In his exemplary account of Canterbury Cathedral in The Buildings of England, John Newman observed that the proportions of the Trinity Chapel constituted an improvement on those of the choir and presbytery (Figs 1, 2 and 3). This perception of improvement results from the reduced height of the Trinity Chapel piers that produces a more satisfactory balance in the design of the elevation and, more significantly, a consequential change in the proportions of the piers, which now take on the appearance of classical columns. That this classicizing appearance is intentional is manifest in the elegant attic bases, the finely carved Corinthian-style capitals and particularly in the use of polished limestones to give the effect of marble. The piers are columnar, constructed in drums of predominantly Purbeck marble of varying colours, but the conspicuous eastern piers are partly made up of two other stones which must have been imported: a smooth creamy-white peletal limestone from Caen and a rose-pink marble which has now been shown to come from the area around Tournai. The supply of these imported stones was obviously limited and must have run out as two of the piers had to be completed in Purbeck, as can be seen in Figure 3. In fact, the use of such exotic polished stone was already well established at Canterbury, having been employed by Prior Wibert as early as the 1150s in the infirmary cloister and in the undercroft to the Treasury where both Purbeck marble and onyx can be found.

When John Newman wrote his two magnificent volumes on the buildings of Kent over thirty years ago, his great founding editor, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, described them as ‘the best of the whole series’. They were indeed exceptional volumes in the Buildings of England series, and it is very clear how well John knew Kent’s architectural monuments. One group of buildings, those of West Malling Abbey, could not, however, be examined in detail because they were within the enclosure of the Anglican Benedictine community. Part of his description of these buildings was, therefore, based on ‘inadequate photographs and pre-enclosure descriptions’ and are set in brackets in his text.

The parish church of St Mary the Virgin at Stone near Dartford, under construction in about 1260, is justly famous for its ambitious choir, the work of masons from the premier Gothic building in England, Henry III’s Westminster Abbey. The choir of Stone is a miniature Westminster: its generous bar-tracery windows and its lusciously carved wall arcades bring the metropolitan glamour of the abbey to a north Kent parish church on the Thames estuary (Fig. 1). Not surprisingly, this mysterious transfer has distracted attention from the virtues — indeed almost from the very existence — of the nave of the church. Only John Newman, in what is still the most incisive analysis of the whole building, gave proper weight to the nave’s elegant enrichment and noble proportions. There can be little doubt that the nave, which was built sequentially to the choir in the 1260s, belongs to the same Westminster milieu; but whereas the choir seems to depend solely on the abbey church, the nave reflects a much wider range of inspiration, from the hinterland of Westminster’s own sources, namely the architecture of southern England in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Most importantly, the nave stands in self-conscious contrast to the choir, a contrast which offers important clues to its unnoticed significance. Despite the choir’s élan, it is the nave which ensures Stone’s place of honour in the history of English Gothic architecture.

The Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey is one of the best-known buildings in the country, but, except for the construction of its vault, it has been surprisingly little studied. Few have recognized that it retains, alongside King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, one of the most complete pre-Reformation interiors of any church in England. This survival is due not to good fortune but to the use of the chapel for the first three centuries of its existence as a royal mausoleum and, from 1725, as the spiritual home of the revived order of the Bath. These noble connexions have proved of enduring benefit.

The large sculpture of the crucifixion created at Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire, for Sir Thomas Tresham is a remarkable survival (Fig. 1). Sir Thomas was a highly controversial personality of the Elizabethan age, notorious as a leading Catholic dissenter against the Protestant religious settlement. Rushton Hall in Northamptonshire was his ancestral country seat. Religious imagery from the Elizabethan period is rare, but it is quite exceptional to find a surviving religious sculpture made for an English Catholic.

The Survey of London has recently turned its attention to the Charterhouse, that extraordinary combination of medieval priory, Renaissance mansion and Jacobean almshouse and school on the northern fringe of the City. The results of the Survey’s research are due for publication shortly; here there is only space to dwell on a few of the discoveries which have been made, most of them concerning the sculptor John Colt and his role in the refurbishment of the chapel, on Laudian principles, in the mid-1630s. John Newman’s work on Laud’s impact on architecture and interiors is well-known, and we hope this will be a fitting contribution to his celebratory volume.

