2015_ArchHist-Dec

The 

ARCHITECTURAL 

HISTORIAN 

Issue 2, Dec 2015 / Jan 2016 

ISSN 2056–9181 

IN OUR SECOND ISSUE: ‘Capability’ Brown at Compton Verney | Mrs Coade’s Stone: Fact and Fiction | SAHGB 

Conference Special Report | Exhibitions | A Week in the Life… | Book Reviews

The 

ARCHITECTURAL 

HISTORIAN 

Issue 2, December 2015 

Message from 

the Editor… 

Editorial Team 

Magazine Editor 

Kay Carson 

magazine@sahgb.org.uk 

Book Reviews Editor 

Cat Gray 

reviewseditor@sahgb.org.uk 

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SAHGB 

The Society of 

Architectural 

Historians of 

Great Britain 

Hello and welcome once again to The Architectural Historian. First of all, I would like 

to say a heartfelt thank you for all the kind words we have received in praise of our 

new publication. In this second issue, we have an outstanding selection of features 

which is sure to appeal to the many varieties of architectural historian we have in our 

learned society. In addition to two excellent articles, we bring you a special report from 

the SAHGB Conference and the latest research adventures of education officer Julian 

Holder, together with our regular ‘A Week in the Life...’ and ‘Classic Book Review’ 

articles. The substantial Book Reviews section begins with an appraisal of George 

Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America. The book’s author, 

Michael Hall, was awarded the SAHGB’s Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion for 2015. 

Don’t forget to enter our mystery photo competition on Page 12 – you could win a 

National Book Token for £20. 

Your feedback is always very much appreciated, so please do keep in touch. 

Happy reading, 

Kay 

Kay Carson, Editor 

The Architectural Historian would like to thank the following contributors: 

Bruce Bailey 

Alex Bremner 

Ian Campbell 

Nicholas Cooper 

Alistair Fair 

Lucy Gent 

Anthony Geraghty 

Elain Harwood 

Julian Holder 

Anna Keay 

Cover image Adam Bridge in autumn © Sally Crane Photography 

Jonathan Kewley 

Peter Ledger 

Jeremy Musson 

Steven Parissien 

Caroline Stanford 

For further information about the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain including details 

on how to become a member, please visit our website at www.sahgb.org.uk. More from our new 

magazine can be found at www.thearchitecturalhistorian.org.uk. 

2 The Architectural Historian Issue Two / December 2015 /January 2016

Contents 

p. 4 

p. 10 

p. 14 

p.18 

p. 20 

Features 

4 Cover Story 

‘Capability’ Brown at Compton Verney 

by Steven Parissien 

10 SAHGB Conference 2015 special report 

by Peter Ledger 

14 Mrs Coade’s stone: fact and fiction 

by Caroline Stanford 

18 Remembering Keith Ingham 

by Julian Holder 

24 John Foulon: an unknown architect 

by Bruce Bailey 

Society News 

12 Letter from the SAHGB’s new Chairman 

by Anthony Geraghty 

22 Vote of thanks 

by Jonathan Kewley 

24 Hawksmoor Essay Medal 2015 winner 

The Architectural Historian meets Edward Gillin 

Regulars 

12 Competition 

Win a £20 book token by solving our Mystery Photo Puzzle 

13 Classic Book Review 

Reyner Banham’s 1966 publication The New Brutalism 

revisited by Elain Harwood 

20 Exhibition 

Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the Unexpected 

Review by Kay Carson 

23 A Week in the Life … 

. . . of Anna Keay, director of the Landmark Trust 

Book Reviews 

25 George Frederick Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain and America by Michael 

Hall 

Review by Alex Bremner 

27 Nathaniel Clements, 1705–77: Politics, Fashion and Architecture in 

Mid-Eighteenth-Century Ireland by A. P. W. Malcomson 

Review by Jeremy Musson 

29 Architecture Since 1400 by Kathleen James-Chakraborty 

Review by Alistair Fair 

30 Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World of Elizabethan Art by Elizabeth Goldring 

Review by Lucy Gent 

32 The Noble Houses of Scotland 1660–1800 by Charles Wemyss 

Review by Ian Campbell 

The Architectural Historian Issue Two / December 2015 /January 2016 3

COVER STORY 

As 2016 marks the 300th anniversary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, 

Dr STEVEN PARISSIEN guides us through the landscape architect’s 

legacy at the Warwickshire-based national museum and gallery 

‘Capability’ Brown at 

Compton Verney 


In the 1760s and 70s Compton Verney in Warwickshire was transformed by two of Britain’s most gifted 

innovators: the architect Robert Adam, who leapt to almost overnight celebrity at the accession of King 

George III in 1760, and the nation’s premier landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. The latter, 

now at the height of his fame, was afforded the autonomy to create what was possibly his first ‘minimalist’ 

landscape, in which garden buildings and tree cover were kept to a minimum and more emphasis was placed on 

providing a forum for leisure activities such as shooting and riding – and, significantly, on fashioning a distinctly 

‘English’ setting for these pastimes. The resulting landscape is today being restored and re-interpreted by the 

national museum and gallery which now occupies the site; thus Brown’s masterly vision will be reborn in time 

for the tercentenary celebrations of Brown’s birth in 2016. 


previous page © Compton Verney, photograph by 

Stuart Thomas 

above © Compton Verney, photograph by Stuart 

Thomas 

below West Lawn at Compton Verney © Compton 

Verney 

The main house at Compton Verney had 

already been rebuilt in a Baroque idiom – 

probably by the Oxford master-mason John 

Townesend (1678–1742) – at the behest of 

George Verney, 12th Baron Willoughby de 

Broke, after 1711. Verney also created a new, 

French-style garden round the house, 

dominated by a chain of five ponds, formal, 

geometric parterres and, south of the lake, an 

area of plantations crossed by straight 

avenues. Most of this, though, was to be 

swept away by Brown. 

Barely fifty years after the 12th Baron’s work, 

George’s great-nephew, John Peyto Verney 

(1741–1816), succeeded to both the title of 

14th Baron and the prosperous Chesterton 

estate, which raised the family’s income to a 

handsome £4,000 a year. John’s wealth and 

ambition – furthered by his marriage in 1761 

to the sister of the courtier and future Prime 

Minister, Lord North (who lived at nearby 

Wroxton Abbey in Oxfordshire), and artfully 

captured by Johann Zoffany in his famous 

painting of John and his family, now at the J 

Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles – clearly 

encouraged the 14th Baron to indulge in the 

grand projet of wholly recasting both house 

and grounds in a more modish guise. 

For the house, John commissioned the 

prominent Scottish neoclassical architect 

Robert Adam, whose astonishingly rapid rise 

had made him the most fashionable architect 

in the country, to make major alterations. 

