Opportunities to attempt a bird’s-eye view of a field are rare, and my thanks go to the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain for providing the forum for just such an exercise. Most scholars, after all, spend the research part of their academic careers doing what seems best suited to their tastes and abilities and hoping to make a good job of it. There is little time for navel-gazing; and besides, most people have little time for it. Certainly scholars will consider the kind of methods to follow in order to bring their research to a successful conclusion: the ‘how’ in both practical and intellectual terms. But unless they are naturally of a theoretical turn of mind, they are more likely to spend their time with the what than with the why, let alone the whence and the whither. It is those issues that will form much of the substance of this paper. There is no intention here to peddle some theory; instead, the focus will be on how work on Islamic architecture and its history has been, is being and should be done. The approach will thus be more practical than theoretical.

The concentration of military architecture in north Wales from Flint in the east to Anglesey in the west is unsurpassed anywhere in Great Britain. Some of the castles are attributable to the wars fought between the princes of Wales and Edward I of England in 1277, 1282 and 1294/5. Others were built several decades earlier, by both the Welsh and the English. Of these, some were slighted and left in disrepair after Edward’s conquest, but the English took over and modified some others, notably Castell-y-Bere, Criccieth and Dolwyddelan. This article is primarily concerned not with them, but with the castles built de novo around Snowdonia by Edward after his various campaigns: Flint and Rhuddlan founded from 1277, Conway, Caernarfon and Harlech from 1283, and Beaumaris from 1295. Their location reflects the outcome of the wars, with Flint and Rhuddlan founded in the east after Llywelyn ap Gruffudd had retreated into Snowdonia; Conwy, Caernarfon and Harlech closer to Snowdon after Llywelyn’s defeat and death; and Beaumaris on Anglesey after the Welsh uprising of 1294/5. These castles are judged to be the apogee of military architecture in the late thirteenth century. Imposing and stylish, they represent all that was required in a fortified castle at that time: a visible, formidable presence that dominated its surroundings; defensive strength in walls, mural towers, and gatehouses equipped with multiple portcullises and murder holes; and domestic apartments suited to the administrative and judicial duties that the constable would dispense in peacetime.

The last two decades have seen important scholarly research published on medieval wood sculpture. The exhibitions held in Siena (1987), Lucca (1995–96) and Pisa (2000–01) allowed the status of these studies to be examined and permitted investigation into crucial aspects of style and attribution. Furthermore, all these contributions note the liturgical role and function of these works of art. Nevertheless, they only suggest the issue of the relationship between wood sculpture and architecture, which is the topic of the present article. If stone sculpture is often conceived with specific settings inside churches in mind — like lunettes or pillars — being strongly connected with architecture, the same cannot be said for sculpture in wood. In fact, function and practical usage have always been recognized as the main characteristics of wooden statues, and these qualities make it much more difficult to ascertain their original setting.

Until recently relatively little was known of the secular seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Woburn Abbey. The surviving small north range with its famous grotto has sometimes been discussed, but generally in connexion with the grotto designer Isaac de Caus, and with no reference to Nicholas Stone, the King’s Master Mason and an architect, who worked with De Caus on several other occasions. Woburn’s monastic architectural origins have been all but ignored. The known architectural history has been largely confined to Henry Flitcroft’s rebuilding in the mid-eighteenth century, and to the work carried out subsequently by William Chambers, and Henry Holland. These eighteenth-century works began the erosion of the monastic fabric which remained after the seventeenth-century conversion, a slow process which culminated in the demolition of Flitcroft’s east range in the early 1950s, then thought to be irretrievably infected with dry rot. It is now known that with this demolition the remaining major vestiges of the subsumed former abbey buildings were unfortunately lost.

The topographical paintings of English country houses which appeared in considerable numbers in the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries have provided architectural historians with valuable evidence of architectural schemes and gardens. John Harris’s catalogues and commentaries on these paintings have been of great importance for both architectural and social historians. Rarely, however, is much attention paid to the human figures who people the paintings and who provide an insight into the ways in which the spaces delineated were used and, in particular, the occupation of the space in and around the country house by people of different classes and sexes. They show how access to the house was organized and the kinds of activity that took place in the vicinity of the house as an extension of the life of the house, rather than as part of the agricultural enterprise that supported the house and its occupants. Like Dutch genre scenes, the paintings celebrate domestic peace and prosperity; but, like human portraiture, these portraits of houses depict the subject in its best light and hint at the patrons’ aspirations, the figures contributing as much to the image of the patron’s possessions as the building itself. These paintings perform the essentially practical function of showing the house for the patron’s descendants, possibly asserting ownership, but at the same time representing the an ideally harmonious life and the peaceful prosperity of the owners. The myth created is a modest one, of homely pursuits and submissive servants, a myth which could not be represented without the figures.

