Blickling Hall in Norfolk is one of the best-known Jacobean mansions. Its south (entrance) and east façades (Figs 3 and 4) are outstanding pieces of architecture of the period and the rich emblematic plasterwork of the long gallery ceiling is justly celebrated. The date of its commencement, 1619, is carved in a prominent place in the entrance courtyard, and even the name of its architect, Robert Lyming, has long been known, for in the parish registers of Blickling his death in 1628 is recorded with the words ‘architect and builder of Blickling Hall’.

In the public eye the long gallery is a popular, often spectacular feature of Elizabethan and Jacobean houses and as such has been exclaimed at, described, measured, praised or criticized by generations of visitors. Considering this, and the obvious importance of the room in its period — noted and discussed by Gotch as long ago as 1901 — it is surprising that until Howard Colvin wrote his introductory chapter to Volume IV of the History of the King’s Works almost no enquiry had been made into its architectural or social origins and development. In his recent book, Renaissance Paris, David Thompson remarks that ‘the evolution of the gallery in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is a favourite matter for argument among architectural historians’, a comment which may apply to continental galleries and historians but not, generally, to their English counterparts. So that, whilst continental galleries of the Renaissance and seventeenth century have often been discussed and analysed, especially in terms of their classical prototypes and their sophisticated, frequently highly programmatic decorations, the English gallery has been neglected. Yet the English had a particular genius for galleries of varied design which, in response to practical architectural considerations, they incorporated into their house-plans with an originality and ingenuity seldom matched abroad (Figs 1–3).

When Inigo Jones introduced Italian architectural ideas into Britain, he also brought a new kind of roof structure that facilitated the construction of large scale spaces. The unsupported ceilings of the Banqueting House and St Paul’s, Covent Garden, were both over 50 ft and although similar spans had been built before, they had relied upon quite different structural methods which created a distinct architecture. The roofs of Westminster Hall and those of many lesser halls, like those at the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, used either arch or hammer-beam forms whose open structures dominated the rooms. These structures were quite unsuited to providing flat ceilings or roofs which, when required, had relied upon massive tie beams. Instead of this rather crude structural method, Inigo Jones supported his flat ceilings and roofs by using the much more efficient trussed roofs which were in use in Italy at the time and were shown in the drawings of Palladio and Serlio. These structures allowed large spans to be constructed with timbers of smaller scantling, particularly for the tie beam which no longer needed to carry the full weight of the roof and which no longer needed to be built in a single length. It might be argued that the use of this new structural form was essential to the development of the new classical style of architecture in England but, although he was the first architect to use it on any scale in Britain, the influence of Inigo Jones on its subsequent use and development is questionable because of the interruption to building by the Civil War and the re-discovery of the form by others thereafter.

Shortly before the coronation of George I in October 1714, an English antiquarian named John Talman reported from Venice on the progress of his plan to transport ‘curiositys [such as] pillars of various dimensions & colourd marbles; Busto’s, bassirelievi, Statues, tables of Porfiry & c . . . from y mediterranean to London to furnish a Palace. . . of a King. . . yt. shou’d outdo y world’. Since the destruction of Whitehall Palace by fire in 1698, provision for a new and more glamorous royal residence had been a leading issue among writers, politicians and architects as part of their unprecedentedly ambitious scheme to make London ‘the most flourishing City in the Universe’. A number of different designs for various sites were submitted from time to time. The majority were, like Talman’s, too expensive or extravagant to be realized. Certainly the most remarkable of these are the designs, now preserved in the Scottish Record Office, for palaces for James Francis Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, in St James’s Park and the ‘King’s Paddock’ at Kensington, prepared between 1718 and 1730 by John Erskine, 11th Earl of Mar (1675–1732), each of which he regarded as ‘worthy of the Grandeur of the King and Kingdom of England’. The seriousness with which the Earl regarded the project is apparent in the large number of meticuously rendered and annotated drawings associated with it — more than were made for any other of his many architectural schemes — and by the detailed account he provided in his manuscript Description of the Designe for a New Royall Palace for the King of Great Britain at London, 1726, here published in full for the first time (pp. 110–17).

In March 1946 Rudolf Wittkower read a seminal paper on ‘Lord Burlington and William Kent’ to the Royal Archaeological Institute. Whilst it paved the way for a reassessment of Lord Burlington’s achievements as an architect in his own right, it also unequivocally reduced Kent to a subservient role, denying him any real degree of autonomous creativity in the field of architecture. Kent was said to have turned his hand to architecture only relatively late in his career, thus his education in this field had taken place under the scrutiny of the Earl of Burlington, a purist and uncompromising disciple of Palladio and Jones. Wittkower, and after him all the major British scholars in the field have asserted that as a style British neo-Palladianism was entirely dependent upon Palladio, Scamozzi and Jones. It was in the works of these masters that the ‘academic’ architects of the Burlington circle believed they had discovered the eternal rules of architecture. So Wittkower, and those writing after him, postulated a privileged relationship between the British architectural innovators of the early part of the eighteenth century and the architectural tradition of sixteenth-century Veneto. Kent was forced into this straightjacket, even though many aspects of his work jarred with this overall interpretation of the period; indeed in 1945 Wittkower himself had acknowledged the presence in English architecture between 1720 and 1760 of elements which are not Palladian at all. But after this initial admission of complexity and contradiction Wittkower chose to concentrate on Burlington, on whom he planned to publish a monograph. Kent had vanished from his horizon.