Adam’s proposed scheme involved 

demolishing much of the Baroque house of 

1711; in the event, however, financial 

constraints meant that he had to content 

himself with inserting a new, larger hall and 

saloon on the ground floor, creating a new 

attic storey, and adding a portico to the west 

side of the courtyard, which he now opened 

up by demolishing the old east range. Adam 

seems in turn to have introduced Lancelot 

Brown to the Verneys in 1768, as in November 

of that year Brown commenced work at 

Compton Verney. 

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown was born in 1716 

in the Northumbrian hamlet of Kirkharle to a 

family of yeoman-farmers. The local 

landowner, Sir William Loraine, granted him 

his first gardening job at Kirkharle Hall in 1732 

and, by the time Brown was 25, Viscount 

Cobham had promoted him to the position 

of Head Gardener at Stowe in 


Exterior of the Chapel © Compton Verney, photograph by Stuart Thomas 

Buckinghamshire. Thereafter, Brown secured 

a number of lucrative commissions 

throughout Britain and, in particular, across 

the South Midlands, from sites ranging from 

Croome Court to Compton Verney. By 1768 

he was at the height of his fame: four years 

earlier he had been appointed Royal 

Gardener to King George III, and had 

simultaneously been commissioned to 

execute several large and illustrious 

commissions, including Blenheim Palace in 

Oxfordshire and Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire. 

Brown’s towering reputation meant that he 

was now free to refine his radical new vision 

and to depart from accepted norms in 

landscape design. Thus at Compton Verney 

Brown eliminated all trace of the existing 

formal gardens and replaced them with 

undulating grassland and trees, and planted 

the approaches to the lakes – which 

themselves were sharply-defined by crisplycut 

banks (the picturesque reed beds are a 

Victorian innovation) – to mask the views of 

the lakes and house. To further improve the 

latter, the medieval chapel at the north edge 

of the old ponds was ruthlessly swept away. 

Brown evidently objected to the building’s 

location, but not to its contents: his simple, 

Palladian-style chapel, located to the rear of 

the house and built in 1776–79, included the 

splendid Nicholas Stone double tomb of 

c. 1631 and most of the major wall and floor 

memorials from the old Chapel, along with 

much of the old building’s late-medieval 

glass. This was in turn enhanced with panels 

of German Renaissance stained glass 


View from the Portico © Compton Verney, photograph by Stuart Thomas 

assembled by an antique dealer whom Lord 

North has already employed for a similar 

purpose at Wroxton. The magnificent tomb 

and the wall-mounted monuments are still 

there; tragically, though, not long after the 

chapel’s interior had been recorded by 

Country Life in 1913, its splendid stained glass 

was sold by the 2nd Lord Manton in 1931 in 

an act of breathtaking architectural 

vandalism. (As part of its Heritage Lottery 

Fund-supported project, Compton Verney is 

currently restoring the historic stained-glass 

window tympanums that still survive and is 

replacing Manton’s cynical bathroom-glass 

windows with contextually-appropriate 

heritage glass.) 

With the old chapel demolished, a new south 

drive – created by altering an early 

eighteenth-century formal avenue into a 

serpentine route – now revealed the house 

to visitors from the bridge. To the west, the 

Kineton-Stratford road was moved to enable 

a ha-ha to be introduced west of the house, 

which in turn allowed views from the house 

to the south and west to be opened up. The 

ponds themselves were turned into a single 

expanse of water by removing the dam 

between the Upper Long Pool and the 

Middle Pool and creating a new Upper 

Bridge. It is not known definitively whether 

Adam or Brown provided the designs for the 

two bridges, both of which were begun in 

1770: the Upper Bridge with its four lead 

sphinxes (re-moulded in 1980s after having 

being used for target practice by the Pioneer 

Corps during the Second World War) has 

been stylistically attributed to Robert Adam; 

but the design could equally have been 

Brown’s, or a construction by Brown to 

Adam’s design. 

Brown certainly designed the Ice House, built 

in 1772 and thatched (by one William Harris 

for 15s 2d) in the same straw subsequently 

used to layer and insulate the ice inside. In 

1769, too, payments were recorded for 

‘digging the foundations and supplying 

Warwick sandstone’ for a classical 

greenhouse with Doric columns, sited 

beyond the chapel to the north-west of the 

house. An unbuilt, undated ‘Greenhouse’ 

design by Brown has been found in the 

archives of Ashburnham Place, and was 

indeed probably used for Compton Verney. 

(Brown’s greenhouse was, disappointingly, 

demolished by the site’s absentee owner 

some time after 1945.) The shrubbery 

surrounding the Ice House had, before 

Brown arrived, featured geometric walks, but 

Brown now replaced these with curvilinear 

paths, large-scale tree planting 

(pragmatically designed to shelter the Ice 

House from the sun) and serpentine belts. 

Brown’s original footpaths in this coppice 

were reintroduced by the Compton Verney 

House Trust in 2008, using a historicallyappropriate 

paving mix. 

‘Capability’ Brown’s later landscapes, such as 

that at Compton Verney, were typically 

simple, uncluttered and restrained, generally 

comprising sweeping pasture bordered with 

tree clumps, perimeter shelter-belts and 

screens of trees. He had certainly swept away 

the formal parterres and the classicallyinspired 

allusions of the previous age; but he 

had also planted thousands of trees – 

predominantly oaks, ash and elms. The 

resultant landscape designed to impart a 

visible sense of ‘Englishness’. Brown chose to 

use native rather than foreign, imported 

plants at a time when, following the military 

successes and colonial gains of the Seven 


Years War, the nation’s economic and 

political self-confidence was burgeoning and 

a sense of national identity was clearly 

emerging – buoyed by cultural 

manifestations ranging from Arne’s Rule 

Britannia, the cult of King Alfred, Hogarth’s 

nationalistic paintings and prints and 

Handel’s English-language oratorios to 

Gainsborough’s very English landscape views 

and Brown’s patriotic parks. 

Brown’s new landscape at Compton Verney 

was explicitly designed both for viewing – 

presenting a sequence of pictures that 

darted into view from a speeding carriage, 

horseback or a drifting boat – and, in 

addition, for shooting and fishing. His lakes 

could be used for fishing and boating, while 

his carefully-planted belts and copses 

provided cover for game birds. As the 

century had progressed, guns had become 

lighter and consequently more accurate, 

with barrel length decreasing rapidly. And 

barely had work started on the park at 

Compton Verney than the sport of shooting 

received a major fillip with the 1770 

publication of The Art of Shooting Flying. 

Pheasants, Brown recognised, preferred to 

roost within the copses and clumps of a 

landscape park and flew high, providing 

gentlemen with a moving target. Thus 

landowners such as the 14th Lord Willoughby 

de Broke were soon releasing large numbers 

of birds onto their estates for the express 

purpose of shooting them down again. 

