In July 1650 the Puritans tore down the statues of the two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, which crowned the portico on the west front of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (Fig. 1). According to one contemporary report, under the new Republican authorities the portico’s Corinthian columns, which had been erected only a few years earlier by Inigo Jones (1573-1652), were ‘shamefully hewed and defaced’. Clearly his architecture, or certain forms of it, did not enjoy immunity from the Puritan animosity directed at royalist and religious iconography during the Civil War and its aftermath. This conflict had brought to a head the underlying religious tensions and related aesthetic sensitivities that Jones had had to respect throughout his career popularizing the antique (or all’antica) style of building. The Orders had run the obvious risk of being interpreted as foreign, pagan or — worst of all — Popish, at least by Puritans, and as such they required reconciling to English sensitivities and national identity.

Since the late nineteenth century, scholars have considered pilgrimage a dynamic catalyst that influenced a range of cultural practices, not least architecture. The charismatic stewardship of such influential scholars as Arthur Kingsley Porter, Kenneth John Conant, Emile Mâle and Elie Lambert helped propel the study of ‘pilgrimage architecture’ to a leading field of study, and a handful of churches — notably St-Sernin in Toulouse, St-Martin in Tours, St-Martial in Limoges, Ste-Foy in Conques and the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela — achieved status as paradigmatic monuments. At the same time, the subject was also for a long while a source of heated debate fuelled by nationalist interests, occasionally lapsing even into ad hominem squabbles. The matter has in recent decades generated calmer discussion, including new perspectives introduced by studies of other complementary cultural phenomena. Urban and economic historians, in particular, have looked to the role of pilgrimage in relation to urban growth and the rise of commercial markets. This scholarship has contributed to re-evaluations among art historians and has shed greater light, for example, on the predatory fervour with which certain bishops, cathedral chapters and abbots enticed pilgrims to destinations like Chartres, Santiago de Compostela or Cluny, just as the infusion of interdisciplinary perspectives has helped architectural historians reassess so-called pilgrimage architecture. After all, not all churches of that type were on the pilgrimage roads, nor do all churches on those roads reflect the Toulousain-Compostelan model. The relative importance of the paradigmatic five churches has been called into question.

Among the country houses of Northumberland several have remained in the hands of the same families for many generations, including Blagdon Hall, 15 km north of Newcastle upon Tyne, the home of Viscount Ridley’s family (Fig. 1). There are good documentary records for the estate, some dating from the thirteenth century, and detailed accounts from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, reflecting the continuity of ownership since that time. Examination of these documents and of eighteenth-century illustrations suggested that previously accepted dating of the house needed to be reassessed, and raised questions about sources of designs and the involvement of prominent architects and craftsmen in the evolution of the house. Further investigation revealed that the family and commercial networks of Blagdon’s eighteenth-century owners and their builders led to the adoption of the Blagdon design elsewhere in northeast England. This article will examine the remodelling of Blagdon Hall as an example of the history of English élite architecture in the provinces.

When a building copies or references a model, it becomes an analogous space. Regardless of how exactly the model is invoked, or whether the model ever existed, elements of the new building stand for an original that is not present, yet can be read, understood or remembered by means of these elements, their arrangement or use. If it is quite easy to accept that analogies of this kind exist, it is harder to determine how they are established. What defines the connexion between the building and its analogue? How is this connexion recognized or activated? On what does it depend — on the design of a building, its use, its descriptions or its context?

The small Spanish island of Minorca is the unexpected setting for a British naval hospital. It was constructed from 1711, during the first years of the British military occupation of the island, to provide medical care to mariners as they served in the strategically important Mediterranean. Scholars working in the fields of both medical and architectural history agree on the innovative importance of this hospital. Christine Stevenson, the foremost expert on early modern British hospital architecture, stated that: ‘the first of the purpose-built naval hospitals was at Port Mahon, Minorca […] [It] was, however, unique until the 1740s, when others were built on Jamaica and Gibraltar’. In terms of the history of hospital architecture, the Minorcan hospital’s role, as the sole purpose-built British naval hospital for over three decades, was a reflection of its exceptional setting, for it presented the British navy with an opportunity to create an infirmary that realized contemporary ideals of hospital design. The single-storey limestone edifice, which adopted the U-shaped plan already pioneered by Sir Christopher Wren (1635-1703) back in England, was located on an island in the middle of Mahon harbour, known by the name Isla del Rey. This was a highly significant location in Minorcan history, formerly called Ilia dels Conills (Rabbit Island), and was named for King Alfonso III of Aragon. It was from this island that Alfonso launched his reconquest of Minorca for Christendom from the Moors, and from this point in time Minorca was incorporated into Catalonia. No evidence has yet come to light of this important name in British usage; instead the occupiers referred to it as ‘Bloody Island’, or ‘Hospital Island’. Despite the informal and macabre renaming of the harbour island it was, however, a beautiful location, cooled by sea breezes, and was visible from all the surrounding cliffs.

