The south front of Wilton House (Fig. 1) and the State Apartment on the first floor of the south range are justly famous as one of the most important and influential works of English architecture to survive from the seventeenth century. The work has been described, recorded and analysed by travellers, connoisseurs and art historians since its completion shortly before 1652. Much of that analysis has been based on documentary sources with only limited investigation of the fabric. A recent comprehensive restoration of the south range has enabled a detailed reconsideration of its complex historical development.

The importance of the Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975) to the development of the Modern Movement has only recently been recognized. Following Lewerentz’s confirmation at the age of eighteen he was a life-long Bible-reading Lutheran, the established religion in Sweden, and Lewerentz’s well known churches are testimony to his ability to design sacred space which reinterpreted the Lutheran mass. It is within this scriptural context, albeit modified by Swedish cremation policy, that this article examines probably the most famous and monumental of Lewerentz’s works, the Woodland cemetery and crematorium, Stockholm (the Skogskyrkogården).

It was Howard Colvin who, whilst going through the accounts, fragments and miscellanea at the Public Record Office, as well as the plans, in the late 1950s stumbled over the two halves of MPF 146 and suggested to Mr Noel Blakiston, then supervising the preparation of a catalogue of the PRO’s early maps, that the two should be reunited.

In 1945, Janet Vaughan, a distinguished haematologist, became Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, her Principalship lasting until her retirement in 1967. Described in her obituary as ‘a woman of extraordinary vitality and not a little impatience’, Vaughan — awarded the DBE in 1957 — played a key role in steering the college through a period of major change in British Higher Education. Not least amongst the changes was a significant growth in the number of students at university across the country, which resulted in numerous, often high-profile, construction projects. Somerville, which had been founded in 1879 as the University of Oxford's second college for women, was not untouched by this development, and at Vaughan's retirement party, her colleague, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, referred to the several new buildings completed during the previous two decades. The college's post-war building campaign had begun modestly with two small infill developments by Geddes Hyslop in 1948–50 and 1954–56.

The buildings and landscaped grounds of the nineteenth-century international exhibitions were directly related to the architectural and urban design traditions of the cities in which they were built. At the same time, they possessed idealized qualities that made them innovative and distinct from other contemporary buildings. The result of collaborative planning among architects, engineers, and planning committees, the exhibitions were built to evoke ideal civic settings, their exhibition palaces, pavilions, and gardens forming exemplary complexes that synthesized both invention and tradition. The International Exhibition, the Weltausstellung, held in Vienna, Austria in 1873, was one such event (Fig. 1). Its buildings were both related to the architectural and urbanistic design traditions of nineteenth-century Vienna, and at the same time possessed idealized qualities that were inventive and progressive, marking new technological achievements.

At Beverley Minster, in the second bay of the south aisle west of the transept, there is a change in the character of the wall arcading. The first three arches rest upon four capitals of the ‘Early English’ pattern. They are typical of the eastern section of the church in which the high altar was dedicated in 1260, marking the completion of a stage in building the Minster. The two western arches of the bay are of a different proportion and the last two capitals are decorated with naturalistic foliage (Fig. 3). The hood moulds, instead of coming down to points, rest upon small pieces of sculpture. This pattern is continued along the south side of the Minster, echoed in the treatment of the north aisle and imitated in the alterations which were carried out under Hawksmoor's direction.

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.

The great urban churches that were built for Protestant worship in the three or four centuries after the Reformation have often been compared to theatres. With their common need to seat a large number of people within sight and earshot of a central point, theatres and churches have often adopted similar arrangements: galleried auditoria with carefully contrived patterns of seats and a minimum of columns. Floors were sometimes sloped to improve sight-lines, and private boxes might be provided in either type of building. During the later decades of the eighteenth century the idea of the semicircular auditorium was taken up by leading neo-classicists who went beyond Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico to Roman and Greek models for inspiration. Gondoin’s anatomy theatre (of 1769–74) for the Ecole de Chirurgie in Paris is the most celebrated example, providing a clear view of the proceedings for an audience of some 1,200. It was followed by a number of buildings for drama and opera, in which, as Pevsner noted, there was an associated move away from the provision of tiers of boxes. One might expect this enthusiasm for the practical values of the semicircular theatre to have had its counterpart in church building. To what extent it did is the subject of this essay.

‘The key to London is the Thames. Without the river, the city might not have existed and would certainly not have flourished.’ So runs the topographical argument for London’s origin and successful growth. It stems from the Romans’ choice of a crossing-point between a hill on the north bank opposite a rare spot of firm land — an island at high tide — among the marshes to the south. This was the first location up the tidal stream clear of marshland on both sides, and from it the Roman road network fanned out in all the necessary directions. There seems to have been no significant settlement in this place before.

The one constant in the history of Enmore Castle from its construction, 1751–57, to the present day has been its obscurity. In architectural history its impact has been so slight as to make a very real point about aesthetics and motivation in the early years of the medieval revival. Enmore was a very large moated castle, highly innovatory for its building period, and the creation of a prominent politician, an Irish peer who was a member of the English House of Commons. In spite of this it never captured the imagination of its times nor the interest of later historians of the Revival, only the dismissive mockery of Horace Walpole, reproduction in a few prints and some brief mention in country histories and tours of England.