By the time of his death in 1816, John Verney 

– piously revered by his Victorian 

descendants as ‘the good Lord Willoughby’ – 

had presided over the complete 

transformation of the park at Compton 

Verney. In the years following his demise 

there were minor alterations to the building 

and estate, the most significant being the 

introduction of an impressive of Wellingtonia 

(sequoias or redwoods imported from 

America), around 1860. However, along with 

the countless landed estates across Britain 

dependent on agricultural rent for their 

principal income, Compton Verney suffered 

in the agricultural depression of the 1870s 

and 1880s. The house was, as a result, let out 

from 1887 and the Verneys were forced to sell 

the estate in 1921 – after which the park grew 

increasingly neglected. Since 1993, however, 

both house and park has belonged to the 

Compton Verney House Trust, which have 

restored the mansion as a major art gallery 

and is currently restoring and re-interpreting 

Brown’s landscape. From March 2016, visitors 

will once more be able to properly 

appreciate the astonishingly imaginative 

landscape that ‘Capability’ Brown fashioned 

in the heart of South Warwickshire two-anda-half 

centuries ago. 

Dr Steven Parissien is Director of Compton 

Verney museum and gallery in Warwickshire. 

Steven has written extensively on 

architectural and cultural history. His 12 

books to date include Adam Style (Phaidon, 

1992; Apollo magazine’s Book of the Year for 

1992 and The American Institute of 

Architects’ Book of the Year Choice for 1993), 

Interior of the Chapel © Compton Verney, photograph by Lyndsay Buchanan 

George IV: The Grand Entertainment (John 

Murray, 2001), Interiors: The Home Since 1700 

(Laurence King, 2008), The Life of the 

Automobile (Atlantic, 2013), English Railway 

Stations (English Heritage, 2014) and The 

Comfort of the Past: Building Oxford and 

Beyond 1815–2015 (2015). 

Steven is a Visiting Fellow of Kellogg College, 

Oxford, and Warwick University. 


CONFERENCE 2015 SPECIAL 

A varied feast to suit 

all tastes 

Peter Ledger provides an insight into the Society’s Conference at Gloucester 

and Cheltenham 

Holy Innocents, Highnam (1849–51, Henry Woodyer) 

Contrasting fare followed on Day 2, ‘Country 

House Grandeur’, with another rich feast. 

Rodmarton Manor (1909–29, Ernest and 

Sidney Barnsley and Norman Jewson) picked 

up a theme of the Arts and Crafts preconference 

tour, which focused on a trio of 

young architects who had moved to the 

Cotswolds in the late nineteenth century: 

Ernest Gimson and the Barnsley brothers. In a 

sense it is an architectural oxymoron, a large 

country house, its front elevation c. 75 m long, 

but built in the cottage style so favoured by 

the Arts and Crafts movement. The house 

and its contents, however, are a shrine to the 

ideals of the Arts and Crafts, the house 

crammed with furniture commissioned from 

the Barnsleys and Peter Waals, with 

metalwork made on the estate and murals 

and appliqué wall hangings and curtains 

made in the local village by the Rodmarton 

Women’s Guild. 

‘The dogs bark and the caravan moves on …’ 

Upton House (1752 William Halfpenny, the 

north extension 2005–06, Craig Hamilton), 

floating gracefully on its green lawns, 

contrived to simultaneously satisfy the 

interests of both the Georgians and the 

twentieth-century enthusiasts. Now that’s an 

organizational achievement. 

On, on … quaint Chavenage House (1464?, 

sixteenth century, seventeenth century and 

Quality, contrasts and variety – that’s 

what SAHGB members expect of 

the annual conference. Take the 

recent conference venues: 

Edinburgh 2012, Northampton 2013 and the 

Isle of Man in 2014. The contrast could not 

have been greater. 2015 found us in north 

Gloucestershire, enjoying two great 

townscapes, Gloucester and Cheltenham. 

Throw in four carefully chosen preconference 

tours and we immediately knew 

that the conference would be exceptional. 

However, it takes knowledge and 

discernment to assemble a series of 

itineraries that will satisfy a demanding 

group of architectural historians, each with 

his or her special interest. A memorable feast 

succeeds only if the constituent parts are 

carefully chosen to ensure variety, interest 

and quality. 

By way of example, the first day devoted to 

the city of Gloucester had a heavy focus on 

church architecture: St Barnabas, Tuffley 

(1938–40, Nugent Cachemaille-Day) with its 

concrete frame and airy interior, was 

immediately followed by the thirteenthcentury 

ruins of Blackfriars, the best 

preserved Dominican house in England with 

its great scissor-brace roofs sensitively 

restored by English Heritage. Then on to the 

majesty of the Cathedral, the contrasts of its 

pre-Reformation styles a testament to the 

daring of the anonymous masons and 

architects whose vision created one of the 

great buildings of England. A brief excursion 

out of the city took us to a Victorian gem, 

Holy Innocents, Highnam (1849–51, Henry 

Woodyer) with its extraordinary scheme of 

wall paintings, executed by Woodyer’s 

patron, Thomas Gambier Parry. The 

architectural time machine devised by the 

organizers then took us back to Anglo-Saxon 

England at Deerhurst – St Mary’s church and 

its little sister, Odda’s Chapel. By now the 

church architecture buffs were at risk of 

indigestion, but on the way the interests of 

the medievalists, the ‘Victorians’ and the 

twentieth-century aficionados had all been 

satisfied. 

St Mary’s, Deerhurst, C9 beast’s head label-stop 


Edwardian), the location for the TV series 

Poldark (curious this, as Poldark is set in 

Cornwall), High Victorian gloomy splendour 

at Westonbirt (1864–72, Lewis Vulliamy) 

finishing on the Cotswold escarpment at 

Newark Park, a hunting lodge built 1544–56 

but modified over the next three hundred 

years and eventually saved by the Texan 

architectural enthusiast and Anglophile, 

Robert Parsons, who from 1970 devoted his 

life to restoring the building. 

The final day devoted to ‘Cheltenham: 

pleasure town’ brought together themes 

developed throughout the conference 

including the four imaginative preconference 

tours: ‘Bodley in the Stroud 

Valleys’; ‘Arts & Crafts: homes and hospitality’; 

‘Mills, Money and Modernity’, which focused 

on the architecture around Wotton-under- 

Edge; ‘Emerging Classicism’, which 

successfully ranged from fifteenth century 

to twenty-first century. 

To take but one theme – Arts & Crafts. 

