Little is known about the contacts Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Minister to the Court of Louis XVI between 1784 and 1789 and future President of the United States, had with French architects during his residence in Paris, except those with Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721–1820), who collaborated with him on the design of the Capitol of Virginia in Richmond from 1785. We know, however, that, at the end of his stay in France, Jefferson was in close touch with the French architect and agriculturalist François Cointereaux (1740–1830), as is proven by several unpublished letters written by each of them.

When it opened in March 1958, the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, was the first new professional theatre to be constructed in Britain for nearly two decades and the country’s first all-new civic theatre (Figs 1 and 2). Financially supported by Coventry City Council and designed in the City Architect’s office, it included a 910-seat auditorium with associated backstage facilities. Two features of the building were especially innovative, namely its extensive public foyers and the provision of a number of small flats for actors. The theatre, whose name commemorated a major gift of timber to the city of Coventry from the Yugoslav authorities, was regarded as the herald of a new age and indeed marked the beginning of a boom in British theatre construction which lasted until the late 1970s. Yet its architecture has hitherto been little considered by historians of theatre, while accounts of post-war Coventry have instead focused on other topics: the city’s politics; its replanning after severe wartime bombing; and the architecture of its new cathedral, designed by Basil Spence in 1950 and executed amidst international interest as a symbol of the city’s post-war recovery. However, the Belgrade also attracted considerable attention when it opened. The Observer’s drama critic, Kenneth Tynan, was especially effusive, asking ‘in what tranced moment did the City Council decided to spend £220,000 on a bauble as superfluous as a civic playhouse?’ For him, it was ‘one of the great decisions in the history of local government’. This article considers the architectural implications of that ‘great decision’. The main design moves are charted and related to the local context, in which the Belgrade was intended to function as a civic and community focus. In this respect, the Labour Party councillors’ wish to become involved in housing the arts reflected prevailing local and national party philosophy but was possibly amplified by knowledge of eastern European authorities’ involvement in accommodating and subsidizing theatre. In addition, close examination of the Belgrade’s external design, foyers and auditorium illuminates a number of broader debates in the architectural history of the period. The auditorium, for example, reveals something of the extent to which Modern architecture could be informed by precedent. Furthermore, the terms in which the building was received are also significant. Tynan commented: ‘enter most theatres, and you enter the gilded cupidacious past. Enter this one, and you are surrounded by the future’. Although it was perhaps inevitable that the Belgrade was thought to be unlike older theatres, given that there had been a two-decade hiatus in theatre-building, the resulting contrast was nonetheless rather appropriate, allowing the building to connote new ideas whilst also permitting us to read the Belgrade in terms of contemporary debates about the nature of the ‘modern monument’.

The development of a scholarly discourse about Maori ‘architecture’ has been somewhat hampered by a perception, amongst architectural historians, that Maori buildings are part of a building tradition in which purpose, design, and construction, are unchanging and solely determined by custom. Until the last two decades, architectural historians in New Zealand have largely accepted this view of Maori building, possibly because the discipline is still influenced by Banister Fletcher’s ‘tree of architecture’, which never had an Oceanic or Maori branch. In Fletcher’s influential opinion architecture could only be a Western concept. As a consequence only a few scholars have attempted to attach the word ‘Maori’ to the word ‘architecture’. Even in the revised edition of Fletcher’s History of Architecture (1996) which claims to ‘contain more information about vernacular buildings’ by contemporary contributing editors, the entry for New Zealand warns that Maori architecture ‘cannot be easily related to architecture derived from Europe’.