In 1975 the tercentenary of the start of work on the reconstruction of St Paul’s Cathedral was commemorated in its crypt by an exhibition illustrating the design, the structure and the subsequent repair of the building. ‘Resurgam’ not only seemed a very apt name for a display showing how St Paul’s had risen again out of the devastation of the Great Fire but was of course also that ‘single Word in large Capitals’ on the ‘Piece of a Grave-stone’ with which, according to Parentalia, Wren had set out the centre of the dome ‘at the Beginning of the new Work’. Parentalia goes on to say that ‘the first Stone of this Basilica was laid in the Year 1675’, implying that, as might be expected, the two events occurred fairly close together. But when the material for the exhibition was being prepared, it was thought wiser to check this.

During a recent search through the Portland papers at Nottingham University for a project completely unconnected with John James, an item in the catalogue caught my eye. It was a letter written by John James which provides information on a previously unknown example of his work at the parish church of Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire. This church on a very modest scale was designed by James to replace the badly damaged earlier church and built from about 1712 to 1714.

During the eighteenth century few medieval parish churches entirely escaped modernization of some kind, despite John Evelyn’s warning concerning ‘pulling down and patching up’ old fabrics ‘where there are great Dilapidations’ and where the architect ‘might have built entirely new from the Ground, with the same, and oftentimes with less Charge, but with abundance more Beauty and Conveniency.’ Evelyn expressed this belief in a striking analogy: ‘I have very rarely, or as seldom found a new Building joined with any tolerable Decency or Advantage to an old one, as a young and beautiful Virgin to an old, decayed and doting Husband.’

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.

In this modest contribution to a very welcome festschrift for John Newman, I should like to draw attention to a small building in the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset, a place better known for its celebrated ‘martyrs’ story than for anything of great architectural interest. Quite understandably, there is no mention of the structure in the current edition of the Dorset Pevsner, whereas in the Royal Commission’s work on the county it is incorrectly cited as a late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century barn. Yet in terms of its ‘significance’, one could scarcely point to a building more resonant of the struggles of the common man at an especially formative stage in British history. Proof positive has recently been uncovered to show that this was in fact a Wesleyan Methodist chapel, purposely built in 1818, in which several of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ not only worshipped but also served as accredited preachers. Methodism was at the heart of these mens’ religious and social beliefs, with their simple vernacular chapel the focus of daily life. On these grounds alone it is a building worthy of our utmost respect and fuller appreciation (Fig. 1).

In his life of Ronald Knox Evelyn Waugh wrote that, when Knox went up to Balliol in 1906, the chapel ‘was stark new in its disastrous deformation of Butterfield’s original structure.’ Waugh’s date was wrong by thirty years, but the story of the ‘deformation’ is a complex one.

The original fourteenth-century chapel had been replaced with a new one in about 1522–36. Its most remarkable feature was its stained glass. It was refurnished in the 1630s, with panelling, a screen, two painted windows by Abraham van Linge, a wooden pulpit and a brass lectern. In 1685–89 new wainscoting, a ceiling with painted beams, and a black-and-white marble floor were provided. A. W. N. Pugin’s scheme of 1843 for rebuilding the college included a new chapel. The scheme came to nothing, chiefly because of the opposition of the Master, Richard Jenkyns.

Today the Queen’s Chapel at St James’s Palace is cherished as perhaps the most intact of all Inigo Jones’s works, and one which, in the words of John Harris, ‘expresses more of the quintessential Jones than any other surviving building.’ Yet its status was long uncertain, and its importance was established beyond doubt only during the scholarly restoration begun in 1937. Few archaeologically informed restorations of English classical buildings had then been carried out, and the Office of Works had to tread carefully around the sensibilities of the Royal Household to get its own way in the matter. Work on the chapel was finished in 1951, since when its strange eclipse from notice has been generally forgotten.