Christopher Whall’s stained glass fills the 

windows of the fifteenth-century Lady 

Chapel at the east end of Gloucester 

Cathedral while Henry Wilson’s exquisite 

memorial to Canon Douglas Tinling is found 

in the north aisle. Cheltenham’s Masonic Hall 

(1820–03, George Underwood), one of the 

earliest in the provinces, has fire surrounds of 

Arts & Crafts glazed tiles. The identical tiles 

were displayed in Cheltenham’s prizewinning 

museum, The Wilson (2013 

extension, BGS) and revealed to be by 

William De Morgan. The Wilson’s 

internationally renowned Arts & Crafts 

collection contains fine examples of the work 

of Ernest and Sidney Barnsley. Best of all, the 

museum’s display reinforced the impression 

that skilled craftsmen are still working in the 

region and being supported by prescient 

patrons. For example, the visit to Gloucester 

Cathedral allowed us to see the series of 

windows made by Tom Denny over the past 

twenty years. Such is the proliferation of his 

work in the area it would have been possible 

to organize a tour looking at nothing else. 

Is there an architectural society anywhere 

that can serve up such a varied feast? 

However, these events don’t just happen. 

Two years in the planning, Alec and Susan 

Hamilton together with Charles Keighley 

assembled a conference of the highest 

quality. The two sets of Notes in themselves 

are works of scholarship, invaluable 

references for those fortunate enough to 

attend the four days. The bar was further 

raised by the quality of speakers throughout 

the conference. To mention just three: Elain 

Harwood preaching to the converted from 

top left Gloucester Cathedral, memorial to Canon Douglas Tinling (Henry Wilson) 

top right Elain Harwood at St Barnabas, Tuffley (1938–40, Nugent Cachemaille-Day) 

bottom Upton House (1752 William Halfpenny, the north extension 2005–06, Craig Hamilton) 

the pulpit at St Barnabas, Tuffley (“this is fun” 

she was heard to say), Professor Christopher 

Wilson’s brilliant paper “The south transept 

of Gloucester cathedral and the beginnings 

of perpendicular architecture” and the 

architect of The Wilson extension, Gary 

Collins, describing how his practice set about 

its remit. Future conference organisers please 

note. 

If you couldn’t make the conference, hurry 

down to north Gloucestershire. This brief 

article can only give a flavour of the quality 

and variety of the architecture to be found 

there. Such is the rich choice available Alec, 

Susan and Charles must have agonized over 

what they had to omit. Despite this the 

itineraries they devised delivered a 

fascinating series of visits that combined 

buildings of the highest quality with the 

variety expected by a demanding audience. 

The Society owes them a debt of 

gratitude 


Letter from the New 

Chairman … 

It’s a great pleasure to be taking over as 

Chairman of the SAHGB. 

I can’t quite remember when I joined the 

Society, but I do know that my run of 

Architectural History now extends to two 

shelves. My association with the Society, 

then, has been a long one. It has also been a 

very happy one, and I owe the Society a great 

deal. It was in Architectural History that I first 

published my research on seventeenthcentury 

British architecture, and it was 

through the Society’s activities and events 

that I first encountered the wider community 

of architectural historians—not least on the 

back seat of the bus at the annual 

Conference. Last year I was privileged to 

receive the Alice Davies Hitchcock Medallion, 

and in my acceptance speech I was able to 

thank the Society for the support and 

encouragement it has given me over the 

years. 

What I admire most about the SAHGB is the 

diversity of its membership. We are drawn 

from all walks of life. Some of us work in 

heritage and conservation. Some of us work 

in universities. Some of us work in 

completely different fields. Some of us don’t 

work at all. But what binds us all together is 

our passionate interest in the history of 

architecture. This diversity enriches us all, 

and it is what makes the SAHGB something 

very special. 

This is an exciting time for the Society. Our 

website is looking more beautiful than ever. 

We have recently launched the magazine 

that you hold in your hands, The Architectural 

Historian. Our commitment to supporting 

PhD research is now a firmly established part 

of what we do. And our many splendid 

events are more popular than ever. None of 

this would have happened without the 

tireless service of the committee and the 

wider support of the membership. 

This is also a significant moment for our 

journal, Architectural History. After decades of 

loyal service, our publisher, Graham Maney of 

Outset Services Limited, is taking well-earned 

retirement, and from 2016 the journal will be 

published by Cambridge University Press. 

This is an exciting development for the 

Society, and one which will significantly raise 

the profile of our journal. So I would like to 

take this opportunity to encourage each and 

every member of the Society to do two 

things. First of all, send us your work. 

Secondly, encourage the wider society of 

architectural historians to do likewise. 

I very much look forward to chairing the 

committee, and I greatly look forward to 

seeing as many of you as possible at our 

activities and events in the years ahead. 

Anthony Geraghty 

The University of York 

Win a £20 book token by 

solving our photo puzzle 

Do you recognise the building pictured on the 

right? If so, you could be in with a chance to 

win a National Book Token for £20. All you 

have to do is correctly identify the building in 

the photograph. Please send your answer, 

along with your name, address and email or 

telephone contact details to The Architectural 

Historian at magazine@sahgb.org.uk with the 

phrase ‘PHOTO COMPETITION’ in the email 

subject box. The competition deadline is 30 

April 2016 and the first correct answer drawn 

after the closing date will be awarded the 

prize of a £20 book token. The competition is 

free to enter. Good luck! 

Did you recognise the building in Issue 1? It 

was the Schools Quadrangle, or Old Library, 

at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. 

Winner of the Issue 1 competition was 

Marian Miller, who receives a £20 National 

Book Token. For full competition rules, please see page 2 

A few more (faintly flickering) Lamps 

of Architecture, No. 1 

Said Inigo Jones “I am keen, 

On designing a house for the Queen, 

To build that good lady an 

Outright Palladian 

Villa, like nothing yet seen.” 

Nicholas Cooper 

Letters to 

the Editor 

The Architectural Historian would like to hear 

from members. Send letters to the Editor at 

magazine@sahgb.org.uk. Please keep 

correspondence brief. The Editor reserves the 

right to cut longer letters as necessary. Please 

include name, address, email address and 

telephone number (please indicate clearly 

whether or not you wish your contact details 

to be published) 


The New Brutalism © Architectural 

Press, 1966 

CLASSIC BOOK REVIEW 

Looking back at an 

emerging style 

Elain Harwood revisits Reyner Banham’s The New Brutalism, Ethic or Aesthetic? published by 

the Architectural Press in 1966 

Reyner Banham had just started 

teaching at the Bartlett School 

of Architecture in 1963 when he was 

invited to write a book on the New 

Brutalism. He tested the subject on his 

students and found they needed an 

‘historical explanation’ of the movement, yet 

he added few arguments to those already 

made in a potent five-page article published 

in the Architectural Review in December 1955. 

The Brutalist generation was the first whose 

training included the serious study of past 

buildings, just as the subject was taking 

shape among historians themselves. It is one 

feature by which their work can be 

distinguished, for the buildings followed 

similar briefs and budgets to those by 

architects with no connection to the style. 

Banham was Pevsner’s PhD student in the 

1950s, and the Architectural Review article 

followed the latter’s Reith Lectures on the 

Englishness of English Art. 

