With these words George Poole commenced his paper to the Lincoln Diocesan Architectural Society in May 1857. He expressed a hope that has been repeated throughout the intervening years in a flow of papers attempting to explain a work of quite astonishing individuality, spacial invention and surface richness. A work that does not slot into the neat progression of stylistic development which, as Peter Kidson has recently pointed out, is ‘an intolerable state of affairs of tidy-minded art historians’. For this reason, perhaps, the pressure of cultural attitudes upon successive authors is noticeable. Not only has it coloured their understanding of the building’s history, but no doubt it also colours our own, and weights our judgement. This review, therefore, is firstly a study of approach, and secondly a statement of current thinking.

Medieval architecture, considered specifically as architecture, has been unevenly treated by its historians. The vast majority of the literature is devoted to churches, for the most part large cathedral or monastic churches. The implication that other types of building either do not survive or are not architecture is patently false since there are many of them, and not a few manifest a degree of complexity in design and detail equal to a major ecclesiastical building. In particular there has been no strong tradition among architectural historians for discussing the planning, iconography and aesthetics of eleventh- and twelfth-century secular structures. Perhaps this is because they fit uneasily within the style categories of Romanesque and Gothic, which were largely devised and developed through the analysis of ecclesiastical buildings.

Once described by the great Venetian art historian Giuseppe Fiocco as a colossal suq, the city of Venice has always conveyed a distinctly oriental atmosphere to the western european visitor. Mystified by its labyrinth of dark, narrow, often dead-end streets, twisting at right-angles through densely built-up, separately demarcated parishes, glimpsing fragrant gardens hidden behind high, crenellated walls, sniffing the pungent odours of exotic oriental spices in the bustling, crowded markets, the traveller might well have imagined himself transported, as if on a magic carpet, to one of the great mercantile centres of the Middle East — to Baghdad, Cairo or Damascus — to the world of Marco Polo’s travels or the Arabian Nights.

In 1986 Caroline Stanley-Millson and John Newman published an important article in Architectural History drawn from the extensive Jacobean building accounts for Blickling and in so doing added very considerably to our understanding of the house. This catalogue of architectural drawings at the house continues the story from the death of Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet, in 1626 up to the early twentieth century when for more than thirty years Blickling ceased to be the principal residence of its family. The only drawing to survive from the Jacobean building period (No. 1), Lyminge’s design for a banqueting house in the east garden, is illustrated in the earlier article.

The friendship between the architect Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726) and his distant relative Robert Bertie, Lord Willoughby d’Eresby and successively 4th Earl and 1st Marquess of Lindsey and 1st Duke of Ancaster (1660–1723), is firmly but sporadically documented. It appears to have developed during the 1680s, well before Vanbrugh turned to architecture and at a time when, having relinquished a post in the Earl of Huntingdon’s Regiment of Foot, he turned to his kinsmen to seek advancement. On Vanbrugh’s own admission he was highly regarded by Bertie for in a letter written 26 August 1692, referring to events of 1688, he stated, ‘I had been at the Hague in my Lord Willoughby’s Company; That I was his relation, and that (as he was pleased to say) I lead all the Bertue [Bertie] family which way I would’. The letter was written whilst Vanbrugh was a prisoner in the Bastille, Paris, to which he had been committed that year. This was consequent on his visit to the Hague and the subsequent limitation of his liberty at Calais and Vincennes, for the reason that he had been speaking something in favour of the enterprise that the king (William III) was then on the point of executing — that is, war between France and Holland. Like Bertie, Vanbrugh was staunchly Whig. The friendship flourished and appears to have strengthened into a high family regard. In 1711 Vanbrugh was a signatory to the marriage contract of Peregrine Bertie, son of Robert and later 2nd Duke of Ancaster; and in 1719 he was appointed a trustee of the 1st Duke’s will drawn up on 23 May that year. In October 1722 that nobleman became godfather to the architect’s second son, John. The friendship naturally extended to another of the Duke’s family: Robert’s brother, Peregrine Bertie (d. 1711), Vice-Chamberlain of the household from 1694, was said to be ‘Mr Vanbrugh’s intimate friend’.

The owners of Lulworth Castle were Roman Catholic. That distinction from the mainstream of English culture gave Lulworth Castle a special character in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Welds were, and remain, English landowners with their roots firmly in this country, but they were also part of a network which stretched across Europe. Rome had a double significance for cultivated English Catholics. On the one hand was the Augustan idyll perceived through patrician English eyes, which inspired the elegant refurbishment of so many English country houses in the eighteenth century, Lulworth included. On the other, Rome was the head and heart of a religion so alien to the eighteenth-century English establishment that its devotees paid for their loyalty financially, socially and politically.

Dodington Park, Avon was built by Christopher Bethel Codrington, a descendant of the famous Christopher Codrington, founder of the library at All Souls, Oxford and of the college for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Barbados. The estate had been acquired by the Codrington family at the end of the sixteenth century, with its large gabled Elizabethan house and adjoining church. A branch of the family emigrated to the West Indies and there built up an extensive holding of sugar plantations, the income from which was used in 1796 to commission a new house by the fashionable architect James Wyatt.

John Nash’s twenty-nine-page Statement, privately printed in 1829, when he was in his seventy-seventh year, is a personal apologia for his participation in the ‘metropolitan improvements’ in London during the Regency and after. I am aware of only one copy, in the possession of Mr Peter Laing, who inherited it through his Pennethorne forebears and kindly deposited it in Sir John Soane’s Museum for copying and reproduction here.

Battersea Bridge was reconstructed in 1885–90 by the Metropolitan Board of Works and its successor, the London County Council, replacing the proprietary timber bridge designed by Henry Holland 115 years before and made famous by Whistler. Bridge-building and rebuilding in London were then in full spate. In the case of a rebuilding such as Battersea, the authority concerned would buy up both the bridge interests and the immediate approaches on either side for the purposes of clearance, widening and realignment. It could take years after the new bridge was opened to sell off even the best surplus plots of land acquired in this way for ‘improvement’. Thus on the Chelsea side of Battersea Bridge, the approach road of Beaufort Street is lined with Edwardian buildings, constructed piecemeal as and when the LCC could dispose of sites.

Given its importance to his ‘education’, Wright’s introduction to Japanese prints must have been a major, and one would imagine memorable, turning-point in his career. Yet, curiously this pivotal event remains something of a mystery, as does Wright’s rapid assimilation of expertise in a field so remote from his background and training. There seems to be a considerable gap between ‘Frank Wright’, a nineteen-year-old engineering student from rural Wisconsin, and Frank Lloyd Wright, respected connoisseur of Ukiyo-e. Rather conspicuously Wright himself provided little or no information with which to bridge this gulf, and in the absence of any explanation from him, two principal theories have developed as to how he might have been first introduced to Oriental art.