Long before its completion in 1792 James Wyatt’s restoration of Salisbury Cathedral was the subject of fierce debate within antiquarian circles. Criticism of Wyatt’s activities was at first directed at the destruction of antiquities they involved, but attention also focused on the alleged inadequacies of the Wyatt Gothic style, a criticism inspired by the new fittings and altarpiece, but above all by ‘the most conspicuous object in the whole church’, the reconstructed choir screen and organ loft.

The architectural collaboration between J. Gillespie Graham and A. W. Pugin was more productive and extended over a longer period of time than has hitherto been suspected. It is, however, surprising that the relationship has not been investigated previously as it has long been known to scholars, particularly to those interested in the career of the English architect. For example, it was noted at the time that the drawings entered by Gillespie Graham for the Houses of Parliament competition in 183 5 were by the same hand as those entered under Charles Barry’s name. As Benjamin Ferrey, the first biographer of Pugin, put it: ‘the hand of Pugin was so evident that its real authorship could not be doubted’.

A book of drawings in the R.I.B.A., a group of buildings at Garendon Park, near Loughborough, in Leicestershire, and a passage in John Nichol's History of Leicestershire combine together to present a reasonably full picture of Ambrose Phillipps, an amateur architect of the 18th century.

His grandfather, also called Ambrose, was a successful London lawyer who purchased the Garendon estate in 1683 from the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and was knighted three years later. Sir Ambrose died in 1706, when Garendon was inherited by his second son William, who had been a merchant in Constantinople until called home by the death of his elder brother in 1716. William had married, in 1703, Jane, the daughter of Sir Samuel Dashwood, at one time Lord Mayor of London. They had three sons: Ambrose, who was born in 1706 or 1707, and Samuel and William, who both became merchants in Smyrna.

Henry VII’s Chapel, Westminster, represents a solution to the problem of how to create a visually unified and consistently decorated interior. It also represents the transformation into architectural form of the tradition of epideictic rhetoric - the elaborate praising of personages of high degree. Furthermore, it was the most important structure built in the early sixteenth century in England. It is surprising, therefore, that little attention has been paid to it by modern scholars.

Professor Lethaby, writing in 1906 and again in 1925, attributed the design of Henry VII’s Chapel to Robert Vertue. More recently, Professor Webb and Mr Harvey have suggested that the vaulting was designed by William Vertue, c. 1510. These attributions to the Vertues are based on the fact, among others, that Robert Vertue was the first named in a list of the King’s three master masons who gave an estimate for a proposed tomb for Henry VII in 1506.

Obscure sons of famous fathers are a common enough feature of artistic as of other walks of life but it is equally a natural response to seek some specific explanation for this relative failure in the face of the advantages bestowed by parental instruction, example, standing and contacts. James Paine junior (1745-1829), the only son of the architect whom Thomas Hardwick described as having ‘divided the practice of the profession’ with Sir Robert Taylor ‘till Mr. Robert Adam entered the lists’, is a typical case, with only a single executed architectural commission which can be credited unambiguously to his name.

Ever since the publication of Parentalia in 1750 it has been taken for granted that all the ‘fifty-one parochial churches of the City of London’ listed there by Christopher Wren, junior, were indeed ‘erected according to the Designs, and under the Care and Conduct, of Sir Christopher Wren’. That Wren could not personally have designed every detail of so many churches has long been recognized, and it is well known that in most cases the fittings, and in some even the architectural details, were designed by the craftsmen employed. Even if Wren ‘originated the design of every church’, ‘in many cases the working out and supervision was done by somebody else’ — generally by Robert Hooke or Edward Woodroffe, or after Woodroffe’s death in 1675, by John Oliver, Wren’s deputy as Surveyor of St Paul’s Cathedral. Of the many surviving drawings, relatively few are in Wren’s own hand. Some are clearly by Hooke, whose characteristic draughtsmanship is fairly easy to recognize, some no doubt are by Woodroffe, and some must be by the draughtsmen named in Wren’s accounts for rebuilding the churches: first William Walgrave, who in or about 1673 was paid £2 10s. ‘for taking the ground platts of 12 churches yet unbuilt’, then Henry Hunt, who received £6 10s. for thirteen similar plans in 1676/77, and finally Thomas Lane, who between 1676/77 and 1682 was regularly paid ‘for coppying the Designes of severall Churches’, then ‘for drawing the designes for severall Churches’, and finally for ‘drawing and making designes for severall Churches’.

Henry Clutton trained under Edward Blore and inherited many of Blore’s clients. Like Blore, Clutton was a proficient designer of Tudorbethan country houses. Clutton, however, was one of the younger, bolder generation of architects and — with conviction and occasional brilliance — broke out of the rather dull Bloreian tradition in which he had been trained. His red sandstone castle at Ruthin, his early sixteenth-century château at Minley, his experiments with the vernacular ‘Old English’ style and his interpretation of the Jacobean country house, show an originality of which Blore was incapable.

Family traditions about English country houses are often despised by art historians, but they have a habit of being based on fact, however long forgotten. The attribution of a certain wing to a certain architect has more than once been verified by the rediscovery of his original drawings, framed in passe-partout, in a remote servants’ lavatory. Often, as in the case of Cliveden, the evidence is far closer at hand but it has for one reason or another been overlooked.

In about 1905, twelve years after buying Cliveden and embarking on a scheme of major alterations to the house and garden, William Waldorf Astor had all the surviving eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architectural drawings, garden designs, engravings and manuscripts to do with the building bound in a large album for safe keeping.