Quite what is meant by ‘New Brutalism’ is a 

source of eternal fascination. It relates to 

Jean Dubuffet’s Art Brut and Michel Tapié’s 

Un Art Autre, published in 1952, as well as to 

musique concrète which had parallels in the 

found images selected in 1953 by Nigel 

Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and 

Peter Smithson for an ICA exhibition, A 

Parallel of Life and Art. The Smithsons’ claim 

that the term came from an article on Le 

Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation in The Times 

seems more convincing than Banham’s 

suggestion (via Eric de Maré) of Hans 

Asplund, who used it in 1950 to describe a 

house by fellow-Swedes as a counter to the 

country’s empiricist style. Others suggested 

that it was based on Peter Smithson’s 

student nickname of Brutus. 

The important thing was that the New 

Brutalism was a counter to the neo-humanist 

or Scandinavian-inspired architecture then in 

vogue; the ‘New’ is important. Banham 

stressed the divisions at the London County 

Council between those architects who 

positioned themselves as successors to the 

socialism of William Morris and the gentle 

modernism of the Swedish welfare state, and 

those like Colin St John Wilson who sought 

tougher meat. Wilson, who organised a 

debate in a public house near County Hall, 

was also Banham’s friend and neighbour so, 

as he confesses, the book is steeped in a 

personal history with many resulting insights 

and factual inaccuracies. The links between 

traditional styles and the Far Left broke down 

following Stalin’s death in 1953. 

In the crucial years 1952–55, Brutalism can 

stand almost entirely for the work of the 

Smithsons. Their earlier Hunstanton School 

(designed in 1950) and entry to the Coventry 

Cathedral competition (1951) show a 

formalism indebted to Rudolf Wittkower’s 

Architectural Principles in the Age of 

Humanism that broke down as Brutalism 

took hold. Their competition entry for 

Golden Lane in 1952 began their exploration 

of streets in the sky with an ‘X’-shaped slab, 

while in that for Sheffield University a year 

later the external deck dominated a series of 

bold blocks whose shapes were determined 

by the irregularity of their many functions. 

What Banham was not to know, even in 1963, 

was that this was to be the Smithsons’ most 

ambitious concept, and that it was on the 

routes through and between buildings that 

their most significant later work focussed, 

including their scheme for the Berlin 

Hauptstadt competition (1959), Economist 

cluster (opened in 1963) and Robin Hood 

Gardens (1972). 

In The New Brutalism, what is missing is as 

important as what is there. Where the book 

scores is in its enjoyment of foreign 

architecture, while Banham argues that 

although the style follows Le Corbusier’s 

post-war work, as a movement it is wholly 

British, and the first such since the Arts and 

Crafts. Again the most significant buildings 

combine architecture and circulation in a 

total environment, whether on a small scale 

in the work of Atelier 5, or writ large as at 

Kuno Mayekawa’s Harumi block in Tokyo or 

Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith’s Sheffield’s Park 

Hill. Banham concluded that the New 

Brutalism is over – that there is nothing 

Brutalist about the Smithsons’ suave 

Economist group and that in the end it was 

only an aesthetic. He worried at the 

movement’s ambivalence towards 

technology, and we already see the first 

stirrings of The Architecture of the Well- 

Tempered Environment, published in 1969. 

Yet Brutalism in its broader, modern sense 

was only just beginning. Banham 

acknowledged the emergence of a 

‘commercial vernacular’ with Owen Luder’s 

Eros House, Catford, and university buildings 

at Cambridge and Sussex, and the book’s 

publication in late 1966 was closely followed 

by the completion of London’s South Bank 

Centre and Luder’s labyrinthine Tricorn and 

Treaty Centres. Nikolaus Pevsner’s response, 

as a lover of functionalism in general and the 

work of Walter Gropius in particular – the 

victim of Banham’s greatest condemnation – 

threw it into an unintended limelight. 

Pevsner chose the wider interpretation of 

Brutalism, ‘concrete exposed in large chunky 

masses and left rough so as to avoid all 

conventional beauty of surface’ when 

attacking the style (but not the book) in The 

Guardian in December 1966. His assault on 

‘the Anti-Pioneers’ in two lectures that winter 

brought still greater publicity to the 

Brutalists. Thereafter, the term never went 

away: even Waterloo Bridge was considered 

brutalist when it was listed in 1981, and it 

enjoyed increasing publicity in the hands of 

Deyan Sudjic and especially Jonathan 

Glancey as proposals emerged in the 1990s 

for the remodelling of the Hayward Gallery. 

I await Barnabas Calder’s Raw Concrete, to be 

published in 2016, for a fully-rounded history 

of Brutalism to emerge at last. 

Book Reviews start on page 25 


FEATURE 

Mrs Coade’s stone: fact and fiction 

Caroline Stanford, Historian for the 

Landmark Trust, reveals the fascinating 

story behind the woman who fired the 

nation’s imagination with her artificial 

stone manufactory 

In September 2015, the Landmark Trust 

completed the rescue and restoration of 

Belmont in Lyme Regis. This pretty 

Grade II* Regency seaside villa has two 

famous former residents: John Fowles, 

author of the novel French Lieutenant’s 

Woman and much else of renown; and Mrs 

Eleanor Coade, eighteenth-century 

entrepreneur and purveyor of her 

eponymous artificial stone. The villa’s 

restoration has also allowed the spotlight to 

be trained anew on Mrs Coade’s life, and on 

her famous formulation and wares. 

Mrs Coade (or possibly her uncle Samuel 

Coade, who gave her the plot) built Belmont 

c. 1784. She turned its front elevation into a 

bravura display of the ceramic stone 

embellishments that were pouring from her 

Lambeth manufactory and transforming 

British architecture. The reliability and 

adaptability of Coade stone made it 

possible for architects to revel in classical 

ornamentation in a way that would have 

been entirely impractical in the natural 

stone it so effectively mimicked. Coade 

stone became widely used not because it 

was cheap, mass produced replication, 

but because it became acclaimed for its 

own technical and artistic merit. It was 

a key enabler to late Georgian 

architecture. 

Eleanor Coade is a unique figure in 

architectural history as a single woman 

managing a hugely successful artificial stone 

manufactory in Lambeth. ‘Mrs’ or Mistress 

was a courtesy title since she never married. 

Part of a large extended family active in the 

wool trade, she lived most of her early life in 

Exeter and then, from 1759, in London. From 

1784 until her death aged 89 in 1821, Mrs 

Coade owned Belmont as her seaside villa. 


above left Coade embellished doorways and frontages became ubiquitous in Georgian England. This keystone of Neptune is 

unique to Belmont, but typical of sculptor John Bacon’s heavy browed, brooding style 

above middle Belmont in Lyme Regis was Mrs Coade’s seaside villa, newly restored by the Landmark Trust. Its front 

elevation is a three-dimensional catalogue of her wares 

above right Graceful Coade stone caryatids were a favourite with Sir John Soane, who incorporated them in his designs both 

internal and external, as here at his home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields 

In 1769, Eleanor Coade and her mother (who 

bore the same name) went into business 

with one Daniel Pincot. Pincot ran a 

struggling artificial stone manufactory at 

King’s Arms Stairs, Narrow Walk in Lambeth. 

