhouse, from the AA Day School in 1912–13, allows us to examine one student’s reaction to this cultural whirlpool and to trace the influences that were at work in the training of young architects at this moment of transition.

There can be little doubt that to those decorative plasterers who were working in the royal palaces and courtier houses in the early seventeenth century the appointment of Inigo Jones as Surveyor to the Royal Works in 1615 must soon have taken on the appearance of a catastrophe. Just as they had acquired the skills to exploit to the full the potential of their material and were demonstrating their expertise with wonderfully imaginative flair, as can be seen at Audley End, the Surveyor decreed an entirely new mode of interior decoration, affecting both ceiling design and construction.

One of the defining characteristics of Georgian and Victorian London is the mews, a small building for horses and coaches at the rear of a terraced house, connected to it by a garden or yard, but approached from the street by a separate alley. As a building type the mews is a particularly British and overwhelmingly London phenomenon. It is so familiar, especially in Mayfair, Belgravia and South Kensington, that its existence is largely taken for granted. This article sets out to trace its hitherto unidentified origins, to show that like so much that we consider Georgian its roots lie in the middle years of the seventeenth century, and, in particular, to highlight the role played in its development by Inigo Jones.

Thus wrote Sir John Hawkins in the later eighteenth century of Edward Hatton’s New View of London, published in two octavo volumes in 1708. Despite the apparent disregard of the book by this time, Hatton (Fig. 1) has become a recognized name among historians of London and snippets from his New View have often been quoted for their up-to-date picture of the post-Fire metropolis. But although Hatton’s other writings have received brief attention, both the New View and the career of its author appear to have escaped detailed discussion.

John Nash’s plans for developing Marylebone Park and for cutting a New Street to improve communications to Westminster have been lauded as outstanding examples of Regency town planning, a happy amalgam of the picturesque and the socially practical. Nash, however, came late to a project which had its roots in the early 1790s and on which a considerable amount of preliminary planning had already been done by the Office of Land Revenues, the government department responsible for Crown lands, and by John White, sen., architect and property advisor to the third and fourth Dukes of Portland.

‘The key to London is the Thames. Without the river, the city might not have existed and would certainly not have flourished.’ So runs the topographical argument for London’s origin and successful growth. It stems from the Romans’ choice of a crossing-point between a hill on the north bank opposite a rare spot of firm land — an island at high tide — among the marshes to the south. This was the first location up the tidal stream clear of marshland on both sides, and from it the Roman road network fanned out in all the necessary directions. There seems to have been no significant settlement in this place before.

Before the impact of Ruskin’s Stones of Venice in the middle of the nineteenth century, Venetian architecture was far less important for Scotland than, say, France, the Netherlands, England or even Greece. Indeed, the lack of interest can be as striking as the influence itself, given the intriguing consonances between the two cultures. After the mid-nineteenth century, Venetiań allusions multiplied, but they were mediated in the process of translation, to acquire new associations and meanings.

When Nicholas Hawksmoor recalled the circumstances of the building of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich (Fig. 1), begun in 1696, he twice made the point that the achievement of magnificence was part of the architectural brief. In his Remarks on the Founding and Carrying on the Buildings of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich, published in 1728, he noted that it was the desire of the foundress, Queen Mary, ‘who had a great Passion for Building’, ‘to build the Fabrick with great Magnificence and Order’. Later, as if defending a position, Hawksmoor noted ‘her Majesty’s fixt Intention for Magnificence’. Queen Mary had died in 1694 but her husband King William III, respecting her wishes, had ensured the continuation of the project under the architectural guidance of Christopher Wren who was assisted by Hawksmoor in this great endeavour.

Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington (1694–1753) was an architect with a mission. His architecture is didactic and lucid in character, and he employed it to demonstrate how Britain could create an architecture worthy of classical Rome. Burlington based his architecture on what he considered the epitome of the classical tradition: that of Inigo Jones, Andrea Palladio and Roman architecture filtered through Palladio’s drawings of the antique and through discussions and representations of the antique in I Quattro Libri Dell’Architettura. From the smallest architectural detail to the largest forms and structures of rooms and buildings, Burlington’s custom was to rely upon a model or a series of models. Because he rarely obscured or totally transformed his model, it is normally possible to follow his design process. Nowhere is the didactic, expository nature of Burlington’s architectural ideas more clearly stated than in the beamed ceilings of the piano nobile of his suburban villa at Chiswick.

In 1792, Copenhagen’s St Hans Hospital, for those afflicted by insanity (including alcoholism), venereal disease, and a variety of other, incurable, infirmities, received a gift of money specifically for its repair. Thirty years earlier St Hans had been described as holding the ‘very oldest, weakest, wretchedest, and unsightliest’ of the Copenhagen Poor Board’s charges, and by 1792 its buildings were in similar shape. This gift ultimately resulted in an investigation into asylum planning that extended from St Petersburg to Finsbury, where the new St Luke’s Hospital (Fig. 1) opened in 1787.

‘A bicycle shed is a building: Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.’ With that certainty Nikolaus Pevsner opened his Outline of European Architecture, and with such certainties many of John Newman’s generation began their studies of architectural history. A cathedral was a cathedral, a castle a castle; but bicycle sheds were for bicycles, not historians.