The late medieval English laity expressed their piety through ostentatious artistic and architectural patronage. The rood, a large-scale image of Christ on the cross, flanked by the Virgin and St John, and placed in or above the chancel arch, was a particular object of both liturgical and financial devotion in the later Middle Ages.1 One of the more interesting conclusions of recent scholarship has been the recognition that the late medieval desire to express one’s piety through donations to the church was not limited to the upper classes or to one gender. Both men and women of all social classes and ages participated to the best of their ability through collective as well as individual giving.2 Moreover, people made very deliberate choices about the types of images and architectural forms on which they spent their money.3 Scholars have argued that the roots of this very active lay patronage lie in the mid-thirteenth century when diocesan statutes first assigned responsibility for maintaining the nave and most of a church’s ornaments to its parishioners.4

The dominant historical account of constructional polychromy in Britain describes its emergence in the fifteenth century as a by-product of the introduction of brick-making under Flemish influence. Blue bricks, over-fired or possibly deliberately vitrified, were put to use creating patterns and colour contrasts in load-bearing walls. This constructional polychromy passed from fashion in the late Renaissance period before returning to popularity in the mid-nineteenth century, prompted, it is said, by John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–53), and landmark buildings, notably William Butterfield’s All Saints, Margaret Street in London, designed in 1849.

The small Spanish island of Minorca is the unexpected setting for a British naval hospital. It was constructed from 1711, during the first years of the British military occupation of the island, to provide medical care to mariners as they served in the strategically important Mediterranean. Scholars working in the fields of both medical and architectural history agree on the innovative importance of this hospital. Christine Stevenson, the foremost expert on early modern British hospital architecture, stated that: ‘the first of the purpose-built naval hospitals was at Port Mahon, Minorca […] [It] was, however, unique until the 1740s, when others were built on Jamaica and Gibraltar’. In terms of the history of hospital architecture, the Minorcan hospital’s role, as the sole purpose-built British naval hospital for over three decades, was a reflection of its exceptional setting, for it presented the British navy with an opportunity to create an infirmary that realized contemporary ideals of hospital design. The single-storey limestone edifice, which adopted the U-shaped plan already pioneered by Sir Christopher Wren (1635-1703) back in England, was located on an island in the middle of Mahon harbour, known by the name Isla del Rey. This was a highly significant location in Minorcan history, formerly called Ilia dels Conills (Rabbit Island), and was named for King Alfonso III of Aragon. It was from this island that Alfonso launched his reconquest of Minorca for Christendom from the Moors, and from this point in time Minorca was incorporated into Catalonia. No evidence has yet come to light of this important name in British usage; instead the occupiers referred to it as ‘Bloody Island’, or ‘Hospital Island’. Despite the informal and macabre renaming of the harbour island it was, however, a beautiful location, cooled by sea breezes, and was visible from all the surrounding cliffs.

The dance hall was a symbol of social, cultural and political change. From the mid-1920s until the mid-1960s, the dance hall occupied a pivotal place in the culture of working- and lower-middle-class communities in Britain. Its emergence and popularity following the First World War reflected improvements in the social and economic well-being of the working and lower middle classes. The architecture of dance halls reflected these modernising trends, as well as a democratisation of pleasure. The very name adopted by the modern dance hall, ‘palais de danse’, emphasises this ambition. Affordable luxury was a key part of their attraction. This article examines how the architecture of dance halls represented moments of optimism, escapism and ‘modernity’ in British history in the period 1918–65. It provides the first overview of dance halls from an architectural and spatial history perspective.

Domestic interiors created during the Aesthetic Movement have often been interpreted in terms of the ideas of aesthetic autonomy associated with Théophile Gautier, Walter Pater and Joris-Karl Huysmans. This essay takes a different tack by analysing the aesthetic interior in light of concerns with health reform. It focuses on the writings and designs of architect E.W. Godwin (1833–86) who pursued interior design as part of an effort to foster a healthy life, one that consisted of hygiene, relief from urban stress, and an enlargement of the aesthetic responsiveness of his clients. He conceived of spare and calm interiors that were healthful alternatives to dust-infested Victorian clutter while concomitantly offering psychological respite from the ‘high-pressure, nervous times’ endemic to metropolitan life. This goal accords with Godwin's related interest in dress reform, a preoccupation that led to his participation in the Health Exhibition of 1884. By unpacking Godwin's specific contribution to the sanitary discussions that prevailed in Victorian Britain, I align the aesthetic interior with the central imperative of sanitary reform: promoting health through ameliorating Britain's urban environment.

