It was Winckelmann who first suggested that the definitive characteristics of the art of a country lie primarily in its climate and geography. The climate of Greece shaped the customs and habits of the Greeks and it was those same customs and habits which gave rise to the norms and very nature of Greek art. It is a notion such as this which lies behind any attempt to link national characteristics with a national identity in architecture — that idea and, in my own case, a desire to pay tribute to the inspirational character and energy of Nikolaus Pevsner as a speaker and teacher, has tempted me to borrow his title — ‘the Englishness of English Architecture’ — and to tackle the notion from an Irish point of view.

A recommendable approach to architecture is to take the whole of each object as a point of departure and to look for its essential opposites: interior and exterior. Three elementary questions, then, will present themselves: How have the builders mastered the interior? How have they mastered the exterior? How have they mastered the relationship between interior and exterior? The interior is, as a rule, a building’s principal aspect, its very heart, the place where its intended activity, its events, use, function are fulfilled — determining the fundamental conditions for its users and visitors, their experience and state of mind. The exterior is, as a rule, subordinate, designed for introduction, preparation, presentation.

‘North’ in Russia is a broad concept. For the purposes of this article, the term will refer to the Vologda region, an area north-east of Moscow with a cultural and historical coherence created by geography and its strategic position as Muscovy’s gateway to the north and east. Inhabited by Finnic tribes before the arrival of the first Slavic explorers and traders, it served as a retreat and place of spiritual solace for the avatars of Muscovite monasticism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. At the same time the wealth of the region’s forests and lakes, as well as its position astride trading routes north to the White Sea, west to the Baltic and east to Siberia, led to the creation of towns that supported developments in the arts and architecture.

Witham in Somerset was the site of the first Carthusian monastery in England. Following the Dissolution, the priory was replaced by a succession of great houses, incorporating parts of the monastic buildings. A recent survey and analysis have established for the first time the site and orientation of these houses, and confirmed the location of another house nearby, designed by Robert Adam. The work has also shown that, contrary to earlier thinking, an early eighteenth-century remodelling of the house by James Gibbs was in fact carried out, and that the Adam one, too, was substantially completed. The survey also revealed details of the gardens and lakes that accompanied one house, and aspects of an unfinished park which was planned as the setting for the Adam mansion.

Culverthorpe Hall in Lincolnshire is within eight miles of Belton House. It is said to have been built c. 1679 for Sir John Newton: the designer is unknown, but appears to have been aware of advanced Artisan Mannerist patterns. Sir John Brownlow had Belton erected between 1685 and 1689 to designs attributed — none too securely — to William Winde. It is, however, known that the master mason was William Stanton of Holborn, London, and that in 1686 another London mason, John Thompson, was working under Stanton at Belton. Newton came from a long-established prominent family having contacts with the west country, and seems to have acquired land at Culverthorpe by 1672. Brownlow was of a recently advanced family whose fortune derived from the law. Not surprisingly, given the metropolitan quality of the work at Belton, Newton seems to have kept an eye on what his neighbour was doing, and this essay will look at what documentary evidence survives for some of Sir John Newton’s building activities and in so doing will refer at times to those at Belton.

In a former issue of this journal I presented evidence to suggest that in or about 1686 William Talman was concerned in the rebuilding of Holywell House in St Albans for the then John, Lord Churchill, afterwards first Duke of Marlborough. The chief clue was a payment of £500 to Talman entered in Churchill’s account with Child’s Bank, a sum not sufficient for a complete rebuilding even of a small house such as Holywell was, but perhaps representing an advance or intermediate instalment. This one payment, for which the actual purpose was not specified in the account, together with two smaller ones in the following year to craftsmen of the King’s Works and some independent evidence that Holywell was being remodelled at this time, were all the evidence then available for what appeared to be one of Talman’s earliest country house commissions; and as such it has made its appearance in the latest edition of Colvin’s Biographical Dictionary of British Architects.

The rebuilding of St Giles-in-the-Fields between 1730 and 1734 is one of the least known but most significant episodes in the history of Georgian church design, standing at a crucial crossroads of radical architectural change and representing nothing less than the first Palladian-Revival church to be erected in London in the eighteenth century (Fig. 19).

The twelve letters published here are the majority of the only known original letters from Thomas Coke (1697–1759), the builder of Holkham Hall, Baron Lovell of Minster Lovell and later first Earl of Leicester, to Matthew Brettingham senior (1699–1769), his executive architect, draughtsman and clerk of works. They were written between 1734 and 1741, as work on Holkham Hall began with the building of the first wing, the south-west Family Wing.

The letters were found in the Holkham Archives in 1996, as the process of sorting and cataloguing reached a tin deed box of miscellaneous unsorted papers. They were in a flat packet, labelled in pencil ‘Lovel (Ld.) of Minster Lovel, 18 Autograph Letters’. (There are, in fact, twenty letters or part letters.) Wrapped with them were several short notes from a Birmingham antiquarian book dealer in 1900, admitting that he was not sure whether they were of any great importance but offering to send them for inspection; a couple of copy replies, indecipherable owing to the action of ink on flimsy copy paper; and notes from Wenman Coke (younger son of the elderly second Earl) and the estate agent, Wood, which show that Coke (Viscount Coke, the future third Earl) refused to read them but was eventually persuaded to buy them for 42s., the dealer having reduced his asking price of 50s.

