As recently as 1954 the known works of Thomas Farnolls Pritchard (died 1775) of Shrewsbury ‘who from a mason and statuary became the principal architect of the county in which he lived’ were few indeed. All that had been ascribed to him was the rebuilding of St Julian's church, Shrewsbury, in 1749-50, and his third design in 1775 for Abraham Darby's famous Coalbrookdale cast iron bridge. His ghost must have been quite dispirited to have had even the bridge denied him in 1958, although happily this was rectified in the same year. A ‘principal architect’ in his county without a house to his credit is a paradox. Even if St Julian's church was Pritchard’s first commission - and this is unlikely - there are twenty-six empty years to account for.

More than thirty books containing designs for country houses were published in England between 1780 and 1815. Their character and content give an indication of the changes in the conception and creation of country houses in a period which saw the rise of a very large number of superficially diverse and idiosyncratic domestic buildings. Country house building activity as a whole in this period has not before been systematically studied. An investigation of the design publications of the period is a good starting point for such a study.

The range of these publications is wide, encompassing expensive folio editions of large and lavish houses for rich patrons as well as modest designs for farmers and country gentlemen. They contain the greatest amount of written theory by contemporary architects relating to the design of country houses.

The discovery of new documents relating to the Coade Ornamental Stone Manufactory is an interesting and important event. This firm was one of the chief suppliers of manufactured ornaments to the building trade in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was much concerned with contemporary architectural projects, and its records are filled with references to the works and activities of architects. The company's books therefore contain information which sheds new light upon a number of problems relating to Regency architectural history. The documents in question are preserved at the Public Record Office in London. They consist of a late, fairly representative, set of the Coade firm's record books, and together they form the largest group of Coade records known to survive. They date in the main from late 1813 to late 1821. Besides three manuscript volumes containing letter copies, accounts and orders with work notes, there are a few papers relating to Eleanor Coade Jr's personal properties. They allow us to fill in the company's history with greater detail and accuracy than had previously been possible. We can also follow the course of individual commissions from order, through construction, to completion and accounting. Finally, these documents illuminate the relationships existing between manufacturer and client, and between architect and manufacturer.

Charles Fowler was born in 1792 in the small Devonshire town of Cullompton, where his family had lived for several generations. In 1807 he was articled for seven years to the architect and builder John Powning of Exeter. Powning is mentioned as Surveyor to the Cathedral, and it seems that during this time Fowler was able to acquire that understanding of construction and materials for which he was later to become well known among his contemporaries.

At the end of this time in 1814 he left Exeter for London to work as an assistant in the office of David Laing. Laing, who had been a pupil of Sir John Soane, was appointed Architect and Surveyor to the Customs in 1810 and the same year saw the completion of his Custom House at Plymouth.

It is just a century since an architectural competition was held for building new courts of justice in London, and it may be an appropriate moment to re-examine the history of that unfortunate episode. Only forty-two years earlier a new range of law courts had been completed at Westminster to the designs of Sir John Soane (1753-1837). Because of interference by the House of Commons, these courts proved inadequate from the start. A difficult task had been imposed on Soane: Westminster Hall had for centuries been the seat of the courts of law; and when it became necessary to provide more adequately for the needs of justice in the early 1820s, enthusiasm for tradition and legal conservatism combined to demand that the new courts should be as close as possible to the Hall. A restricted site to the north-west was available as a result of the demolition of the old Exchequer Buildings.