The liturgical and sacramental policies of the 1630s had a direct impact upon the architecture and furnishings of English cathedrals and parish churches. Archbishop Laud, in particular, was associated with the restoration of altars, which meant the rearrangement of church interiors and the removal of pews so that communion tables could be erected at the east end of the church. There was also a concerted effort to take down seating galleries and, externally, to remove buildings and shops which encroached upon the churchyard or abutted the church. The impact of these religious policies on the architecture and the literature of the period has been the subject of detailed examination by historians such as Peter Lake, Stanford Lehmberg and John Newman. Yet the authorship of these policies remains hotly contested, with some historians seeing them as deriving directly from the king, while others have argued that the responsibility lies firmly with Archbishop William Laud. Nonetheless ‘Laudian’ provides a convenient shorthand term when discussing these differing ecclesiological strands of the period.

The old-fashioned appearance of Methven Castle, which lies five miles to the west of Perth, has encouraged historians to describe it as a country house of transitional significance. Built in 1664, it has been linked stylistically with the design of Panmure in Angus (1661) and John Mylne, the distinguished king’s master mason. It contrasted sharply with the stark classicism of two other post-Restoration houses in Perthshire, Dunkeld (1676) and Moncreiffe (1679), conceived by Sir William Bruce. Yet the muniments of the Smythe Family of Methven suggest a very different story. Since building work at Methven did not begin until 1678, it did not predate Dunkeld and Moncreiffe at all. It was the last of the three houses to be completed and what is more its owner, Patrick Smyth, was intimately acquainted with the other two houses and even employed the chief mason from Dunkeld.

John Soane has left us the text of twelve lectures which he gave at the Royal Academy, together with several volumes of preparatory drafts, and the notes he made during the long evenings from 1806–09 as he read the works of the principal theorists of his day. In addition we have his published works, entire private correspondence, notebooks and office documentation.

From his lectures we know his recommendations for good practice in general, as well as a range of personal preferences. We know really very little, however, about his personal intentions in architecture. We have the evidence on the one hand of his own idiosyncratic abstracted style, seen at its best in the façade of his Museum, at Dulwich Picture Gallery, at the lodge at Tyringham and in the interiors of the Bank, and on the other his preoccupation with the creation of monumental public buildings, which seem to have mattered most to him, as David Watkin has stated.

This is the first study devoted to Pugin’s small houses. Here ‘small’ is intended to describe any house which does not aspire, either in scale or style, to the country house or mansion. Where these buildings have been considered before it has been in the context of surveys of Pugin’s work in general, or of all of it that was not ecclesiastical. He has been considered primarily as a church architect and such was indeed the case for most of his career, but this perception of him has been exaggerated because he wrote little about his secular and domestic work. It was in the later part of his life, when he published less, that his ideas about domestic architecture matured.

Plans, Sections, Elevations and Details of the Alhambra (1836–45) was a landmark work, both in the history of architectural books and in the development of colour printing. Owen Jones (1809–74) and the French architect Jules Goury (1803–34) spent six months surveying the Nasrid palace in 1834 and Jones was to make a return visit to Granada three years later to undertake further research. From its conception to final printing Jones’ Alhambra project took over a decade to complete. This work represented a huge investment in time and, of course, money, but its successful completion was to establish the name of Owen Jones as an authority upon Moorish architecture and as a pioneer in the new technique of chromolithographic printing (Fig. 1). Jones is probably best remembered today for his encyclopaedic Grammar of Ornament (1856) but, since Michael Darby drew attention to Jones’ predilection for Islamic architectural design, the Alhambra has increasingly been seen as an important contribution to the nineteenth-century taste for the Oriental. Many questions remain, however, regarding the production of this book. Using the evidence of important unpublished letters, this article investigates the circumstances behind Jones’ unusual sidestep into the role of printer.