The building of Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire was a complicated process and the story has been told on a number of occasions. Briefly, the course of events appears to have been as follows. The future first Lord Scarsdale inherited in November 1758 and started building the new house very shortly afterwards, beginning with the north-east wing: his architect was Matthew Brettingham and designs for interior decoration had been provided by James Stuart. In December, however, Scarsdale consulted Robert Adam, inviting his comments on Brettingham’s and Stuart’s proposals and commissioning designs for garden buildings from him. After early 1759 Brettingham’s services were evidently dispensed with, Stuart having already ceased to be involved, and James Paine was engaged: he produced revised designs for the house which were exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1761 and took charge of the building of the north-west wing, his employment lasting until early in 1763. Meanwhile, also in 1759, work began on the body of the house under the supervision of the clerk of works, Abraham Swan, and Adam began to supply designs for interior decoration; and by the following summer Adam was producing further designs for the house itself to succeed Paine’s and Swan had been succeeded as clerk of works by Samuel Wyatt. Under this regime the house was completed structurally c. 1765, but the southern wings and quadrants were not built and work on the interior decoration was to continue for another fifteen years.

Earth, contrary to popular belief, was one of the most widespread building materials in Scottish architecture. A recent study produced by Historic Scotland demonstrates that ‘during the greater part of Scottish history earth construction was predominant’ and various methods of building in turf, mud and clay were evolved. In addition to traditional practices, the technique of rammed earth or pisé was brought from France at the end of eighteenth century. Simultaneously, at the other end of Europe, the Russian architect Nicolai L’vov undertook a large-scale project that involved developing pisé construction. He was assisted by Scotsmen, namely Adam Menelaws, John Cochrane and David Cunningham. They had arrived in St Petersburg from Edinburgh in 1784 in a group of some 70 Scots workmen to execute designs by Charles Cameron in the Imperial residence in Tsarskoe Selo, near St Petersburg. The next year, Menelaws and several other Scots were hired by L’vov. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the co-operation between L’vov and his Scottish associates in designing and constructing earth buildings in Russia.

Thanks to his Recollections, published posthumously in 1879, much is known about the early professional life of the illustrious Victorian architect, George Gilbert Scott. Yet the workhouses with which he launched his career between 1835 and 1843 are poorly understood. The papers of neither Scott nor his partner William Bonython Moffatt have survived from that period, and in his reminiscences Scott mentioned only a handful of workhouses by name.

Much of the groundwork involved in identifying and recording Scott and Moffatt workhouses was achieved by Anna Dickens. With her help, David Cole was able to attribute forty workhouses to the partners in his 1980 biography of Scott, but that figure was pared down to thirty-seven in Dickens’ doctoral thesis of 1982. The revised list at the end of this article includes a total of forty-four workhouses.

Much of what we take for granted as architectural knowledge today was legitimated and codified in the early nineteenth century. Especially in the case of medieval architecture, we are bound by 200-year-old assumptions about what holds value and what counts as fact. This article explores an important founder of empirical architectural history, William Whewell, and argues that he used the methods of early Victorian science to gain authority for the nascent study of medieval architecture. Using methods characteristic of the sociology of science, I will concentrate on the social production of knowledge, not the accuracy of the knowledge produced; therefore, the question of who was right, or who was right first, will be laid aside in favour of asking how architectural knowledge was legitimated in early Victorian Britain.

For Pugin, given his critical perspective on the work of others, the sense of failure in his own less successful designs was especially acute. If the methodology for his recreation of a medieval Christian past was antiquarian, his aspiration was romantic, and the less his modern design matched its medieval model, the more intense he felt its inadequacies. In explanation, in part at least, Pugin identified a lack of concern for the details of his architecture on the part of the clergy, being most vociferous about their indifference in Ireland. In a letter quoted by his biographer Benjamin Ferrey, Pugin, writing in 1850, reported that there was ‘little or no appreciation of ecclesiastical architecture among the clergy’ in Ireland. The new cathedral in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, he described as having been ‘completely ruined’, saying that ‘it could hardly have been worse treated if it had fallen into the hands of the Hottentots.’ His explanation for the destruction of his grand designs for churches was both straightforward and scathing: ‘the clergy have not the least idea of using them properly.’

In German National Socialist policy the arts or any other cultural expression did not serve as ends in themselves. Instead, they were all subordinated to a certain purpose: the expression and promotion of National Socialist ideology. Achieved mainly through the process of Gleichschaltung, that is the exercise of strict control over all cultural institutions, cultural expression in the Third Reich was (ab)used to convey political meaning; it functioned purely as a tool of propaganda.

An association between clinical and civic design has long been suspected — and indeed occasionally explicitly invoked — by commentators on architecture and urban design. Certainly, Mumford is not the only historian to have proposed a symbiotic relationship between hospital and town planning over the last two centuries or more. Yet the twentieth century has surely witnessed an intensification of this relationship, an intensification which points to a definite qualitative — if not even quantitative — shift. This article seeks to reconsider this relationship as it manifested itself in Britain after the Second World War, to investigate the similarities and points of contact between what are often considered by their practitioners to be two quite distinct discourses. It aims to do so through a consideration of a single major project, one which clearly exhibited characteristics of debates which manifested themselves in a more diluted form across numerous other schemes. This building, Greenwich District Hospital (1962–74), was one of two ‘heroic’ hospital projects undertaken in Britain during the 1960s and evidences a plethora of concerns prevalent at the time. Whilst flexibility was a fundamental desideratum, a consideration of the project’s zoning of functions and circulatory logic also reveals a profound affinity with the concerns of modernist urbanism. Moreover, it was not simply a case of hospital design plundering town-planning models for its own use; British urban theory may itself have owed a debt to clinical planning, each discourse involved in processes of specialization, separation and sanitization indicative of capitalism’s need to order and render controllable the phenomena of everyday life. Furthermore, this equivalence of architectural intervention at the level of both the hospital and the city plan raises important questions about modern society’s conception of safety, health and the environment.