Among the Hastings Collection purchased by the Huntington Library in January 1927 from Maggs of London are seven letters written by William Kent; two of these were included in the Historical Manuscripts Commission’s four-volume Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rawdon Hastings, Esq., of The Manor House, Ashby de la Zouch (1928–47), but the remaining five have not been published until now. Despite their oddities of spelling and punctuation, they are worthy of notice if only for the light they cast on Kent’s relationship with the Hastings family.

In Scotland, as in England, architecture was not a fully-developed profession until well into the nineteenth century. There were, of course, some able practitioners of architecture in Scotland in the eighteenth century, but few if any of them were professional architects in the sense in which their Victorian successors would understand the term. Many of them were builders before they were architects, and even those who were primarily architects might on occasion act as building contractors. Far away in London their compatriots Robert and James Adam might insist (in their dealings with a client) that ‘it is of little consequence to us, what the practice is, among professional builders. We are not builders by profession, but Architects & Surveyors, & live by those Branches’. But even in London it was with difficulty that an architect could sustain such pretensions in the 1770s. In Edinburgh it would have been impossible. Sixty or seventy years were to elapse before the posture adopted by the Adam brothers became the norm, before architectural practice in Scotland had progressed from a situation in which both design and execution were in the same hands — those of the master craftsmen — to one in which design had become the exclusive business of the architect. Those sixty or seventy years also saw the gradual emancipation of the architect from the patronage which had nurtured him in the eighteenth century, so that by the middle of the nineteenth century he had achieved the economic independence of a professional man and the social status of a gentleman.

The reinforced concrete specialist in Britain in the early 1900s was of recent vintage and essentially foreign (French) origin and it was as something of a ‘parvenu’ that he was criticized by British architects from the time that he became properly established. Reinforced concrete then existed as a multitude of patented ‘systems’, or methods of disposing reinforcement, controlled by patentees. Among these, the most prolific was François Hennebique’s French-Belgian system. Hennebique’s success was due not only to the system itself; it depended largely on the specialist commercial-technical organization which he evolved, and extended worldwide, to control both the design and construction of his reinforced concrete works (and which was imitated by others). When Louis Gustave Mouchel became Hennebique’s agent in Britain, from 1897–98, his business organization followed Hennebique’s model with specially trained regional engineers to execute working drawings (after initial designs by an architect or engineer), contractors ‘licensed’ to execute them in return for royalties, and nationwide expansion. By 1905, most reinforced concrete works and all framed buildings in Britain were in Hennebique’s system. It was from about this date that growing criticism of the ‘system specialist’, and of Mouchel personally, was voiced there. Three institutions were initiated, which were intended both to curtail the ‘specialist monopoly’ of reinforced concrete in Britain and to promote the knowledge and use of the material among architects in particular. These were: the RIBA Committee on Reinforced Concrete (1905–07), a journal, Concrete and Constructional Engineering (1906) and the Concrete Institute (1908).

No member of the Society of Architectural Historians needs to be told that The History of the King’s Works is a monument of twentieth-century scholarship, founded on research so prodigious that the editor himself, in his preface to the only volume in which he took no specific part, warns us that ‘no one . . . who has not worked long hours in the Public Record Office can fully appreciate the sustained endeavour that lies behind the writing’: those for whom the thought of mere mornings in those gloomy search-rooms is daunting can only be humble in the face of such depth of documentation. Moreover the documentation within these magisterial volumes is itself fully enabling: Mr Colvin and his colleagues have done the research for us — done it, it is impossible to question, with terrifying thoroughness — but left all their stages visible for any reader to retrace. Though, as Mr Colvin concedes, ‘it would be sanguine to suppose that no relevant document has escaped [the authors’] scrutiny’, it is certain that the documentary survey is as complete as human endeavour can make it. In one very important respect, though the History incorporates in many cases recent archaeological research, the buildings themselves have been explored less exhaustively; and it is not quite enough, if one is proposing a total enquiry into what can be known of the King’s Works, to excuse oneself from the study of (especially medieval) technology by referring readers to Salzman. In the third of a century since Building in England was published (itself an exemplary, not an exhaustive, book) much has been learnt about medieval building construction; and some is surely inferable from documents studied for The History of the King’s Works and from the buildings themselves: the characteristically empirical approach of medieval builders to structural problems led to individual solutions which one would like to learn about. How, for instance, were the special difficulties of founding Conway Castle on its precipitous and very uneven rocky site overcome? There is no-one better-equipped to tell us than Dr Taylor; but he is silent. The series aimed to write ‘the history of the government department long known as the Office of the King’s Works, and of the building operations for which that office was responsible’: the process of building is at least as interesting and important as where the money or the stone came from, or how long the surveyors or workmen waited to be paid.