‘When you go abroad, begin with France’, George Gilbert Scott told his student audience at the Royal Academy. ‘It is the great centre of Mediaeval art.’ Scott himself was late in appreciating this. Apart from a day trip to Calais at the beginning of his career, the first visit he paid to France was in 1847, soon after securing his first cathedral appointment at Ely when he was 36 years old. ‘My eyes were at once opened,’ he later recalled:

The three monumental Edwardian buildings that dominate Liverpool’s waterfront stand as a testament to the city’s pre-eminence in global trade in the early years of the twentieth century (Fig. 1). These great buildings, occupying the former George’s Dock, were erected in turn for the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board, the Royal Liver Friendly Society, and the Cunard Steamship Company. They were the result of a long cherished vision to enhance the city’s maritime gateway. Stridently individual in character, commercially driven, and self-advertising in intent, they have given Liverpool an identity that is universally recognizable. Familiar as a backdrop in 1930s travel posters, from films of 1960s ‘Merseybeat’ bands like the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers, or in the 1970s television sit-com ‘The Liver Birds’, they have become icons of popular culture in a way that buildings rarely achieve. This paper, which has been prompted by the recent proposal to erect a further iconic building, a ‘Fourth Grace’, examines the redevelopment of the George’s Dock and reveals how the competing demands of municipal enterprise and mercantile profit were brought together to achieve a potent symbol of imperial ambition.

It is a truism that, for the Victorians, Gothic was the dominant style of church architecture. From time to time however, other voices were heard. Sara Losh created a remarkable church in the Byzantine style at Wreay in Cumbria, consecrated in 1842. The Greek communities of Liverpool and London had Byzantine churches designed for them by British architects. John Patrick Crichton Stuart, third Marquess of Bute (1847–1900), one of the most important patrons of the domestic Victorian Gothic, also commissioned chapels in the Byzantine style. The first of these, constructed in a former servant’s bedroom at Mount Stuart House in 1873 by William Burges, had two Gothic arches, although most other details were either Romanesque or classical. For this chapel Burges drew on very early Byzantine forms, and Losh followed both Byzantine basilica and early British styles. Losh ‘may well have drawn on knowledge of the nearby church of St Leonard in Warwick, Cumberland or the famous church of St Mary and St David at Kilpeck, in Herefordshire’.

Castell Coch, William Burges’s extraordinary Victorian fantasy castle in South Wales, is now regarded as an iconic building of the Gothic Revival (Fig. 1). It was first seriously re-appraised in 1951, by the late Professor W. G. Howell in an article on the castle, shortly after it had been handed into the care of the Ministry of Works.

The article was illustrated by an architectural model of one of the castle’s most spectacular interiors, the Marchioness of Bute’s bedroom at the top of the Keep Tower. The model then disappeared from sight for fifty years, eluding those researchers who have since revived Burges’s reputation, and it was assumed that it had been destroyed. Last year, however, the model, still in excellent condition, emerged from storage at Dumfries House, an Adam mansion near Old Cumnock in Ayrshire, which has been a Bute family property since the early nineteenth century. Although the role of architectural models is a study in itself, the rediscovery of this example casts new light upon the role models played in commissions for Lord Bute, and at what stage they were used, and as such makes it worthy of study.

One of the most enduring themes in the creation and reception of architecture has been the tension between its definition on the one hand as an autonomous ‘art’ practised on the drawing board by individual artists, and on the other as a social activity structured by complex external relationships. That tension was already evident in the Vitruvian distinction between visual, practical and structural qualities. In nineteenth-century England, the issue of individual versus collective ‘authorship’ became bound up with the Puginian tradition of moral and polemical debate, with its stress on strong polarizations of values; hence, the 1892 book, Architecture a Profession or an Art, edited by two protagonists of the latter viewpoint, Norman Shaw and T. G. Jackson. Each succeeding movement — Arts and Crafts, Beaux-Arts and so forth — put forward its own reformist reformulation of the art-versus-society relationship, but it was only in the twentieth-century Modernist years, when ‘language’ and propaganda became as essential as ‘design’ to any architect of standing, that the landscape of architectural criticism and debate finally became dominated by these rhetorical, socio-architectural recipes of reform. Diverse and impassioned concepts of the role of architecture clustered around key individuals or organizations, and around their most important buildings and programmes, whether a ‘traditional’ grand building such as Coventry Cathedral (Basil Spence, 1951–62) or an entire new town. There was high esteem for ‘heroic masters’ and iconoclastic utopianism, of the kind that was largely responsible for the break-up of CIAM in the late 1950s; and at the same time, there was the pervasive influence of communal ideologies and state intervention, and the high status of ‘public’ architectural design offices such as the London County Council (LCC) and Hertfordshire County Council. Nowhere, however, was there a simple, extreme polarization of values; rather, there was a constantly shifting mosaic.