After the publication for Sir John Soane’s Museum of a Catalogue of the Drawings of George Dance the Younger (1741-1825) (in 2003) further cataloguing of, and research into, John Soane’s early drawings has enabled the reattribution to George Dance of a number of sketch designs previously thought to be by Soane. In particular there are several drawings from the years 1771 to 1784, when Soane was a student and exhibitor at the Royal Academy, a competition entrant, and in the first years of practice. Later sketch designs by Dance for Soane then relate to several phases of the rebuilding of the Bank of England in the 1790s. It has also been possible to identify Robert Baldwin as the draughtsman for many of Soane’s early Royal Academy and competition drawings, as well as during Soane’s early years in practice, from 1780 to 1785. These discoveries bring to light not only the character of the collaboration between Soane and Dance, but also aspects of architectural practice more generally in the late eighteenth century.

The Gothic Revival moved forward in step with advances in medieval archaeology and history, the one feeding off the other and back again. As this process unfolded, historical understanding enabled the association of forms with ideas. For example, some Victorian architects favoured the Decorated style because a connection could be drawn between it and the power of the English state in its early maturity. Reasoning by analogy, this style could thus be seen as the model for a modern Gothic architecture appropriate to a new, dynamic age. However, the meaning of forms was rarely fixed. That this was the case is illustrated by the restoration at exactly the same time, the early 1840s, of two medieval churches, both typological copies of the same building, the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Though similar in their round plans, the intentions of those promoting each project were very different. The first, the Temple Church in London, was an essentially secular project; by contrast, the Round Church in Cambridge was restored for theological reasons. In different ways, these two projects also reflected contemporary ideas about Palestine and its archaeology.

Paul Thompson’s monograph on William Butterfield set out to challenge the bizarre misconceptions which had previously warped appreciation of his work. These included Sir John Summerson’s accusation of ‘purposeful sadism’, Ian Nairn’s view of him as an ‘unexpected Heathcliff, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s description of him as uncivilized, ‘a man who never wrote a book or an article’ and who rarely travelled. Mendacious anecdotes suggested a puritanical and antisocial character, lacking in humanity. Thompson effectively refuted such absurdities, but Butterfield’s letters — very few of which have been published, even in part — provide fascinating evidence of his character. They reveal his humour and his affection for old friends, and his strongly held, but eminently sensible, religious views, as well as his pragmatic and conscientious practice of architecture. This evidence bears out and adds much useful detail to Thompson’s depiction of the man, refining our understanding of him and allowing his personality to come to the fore.

Commissioning George Gilbert Scott (1811-78) to design a cathedral for the relatively new settlement at Christchurch, in the province of Canterbury, New Zealand, was an ambitious undertaking by a predominantly Anglican community that had been established only eleven years earlier. The cathedral, which was constructed between late 1864 and 1904, was a conventional stone building, designed by Scott and executed locally by B. W. Mountfort. However, in an unusually experimental move, Scott had earlier proposed a structure that incorporated a stone exterior with an interior frame made of a series of high piers of New Zealand native timber, each almost 50 feet tall. The dramatic interior of this proposal referenced a wide variety of timber- and church-building traditions; had it been constructed, its tall wooden structure would have been ‘unique amongst colonial cathedrals’. After examining previously discussed sources for his design, this paper speculates upon further influences, testing — in particular — Barry Bergdoll’s assertion that the design was an expression of the ‘primitive ruggedness’ that Scott imagined derived from Maori work in wood, examples of which had been known in Europe since the 1770s.

In 1980, Andrew Saint told members of the Victorian Society that the Arts and Crafts architect Horace Field (1861-1948) was ‘frequently referred to but rarely discussed’. Thirty years later the situation is largely unchanged. Yet Field played an influential role in the architectural development of the twentieth-century English and Welsh high street. He was a significant figure in the process by which the architectural styles of bank premises were, by the late 1920s, transformed from ones very similar to those of commercial or municipal offices into a distinct and domestic interpretation of the style of Queen Anne. His contribution was two-fold: as the designer of a series of branches of Lloyds Bank, and as co-author (with his former assistant, Michael Bunney) of the widely read English Domestic Architecture of the XVII and XVIII Centuries, published in 1905.

At many late nineteenth- and twentieth-century World Fairs architecture was an important tool in the representation of national identities. Pavilions at these Fairs offered telling ‘scenery’, against which to display old and new objects, machines, art collections, interior designs and social customs. They formed architectural settings that contributed to the staging of the nation’s vision of its own past, present or future. Furthermore, as the architectural historian Edward N. Kaufman has pointed out, the late nineteenth-century World Fairs were important forerunners of the first open-air museums. In these more permanent exhibition settings, architecture also often played a crucial role in the representation of national or regional identities. In many open-air museums buildings were conceived as important exhibits providing visitors, sometimes implicitly, with information about the nation or region’s past: information considered fundamental to its present or future identity.