In 1946 J. M. Richards, editor of the Architectural Review (AR) and self-proclaimed champion of modernism, published a book entitled The Castles on the Ground (Fig. 1). This book, written while working for the Ministry of Information (Mol) in Cairo during the war, was a study of British suburban architecture and contained long, romantic descriptions of the suburban house and garden. Richards described the suburb as a place in which ‘everything is in its place’ and where ‘the abruptness, the barbarities of the world are far away’. For this reason The Castles on the Ground is most often remembered as a retreat from pre-war modernism, into nostalgia for mock-Tudor houses and privet hedges. The writer and critic Reyner Banham, who worked with Richards at the AR in the 1950s, described the book as a ‘blank betrayal of everything that Modern Architecture was supposed to stand for’. More recently, however, it has been rediscovered and reassessed for its contribution to mid-twentieth-century debates about the relationship between modern architects and the British public. These reassessments get closer to Richards’s original aim for the book. He was not concerned with the style of suburban architecture for its own sake, but with the question of why the style was so popular and what it meant for the role of modern architects in Britain and their relationship to the ‘man in the street’.

It is not the purpose of this short article to announce a new discovery or to draw new conclusions, but to make readily available a document of considerable significance to all concerned with the development of the eighteenth-century provincial town house.

Exhibition 58: Modern Architecture in England, held between 10 February and 7 March 1937 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), was a notable event. Amidst claims that ‘England leads the world in modern architectural activity’, the exhibition ‘amazed New Yorkers’ and equally surprised English commentators. However, it has not subsequently received any extended investigation. The present purpose is to look at it as a multiple sequence of events, involving other exhibitions, associated publications and the trajectories of individuals and institutions, through which tensions came to the surface about the definition and direction of Modernism in England and elsewhere. Such an analysis throws new light on issues such as the motives for staging the exhibition, the personnel involved and associated questions relating to the role of émigré architects in Britain and the USA, some of which have been misinterpreted in recent commentaries.Hitchcock's unequivocal claim for the importance of English Modernism at this point still arouses disbelief, and raises a question whether it can be accepted at face value or requires explaining in terms of some other hidden intention.

On the 12th of February, 1652, a Declaration, ‘that Scotland shall, and may be incorporated into, and become one Common-wealth with this England’ was proclaimed at the Mercat Cross, in the High Street of Edinburgh. An English bystander noted with innocent surprise, that ‘there was a very great concourse of people att the proclayming … but soe sencelesse are this generation of theire owne goods that scarce a man of them shew'd any signe of rejoycing.’ This Union with Protectorate England was to last until the Restoration.

The rule of General Monck was arbitrary and military in character. It evolved in a system of Justices of the Peace, a highly successful instrument of government. That it was effective is shown by the following ‘letter from the Highlands’:

The study of one department of state in relation to its activities in building is at present being undertaken by a group of historians surveying the Office of Works. That Office, however, was certainly not the only department in the late seventeenth century concerned with the construction and management of edifices of national importance. For the Office of Ordnance was one of the most vital building departments during this period with responsibility for the maintenance of all kinds of garrison buildings as well as the erection of fortifications throughout England and later in Scotland and the colonies. It is this concern of the Office for fortifications - without which ‘no monarch, prince or state has been or can be safe in their government’ - that I wish to discuss in this paper.

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.

Architectural casts collections — the great majority of which were created in the second half of the nineteenth or the early twentieth centuries — have in recent years met with a variety of fates. While that of the Metropolitan Museum in New York has been dismantled, that of the Musée des Monuments Français in Paris has with great difficulty been rearranged to suit current tastes. Notwithstanding this limited rediscovery of architectural cast collections, they remain part of a past era in the ongoing history of architectural museums. While drawings and models have always been standard media for the representation of architecture — whether or not ever built — architectural casts seem to have become the preferred medium for architectural displays in museums during a period beginning in 1850. Indeed, until the development of photography and the democratization of foreign travel, they were the only way of collecting architectural and sculptural elements while preserving their originals in situ. Admittedly, the three-dimensional experience of full-sized architecture in the form of casts, or even of actual fragments of architecture, played a considerable part in earlier, idiosyncratic attempts to display architecture in museums, indeed as early as the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, it was only from the mid-nineteenth century that they became the preferred medium for displaying architecture. The cult of ornament reached its climax in the years 1850–70, embodied, in the field of architecture, in the famous ‘battle of styles’ and in the doctrine of ‘progressive eclecticism’, and, in the applied arts, in attempts at reform, given a fresh impetus by the development of international exhibitions. It is not surprising, then, that the first debate about architectural cast museums should have been generated in the homeland of the Gothic Revival and of the Great Exhibition of 1851. For it was in London that this debate crystallized, specifically between the Architectural Museum founded in 1851 and the South Kensington Museum (now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum) created in 1857.

