This paper examines the story, hitherto neglected by scholarship, of the antiquarian artist and architect John Buckler (1770–1851) through a remarkable cache of his letters at the Bodleian Library. Most of the letters relate to Buckler’s attempts to be elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Having twice been blackballed in 1808 and 1809, he canvassed Britain’s leading antiquarian figures for support. With the blackballing of the architect James Wyatt in 1797 frequently alluded to, Buckler’s blackballing was the result of a cabal against him led by Sir Joseph Banks and Samuel Lysons, which had to do with both factionalism – ie his closeness to the preservationist faction led by Richard Gough and John Carter, termed the Carter school – and the Society’s onslaught against professionals. His eventual success in 1810 institutionalised his practice, allowed him entry into polite society and brought him closer to aristocratic patronage. The remainder of the Bodleian letters relate to Buckler’s topographical work recording medieval buildings across the UK, showing how he took on the revisionist medievalist project promoted by the Carter school. The article will explain Buckler’s role in the developing discourses of antiquarianism and the Gothic Revival, and how his association with the Carter school laid the foundations for the work of the Buckler dynasty. Over three generations, in line with the family name (meaning ‘to protect’), they sought to embody the idea of the architect-antiquary as a protector.

The American architect Walter A. Taylor, who was an Episcopal missionary in China from 1923 to 1927, intended to ‘desig[n] churches and other buildings that were Chinese and belonged to China’.2 Taylor found himself at a crossroads, between Christian architecture in his home country, the USA, which was experiencing a time of transition, and the birth of the Chinese Republic and its strong rejection of Western hegemony. This article investigates how Taylor tried to undertake his task, where he found inspiration and what this indigenized architecture looked like. I argue that, although his work aimed at participating in the shift towards indigenization, it bore the signs of Chinese culture as seen through the eyes of a Westerner and imperialism.

The thought of Percy Dearmer was related to that of Augustus Pugin and Daniel Rock, Roman Catholics seeking to revive English medieval forms, and to his Anglican near-contemporaries Conrad Noel and William Palmer Ladd. In England, Noel was more ideologically committed than Dearmer and his imagined medieval society and the English Use were given applied expression at Thaxted. In the USA, William Palmer Ladd was a congenial colleague to Dearmer but his liturgical ideals were of the 1930s, and not an outcome of the nineteenth-century English ritual controversies. Dearmer, Ladd and Noel were all grounded in what has been called Sacramental Socialism, which saw a unity between the Eucharist, the corporate church, and its mission as part of the Kingdom of God.