Crucially, the stone produced at this 

manufactory was a fired ceramic, rather than 

a cast formulation that acquired its hardness 

from chemical reaction with the air. It was 

soon Eleanor junior who was running the 

firm and both her remarkable success and 

the firm’s decline after her death gave rise to 

the enduring belief that Mrs Coade had 

singlehandedly hit upon a secret, patented 

recipe that was subsequently lost. 

This is a myth. Less successful fired ceramics 

had been around since at least the 1720s. In 

1722, Richard Holt took out two patents for 

‘Compound liquid metal, by which artificial 

stone and marble is made, by casting the 

same into moulds of any form, as statues and 

capitals; also for house-work, gardenornaments 

and other sculpture work.’ 1 Holt’s 

formula was also fired in a kiln. In 1730, Holt 

published A Short Treatise of Artificial Stone, 

‘From the Artificial Stone-Ware-House, overagainst 

York Buildings Stairs, and near 

Cuper’s Bridge.’ This is just downstream from 

the future Pincot/Coade manufactory, 

pinpointing Holt’s manufactory in relation to 

familiar landmarks: on the north bank of the 

Thames the monumental stone watergate 

commissioned by George Villiers, Duke of 

Buckingham from master mason Nicholas 

Stone in 1626; and on the south bank the 


Coade stone reaches its apogee in the Nelson pediment at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, modelled by 

Charles Panzetta after Benjamin West’s painting, The Immortality of Nelson. 

long landing stage, or bridge, to Cuper’s 

Gardens, popular pleasure gardens. Coade’s 

manufactory would later lie between where 

the Royal Festival Hall and Hayward Gallery 

stand today. 

Like Coade, Holt produced a very wide range 

of goods, selling them from his Thameside 

manufactory. However, according to Daniel 

Pincot, Holt’s business died with him, his 

wares having ‘neither taste in the designs, 

nor neatness in the execution.’ 2 

From October 1767, Pincot was producing his 

own artificial stone from the site of Holt’s 

workshop. In 1770, a year after the Coade 

ladies went into partnership with him, Pincot 

himself published, An Essay on the Origin, 

Nature, Uses and Properties of Artificial Stone, 

Clays and Burnt Earths in General. Pincot’s 

Essay set out the criteria for good artificial 

stone plainly: it ‘should, in the first instance, 

retain perfectly the form it receives from the 

mould; secondly, exactness in its dimensions; 

thirdly, it should be free from cracks, or fire 

flaws; fourthly is should be equally burnt, or 

have an even firmness throughout its whole 

substance; fifthly, it should have but small 

unconnected pores; and lastly, a bright stone 

colour should grace the whole.’ 3 

While the near total reliability of Coade stone 

does suggest that she made refinements, Mrs 

Coade almost certainly refined a raw mix 

inherited in part from Pincot, who in turn 

may have benefited from Holt’s work. Holt’s 

patent makes clear that by 1722, he was 

including pre-fired, ground ‘grog’ to control 

shrinkage. 

From Belmont, John Fowles was in regular 

correspondence with Coade authority, Alison 

Kelly. 4 In 1985, he gave her a small chip from 

the Coade stone gate post at Belmont, which 

Kelly took to the British Museum for analysis 

by electron microscope by Dr Ian Freestone, 

the first time such an analysis had been 

carried out. 

The Coade mix was revealed as 50–60% ball 

clay from South West England; 10% grog 

(finely ground, pre-fired stoneware); 5–10% 

crushed flint; 5-10% fine quartz or sand, and 

10% crushed lime soda glass (which had a 

higher calcium content in eighteenth century 

than today’s soda glass). These aggregates 

strengthen and stabilise the ball clay, 

inherently brittle when single-fired, as well as 

reducing shrinkage during firing. The silicates 

– sand, quartz, flint, glass – partially vitrified 

during firing, giving Coade stone its great 

hardness and durability. In comparison with 

pure clay ceramic mixes, their grittiness also 

provided the coarser texture necessary to 

imitate natural stone. 

Rather obviously when one pauses to reflect 

on the widely varying scale of Coade 

artefacts, the grind size of the grog also had 

to vary according to the size of the finished 

piece. This was no single recipe. The 

proprietorial secret, if such there were, lay as 

much in the consummate skills of the 

craftsmen who mixed the clay and the 

fireman who tended the kiln as in the 

formulation. 

What, then, were the secrets of Mrs Coade’s 

success, in contrast to Holt and Pincot? As 

much as in formula, these lay in process: 

artistic quality, practical skills in mixing and 

firing – and astute marketing. 

By employing sculptors of the calibre of John 

Bacon, John Flaxman, John Rossi, Thomas 

Banks and Joesph Panzetta, Mrs Coade raised 

the credibility of her wares at a stroke. Her 

wares became fine art, acceptable to the 

highest levels of society alongside the 

‘Bustos, Figure and Various Ornaments, 

Chimney Pieces, Friezes etc’ that were 

offered ‘at a Price sufficiently low to 

encourage any Gentleman or Builder who 

chuses to treat about them.’ 

Every phase in creating such Coade stone 

objects was highly skilled and time 

consuming. First, the artist made the model 

in clay, bigger than the desired end product 

by a carefully calculated percentage, to allow 

for shrinkage during firing. Then a plaster 

mould was made, and sheets of raw Coade 

mix carefully pressed into the negative 

volume. For very large works, the model 

might be cut into pieces, since the kilns were 

only some nine feet in diameter. 

All but the smallest items were created 

hollow, and the fingerprints of the 

eighteenth-century craftsmen, and probably 

women, can often be seen in pieces of 

broken Coade stone. Depending on size, the 

cast pieces might be reassembled before 

firing, using slip to mask the joins, and 

carefully re-finished. Larger, sculptural works 

were fired in several pieces, for subsequent 

reassembly. 

The raw works were fired over four days in 

coal-fired kilns at 1100–1150 degrees 


centigrade – a process that required 

extremely careful control and skill in firing. 

The fireman was probably the most skilled 

workman in the manufactory, paid extra to 

watch the kilns overnight and a closely 

guarded employee. Even so, firing was by no 

means a certain process, and we can add 

strict quality control of the finished wares to 

the Coade manufactory’s virtues. While in the 

kiln, the pieces would shrink by 10-13% 

according to the mix. No technical records 

survive from the manufactory during Mrs 

Coade’s day, but the trials and ‘recipes’ 

would surely have been recorded as 

meticulously as Josiah Wedgwood was 

noting his own essays at his factory in 

Burslem. 