Nicholas Hawksmoor is usually seen as the antithesis of the English neo-Palladians. The unprecedented originality of Christ Church, Spitalfields, and St George-in-the-East has little in common with the carefully derived compositions of Colen Campbell or Lord Burlington. Lord Shaftesbury, often seen as the harbinger of neo-Palladianism, condemned the sterility of Wren’s court-based architecture, much of which involved Hawksmoor, and, without mentioning its name, Blenheim Palace, designed by Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh in collaboration. Campbell’s neo-Palladian manifesto, the Introduction to Vitmvius Britannicus, attacked the ‘odd and chimerical Beauties’ of Borromini, and so by inference, it is assumed, Hawksmoor, the only English architect whose attitude to the Classical orders was as unrestrained as Borromini’s. Because of this, because Hawksmoor was dismissed from his main posts in the Office of Works by the neo-Palladians, and because Lord Burlington criticized his lack of architectural purity, the links between Hawksmoor and the neo-Palladians have never been given the detailed consideration they deserve.

For the Riding-House, 'tis of so vast extent,
It does some mighty Temple represent,
Where seeing them ride, Admiring Indians wo'd
Adore each Horse there as a Semi-God.

In 1668, Mr Thomas Povey made a tour of the great houses of Derbyshire. He visited Chatsworth, Hardwick Hall, and then that ‘considerable Prince, the Duke of Newcastle, and his Pallace, Stables, Riding Houses, and Horses, which are more extraordinarie, then are to bee seene in Europe, If the Curiositie and Excellencie of their Manège Discipline, and Methods, bee considered'. The Duke of Newcastle was William Cavendish (1593-1676), well known for his interest in architecture, and renowned across Europe as an expert in the art of manège or horsemanship. His riding houses at Bolsover Castle and Welbeck Abbey survive, although the latter has been much altered (Figs 1,2 and 3). The first part of this article will examine their date, form and function, particularly through an assessment of the surviving fabric of the Riding House range at Bolsover, and will set them within the context of William Cavendish's other projects for buildings connected with horsemanship in Antwerp and London. The second part will go on to examine the social significance of William Cavendish's horsemanship and its importance for his political career. The tension between innovation and tradition that has been seen in William's Advice on politics and society, written for Charles II, can also be seen reflected in his practice of horsemanship. The concluding section, however, will argue that William Cavendish had personal reasons for wishing to be thought of on horseback, like Perseus upon Pegasus'.

In November 1882 the Royal Courts of Justice moved house, exchanging premises built by Sir John Soane along the flank of Westminster Hall (Figs 1, 2 and 3) for George Edmund Street’s Gothic masterpiece in the Strand. The new building, some sixteen years in the making, solved one problem but left another in its wake. Back in Parliament Square were Soane’s Courts, redundant and, worse, covering over a large part of Westminster Hall. Constructed in the late eleventh century, the massive Hall had been transformed three centuries later. Outside are six splendid flying buttresses (Soane had incorporated them into his cross walls) built to receive the thrust generated by Hugh Herland’s peerless hammerbeam roof, a wonder of high medieval carpentry (Fig. 4). Here was an unmissable chance to raise the profile of the ancient masterpiece, which was hemmed in by Georgian brick and masonry, and overshadowed by the modern medieval pomp of Pugin and Barry’s New Palaces of Westminster. The solution seemed simple: demolish Soane’s ranges and tidy up what was left. It was more like housekeeping than architecture and what was more it would not cost much. As for Soane’s ranges (and Vardy’s to the south), they were seen to be completely without merit.