The history of Audley End can be divided into three principal phases: the Tudor house, a conversion of the buildings of Walden Abbey, c.1538–1605; the Jacobean house, built by Thomas, 1st Earl of Suffolk, in two stages after c. 1605 and held by successive Earls until 1745, save for the period 1667–1701 when it was a Royal Palace; and the rehabilitation and later expansion of the surviving core of the Jacobean house from 1752 onwards, by Elizabeth, Countess of Portsmouth, and her successors. The aim of this paper is to give a preliminary account of some of the results of research in progress for the Department of the Environment into the first two of these phases.

‘Some people drink to forget their unhappiness. I do not drink, I build.’

Architecture for Beckford was not only a means of escape from a hostile society into a total environment of fantasy; paradoxically, it also enabled him to express his life-long aspirations for social recognition. Fonthill Abbey was to become a legend in his lifetime as the ideal setting for his protean activities as an outstanding patron and collector — a veritable Palace of Art. In the uneasy collaboration with the wayward genius of James Wyatt, Beckford also developed an approach to design in which architecture assumed the romantic properties of landscape. The effects of this potent fusion of nature and artifice, sustained in his later creation of Lansdown Tower and its gardens, were to reverberate in English architecture until the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

The fact that so few of the private papers and drawings of Thomas Hope (1769–1831) have so far come to light makes the recent purchase by the RIBA of a small sketchbook all the more interesting. The book, measuring 10.5 cm by 16.0 cm, is bound in green paper-covered boards containing 86 pages and is initialled T.H. The attribution to Hope is confirmed by the fact that 12 of the drawings (those on pp. 14–15,60, 62, 66–67 and 72–77) were subsequently used for the engravings in An Historical Essay on Architecture by the late Thomas Hope, illustrated from Drawings made by him in Italy and Germany (2 vols, 1835). The sketch-book and its drawings are not dated but a loose page inserted at the end, with drawings in a similar style, is watermarked 1812: this seems a likely date for the whole book since Hope refers to the Villa Aldobrandini in Rome as the Villa Miollis (the villa was occupied by General Miollis who was Governor of Rome from 1808–13). The book seems to be the record of a single journey proceeding from Rome to Florence, Siena, Parma, Modena, Piacenza, with a few drawings made on the way home in Dijon, Auxerre and Paris. A label on the cover reads: Italy 1. Rome, Siena, Florence, Parma, Placenta, Rivoli, France Dijon Auxerre.

In 1964 Peter Ferriday wrote that, in respect of his effects on medieval church architecture, Sir Gilbert Scott could claim to be ‘the first rapist with a timid and careful manner’ ; Scott’s meticulous and reverential reports were not in practice pursued, he argued, and while Scott made loud protestations at the destructiveness of over-restoration, he was not averse to the habit himself: ‘He was the only restorer who publicly repented and followed this by public (and profitable) public sinning.’ Such criticisms have until very recently been the hallmark of the literature on Sir Gilbert’s restorations, criticisms not merely levelled since his decease.

Charles Eastlake, in writing A History of the Gothic Revival, said of St James-the-Less, Westminster:

Here the whole character of the building, whether we regard its plan, its distinctive features, its external or internal decoration is eminently un-English.

No one British building by George Edmund Street displays such an amount of Continental influence, and it can be regarded as representing the high water mark of Street’s adaptation and incorporation of features and forms derived from Continental precedents.

In September 1850, only eight years before work started on St James-the-Less, Street had crossed the English Channel for the first time. In ten days he saw Paris, Chartres, Alenҫon, Caen, Rouen and Amiens, and developed an enthusiasm for foreign travel which he retained throughout his life. Thereafter his annual tours were always well planned and hastily conducted, a great number of buildings being seen in a very short time. Thus each year Street would go, ‘sketchbook in hand, with some ancient town or thrice noble cathedral set before him as his goal’.

The British Architectural Library (RIBA) possesses a collection of 81 letters written by J. F. Bentley to Charles Hadfield (including a few to his father or son), together with the draft of one letter from Hadfield to Bentley, as well as 6 letters which he received from W. R. Lethaby. The letters from Bentley cover the whole period of their acquaintance, from a few months after their first meeting in 1862 (when Bentley was 23 and Hadfield 22), until two days before his death in 1902. They are here published in full, with a running commentary.

Charles Hadfield’s father, Matthew Ellison Hadfield (1812–85), was born at Lees Hall, Glossop, Derbyshire. Matthew’s grandfather Charles had been farm and gamekeeper to the Duke of Norfolk at Lees Hall, and his father Joseph (described as ‘of Lees Hall, gent.’) married Mary Ellison, whose father, Matthew Ellison, was steward of the Duke of Norfolk’s Glossop estate. Matthew Ellison Hadfield entered the office of his uncle, Michael Ellison, who was steward of the Duke’s Sheffield estate, in 1827, when he was 15.

Two letters of biographical information about Inigo Jones and his disciple and relative by marriage John Webb, written by the latter’s son James, are to be found among the papers of Anthony Wood in the Bodleian Library. The letters arose from enquiries Wood made in 1681 and 1682 for his great collection of biographies of Oxford men, Athenae Oxonienses. For a time he supposed that Webb had studied at Oxford and so sought information about him and Jones. He included a brief biographical statement about Jones in the first edition of the Athenae in 1691–92, and additional information about Jones and Webb was added from his papers after his death in the second edition in 1721. He provided a note in 1692 stating that his source was letters by James Webb, but later scholars have apparently not realized that these letters are still in existence. They are printed here for the first time.

In Ornament and Crime Adolf Loos compared architectural decoration with the scriblings on lavatory walls; graffiti recently discovered on a basement wall in Cambridge provide a curious comment on one of the architectural controversies of Victorian England.

In 1976 Mr Christopher B. George of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, came across pencilled drawings behind old shelving on the plaster walls of a long disused basement storeroom in No. 22 Parkside, an Early Victorian house on the east side of Parker's Piece. As well as scribbled calculations and an unidentifiable rough plan, there were caricature drawings of a mongrel-styled building with a Classical portico and a Gothic tower, labelled ‘What Palmerston wants for the Foreign Office. Hardwick would have done it better, but he's dead’, and of a huge statue, labelled ‘Albert the Good, but he's dead too. G.G.S.’ (PI. 60).