The tribulations suffered by the aging Sir John Denham following his second marriage in 1665 to the young and beautiful Lady Mary Brooke were the subject of scandalized gossip amongst his contemporaries. Little is known about his first wife Anne Cotton of Whittington, Gloucestershire, whom he married in 1634 when he was only 19. Denham benefited considerably from this marriage for, with her sister Appolina, Anne was heir to the estates of a prosperous Gloucestershire gentry family that included the manor of Horsenden, Buckinghamshire, as well as the manor of Whittington and the estate of Gubshill, near Tewkesbury. At a division of the estates between the sisters, Horsenden was assigned to Anne and Whittington to Appolina, but, at some point in or soon after 1642, Anne also inherited Whittington, together with its manor house now known as Whittington Court.

Westwood House (Fig. 1) is a prodigy among the prodigy houses of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, in its different way as innovative and almost as remarkable as Wollaton, of whose site its commanding hilltop, two miles north-west of Droitwich in Worcestershire, is strongly reminiscent. Yet it has received comparatively little attention from historians and is correspondingly little known. This is evidently in part due to a persistent misdating and misinterpretation of its building, almost every subsequent writer having accepted unquestioned the authority of T. R. Nash in his Collections for the History of Worcestershire, published in 1781–82. Nash states unequivocally that

Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire was begun in the early 1660s, roofed and richly decorated in the 1670s and its interior further adorned in the 1690s. Yet the Jacobean characteristics of its plan and façades have led to suggestions that its structure was built much earlier in the seventeenth century (Figs 2 and 3).

Its creation was the life work of one man, George Vernon (1636–1702), who inherited Vernon estates in Derbyshire, Staffordshire and Cheshire upon the death of his father in February 1659. Sudbury was the most extensive of these. George Vernon had not, however, been brought up there. Upon their marriage in 1635, his parents had established themselves on his mother’s ancestral estate of Haslington in Cheshire. His mother was an heiress, the sole surviving child of a judge, Sir George Vernon, who died in 1639. George’s father did not inherit Sudbury until June 1657. George and his younger siblings were born at Haslington Hall, which remained the family’s home throughout the civil wars and commonwealth years, and was in due course part of George’s inheritance.

Under ‘Hazlegrove House’, Pevsner’s South and West Somerset (1958) draws attention to ‘the gateway from Sparkford’, which, ‘with its segmental arch, its broad pilasters and rudimentary Ionic capitals . . . is evidently earlier [than the Georgian house] . . . c. 1690’. As he goes on to explain, it was brought in 1872 from Low Ham, where the second Lord Stawell had begun to build what, according to John Macky’s Journey through England of 1737, was destined to be ‘the biggest and most regular house in the County of Somerset’.

Radley Hall in Oxfordshire is a fine baroque country seat. The contract for building the house was made between John Stonehouse of Radley and William Townesend and Bartholomew Peisley of Oxford and is dated 28 June 1721. One would look therefore for a characteristic baroque plan. The anomaly was to find a late-eighteenth-century plan inside a baroque envelope.

At Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire there survives the ‘House Account’ Book, kept between March 1862 and November 1895. In it are recorded for every day of the year the number taking meals in the house (divided between ‘parlour’, ‘Nursery’ and ‘Hall’), the food ordered in for their consumption (almost all off the estate) and the arrival and departure of all visitors — and some servants. This fascinating social document also provides the bare bones of a story of architectural patronage.

Estate maps can tell us many things about a house in a certain period. Although rare, pairs of estate maps can tell us even more. Perhaps the best-known examples are Ralph Treswell’s two maps of Sir Christopher Hatton’s Holdenby, dated 1580 and 1587. Although the house was largely completed by 1580, the courts and gardens were not; so the second map shows how the areas around the house were developed. The main purpose of the second map, however, was to record the creation of the new hunting park, celebrated in a joyous rendering of deer, rabbits and jaunty hunters with their falcons. While maps of parks were primarily executed in order to establish their legal boundaries, they can also be useful to architectural historians, for some include images of very important buildings (like Holdenby). John Thorpe’s view of Theobalds in 1611, often reproduced in connexion with that important house, is only a detail in a much larger map of Cheshunt Park.