Once out of the kiln and cooled, the works 

were again carefully finished, smoothing out 

any imperfections. Sculptural works fired in 

more than one piece were reassembled 

using cast iron dowels and again carefully 

finished (the rusting and spalling of these 

iron dowels are generally the only cause of 

failure in Coade stone works). 

In no sense, then, were Coade stone statues 

and artefacts ‘mass produced.’ Larger 

bespoke ones, like the River God at Ham 

House, or intricate replicas like the Medici 

and Borghese vases, required multiple presubscriptions. 

There is also every indication that Mrs Coade 

was a personable and forceful entrepreneur. 

In the early years of the manufactory, Mrs 

Coade called her stone Lithodypyra, a madeup 

Greek word meaning ‘twice-fired stone.’ 

This hardly trips off the tongue; she soon 

rebranded to the punchier ‘Coade Stone.’ 

She had spotted a clear gap in the building 

trade at an artisanal level, validated by the 

fine art market she also exploited. Coade 

Stone rode an architectural zeitgeist 

moulded by the Grand Tour and, perhaps 

especially, by Robert Adam, newly returned 

from Rome and fizzing with enthusiasm for 

the embellishment of plain Palladianism with 

graceful classical ornamentation to an extent 

that was completely impractical in natural 

stone. As London expanded apace in the 

eighteenth century, there was a groundswell 

aesthetic discontent with the uniformity of 

the brickwork in these new streets. Coade 

stone’s consistent quality and dimension 

meant speculative builders as much as 

architects could plan it into their buildings 

from the start. 

Mrs Coade did all the things similar 

contemporaries like Wedgwood were busily 

undertaking to market their wares: the 

published catalogue sheets, the exhibition 

gallery from 1799 on the south bank of 

Westminster Bridge, the advertisements in 

the newspapers, the exhibits at the Royal 

Academy. But her defining success in 

marketing her product lay in a technical 

positioning for frost resistance that made it 

actively preferred to natural stone. All the 

great architects of the day – the Adams, 

Soane, Wyatt, Wyatville and more – found 

this positioning convincing, and all 

incorporated Coade stone in their designs 

and interiors. So too did the speculative 

builders of Georgian London, personalising 

the doorways and frontages of their terraces 

with keystones and quoins no less finely 

modelled that the statues and caryatids that 

graced mansions and parks. 

The Coade catalogues contained no fewer 

than 788 designs. Often the pieces could be 

customised: a goddess’s face given different 

headdresses, columns and capitals mixed 

and matched, chimney pieces assembled by 

assortment. Coade stone was used from St 

Petersburg to the Caribbean, and both 

George III and IV gave it the royal warrant. 

When in 1810 a grateful nation sought a 

fitting public memorial to Nelson in King 

William Court at the Old Royal Naval College 

at Greenwich, it was to the Coade 

manufactory they turned for its execution. 

Inevitably, Eleanor Coade took a reduced role 

as the decades rolled past. From 1799 to 1813, 

John Sealy, a cousin, added his name to hers. 

When Sealy died in 1813, William Croggan, 

another member of her extended family took 

over the manufactory, but it was the Coade 

name that gave the manufactory its 

credibility. 

Croggan kept the manufactory going until 

the late 1830s, when he went bankrupt and 

the fine Coade models became dispersed 

among other manufacturers who had no 

stock with the patience required for the 

Coade process, preferring simpler cold cast 

cements and explicitly terracotta wares. 

Yet the allure of the Coade manufactory 

continues. One of the most exciting 

moments during the restoration of Mrs 

Coade’s Belmont was the discovery of an 

inscription on the back of one of the fine sea 

goddess keystones that adorn its front 

elevation. It said simply ‘J. Brabham fecit. 

1785.’ And thus speaks one of the eighteenth 

craftsmen, and perhaps –women, who were 

the true enablers of the Coade stone legend. 

Caroline Stanford has been historian for 

building at risk charity the Landmark Trust 

since 2001, and is a past SAHGB committee 

member. She carries out the documentary 

research on Landmark’s national portfolio of 

buildings, and has been researching Belmont 

and Mrs Coade since the Trust acquired the 

house in 2007. Belmont is now available for 

self-catering holidays for up to eight people 

via www.landmarktrust.org.uk. 

1 Bennet Woodcroft, Alphabetical Index of 

Patentees of Inventions (1969 ed.) 

2 Daniel Pincot, An Essay on the Origin, Nature, 

Uses and Properties of Artificial Stone (1770), p. 47. 

3 Ibid, p. 59. 

4 Kelly’s magisterial Coade Stone (1990) remains 

the authority on the subject. 

The heads of the sea goddess Amphritite at Belmont (this one before and after steam cleaning) show how 

bespoke keystones could be assembled around stock faces, by picking different elements from the catalogue. 

One of these heads was inscribed ‘1785’, its date of manufacture. Cleaning allows the incredible detail to be fully 

appreciated 


Remembering 

Keith Ingham 

The SAHGB’s Education Officer, Julian Holder, took on more than he 

bargained for when he was asked to write an article for Twentieth 

Century Architecture, the journal of the Twentieth Century Society 

Keith Ingham’s own house, No 10 Regent Avenue, Lytham St Annes, completed 1968, 

designed at the same time as Preston Bus Station. Featured in popular magazines such as 

House and Garden it was demolished some time in the 1990s. Image courtesy BDP/MMU 

Special Collections 

Iwas the Twentieth Century Society’s first 

employee more years ago than I care to 

remember, and when it was still known 

as The Thirties Society, so it was hard to say 

no to the request to write something about 

the housing design of Keith Ingham (1932–95) 

for an issue of Twentieth Century Architecture 

that was devoted to the topic of ‘regional 

practice and local character’. 

Despite his life-long commitment to 

modernism, as both an architect and 

conservationist these were issues high on 

Ingham’s own personal agenda and which he 

shared with better known colleagues 

working in post-war Lancashire in the early 

days of BDP. Together with other members 

of the local architectural community in the 

1960s Ingham established the regional 

magazine Architecture North-West promoting 

the RIBA and ‘good design’ generally. 

I did scratch my head a lot before agreeing 

because I knew Keith fairly well for a few 

years before his unexpected death in 1995 

and wasn’t sure if I was the right person to do 

this … I’m far from unbiased. There was also 

the issue of where the material was to write 

the article from. Much of his working life was 

spent with BDP working out of their original 

office in Preston and that posed another 

problem. 

Part of BDP’s archive was destroyed by fire 

some years ago so the record was likely to be 

incomplete. Luckily Ingham’s own papers 

had been deposited in Special Collections at 

Manchester Metropolitan University – an 

increasingly significant collection of 

architectural archives. The staff at the 

University, especially their archivist Jeremy 

Parrett, couldn’t have been more helpful but 

essentially what I was faced with was a house 

clearance… some papers had been 

destroyed and the remains, though 

substantial were, and remain, 

uncatalogued. I was faced with having to 

create a basic chronology of projects and 

employment and identify hundreds of 

photographs. Some parts of the archive 

were already well organised by Ingham as 

part of the private practice he established 

once he left BDP in the early 1980s, others 

less so. 

Ingham’s main claim to fame is as the 

designer of Preston Bus Station (1968–69) – 

one of the icons of Brutalist architecture. 

Ironically, Keith hated the label Brutalism 

whilst being understandably proud of his 

achievement in the design of this 

controversial building. Comprised of a bus 

station, taxi rank, and multi-storey car park it 

was designed with an eye to the standards 

and sophistication of an airport terminal. The 

building was listed, on the third attempt, in 

2013 so its future is less uncertain than it has 

been for the last decade or more. 

People used to talk to me about Keith’s 

housing design. In 1964 he’d won a Ministry 

of Housing and Local Government medal for 

good design in housing, and very much 

established his credentials by winning a prize 

for the Grenfell-Baines Group [the future 


Bankfield Manor, Singleton, completed in 1985 for Don 

Sidebottom. Ingham’s own photograph from the MMU 

Special collection. (Courtesy MMU Special Collection) 

BDP] in the seminal RIBA/Daily Mail Ideal 

Home ‘Small houses’ competition in 1958. 

Against the scale and complexity of projects 

such as Preston Bus Station the houses, both 

the glamour of his own, and for public and 

private clients give a fuller picture of 

Ingham’s career including his attempts to 

address the housing crisis of the 1960s. 

Amongst the papers I found an innovative 

idea for low-cost- housing as a means of 

addressing housing problems of the 1960s 

that is illustrated in the essay. 

Ingham could be fiercely individual which 

went against the collective ethos of BDP as 

established by George Grenfell-Baines. In 

other respects his range of talents – 

spanning graphics, furniture, interiors, 

product design, and landscaping – made him 

the ideal employee for one of the post-war 

practices which pioneered this multidisciplinary 

approach. Together with 

like-minded colleagues Ingham emerged 

as a key figure in the establishment of 

Urban Design in the UK due to their 

disenchantment with the RIBA’s approach 

to planning. 

The University archive included not only 

plans, photographs (both professional and 

his own), scrapbooks, student work, 

correspondence, but hitherto unknown work 

such as a concept design for the Liverpool 

Metropolitan Cathedral Competition. It also 

showed his fierce loyalty to not only the 

north-west of England but his own particular 

part of it – the Fylde, a quiet part of 

Lancashire bounded by Preston, Blackpool, 

and Morecambe centred on his home town 

of Lytham St Annes. Despite the pull of 

London, especially when he was elected a 

Vice-President of the RIBA in 1977, he stayed 

rooted to the region. 

Whenever I visit the RIBA nowadays, I think of 

Keith. The son of a local house builder he was 

so proud to be an architect and so 

determined that this building should be 

opened up more to the public. He’d be 

delighted its now happening…. nearly fifty 

years after he first started making the 

argument. 

Julian’s article ‘Busman’s holiday: houses in 

Lancashire by Keith Ingham’ is in Houses: 

regional character and local character, 

(Twentieth Century Architecture 12), 

ed. Elain Harwood and Alan Powers. 

Available from the Twentieth Century 

Society at £19.50. 

Details of Manchester Metropolitan 

University’s Special Collections can be found 

at http://www.specialcollections.mmu.ac.uk/ 

Julian will be giving a talk on the archive in 

Special Collections some time in 2016. 

The University is currently looking for 

funding to catalogue the archive. 


EXHIBITION 

A pillar of posterity 

PALLADIAN DESIGN: THE GOOD, THE BAD 

AND THE UNEXPECTED 

The Architecture Gallery, RIBA, London 

9 September 2015 – 9 January 2016 

Cowshed in Somerset by Stephen Taylor Architects © 

David Grandorge 


Design for a Palladian house by Colen Campbell © RIBA Collections 

Thomas Jefferson, the nineteenthcentury 

US president and architect 

who designed the University of 

Virginia and his Charlottesville residence, 

Monticello, referred to Andrea Palladio’s I 

quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books 

of Architecture, 1570) as his architectural 

‘bible’. To say Jefferson was not alone in his 

admiration of Palladio’s work would be the 

understatement of the century – or, to be 

more precise, five centuries, because, more 

than 500 years after the birth of the 

Renaissance architect, his creations are still 

celebrated and emulated, as this latest major 

exhibition shows. 

Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the 

Unexpected at the Royal Institute of British 

Architects (RIBA) explores the legacy of the 

man who started out as a stonemason’s 

apprentice in Northern Italy and went on to 

become one of the most influential architects 

in the world. Palladio was inspired by the 

formal, classical building designs of Ancient 

Greece and Rome and adapted them for 

contemporary use. This in turn has resulted 

in the democratisation of his design features, 

earning them their own ‘ism’ in the process. 

The exhibition offers a generous and wellconsidered 

selection of drawings, models 

and busts, themed into revolution, evolution 

and the contemporary. The iconic design 

characteristics of Palladianism – symmetry, 

proportion, repetitive columns, minimal 

exterior ornamentation, pediments and 

porticos – soon become apparent in the 

work of the other architects and designers on 

display. In some, the influences are direct, 

obvious, and well documented: after all, were 

it not for the keen collecting and careful 

preservation of Palladio’s drawings by 

English architects Inigo Jones and Richard 

Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, Britain may not 

have the Banqueting House on Whitehall 

(designed by Jones, 1622), the Queen’s 

House, Greenwich (Jones, 1616–19), or 

Chiswick House (Lord Burlington, 1725). 

Anglo-Palladianism, as it came to be known, 

was a national style by the eighteenth 

century. Adapted for a British climate, it was 

a hybrid dominated by Palladio’s features, 

but also containing other architectural 

influences. 

The use of Palladian design elements in 

political and religious buildings is 

highlighted in the exhibition, from James 

Gibbs’ St Martin-in-the-Fields Church (1721) to 

Sir Arnold Thornely’s Stormont, the 

Parliament Buildings in Belfast (1928–32), 

whilst the influence upon the American 

colonial architecture of churches, villas and 

plantations is also recognised. 

Unsurprisingly, it is the postmodern 

perspective that brings the piquancy to a 

full-flavoured show. Oswald Mathias Ungers’ 

Glashutte, France (1985) is, to all intents and 

purposes, a smooth, white box; but its 

balanced and consistent windows, doors, 

and views from all four sides are undeniably 

evocative of Palladio’s work. And once you 

break down the design composition of 

Stephen Taylor’s Cowshed in Somerset (2012) 

to a series of evenly-spaced columns, flanked 

by sweeping archways, it is impossible to 

view it any other way than Palladianism 

playfully reimagined for the twenty-first 

century. Kay Carson 

Palladian Design: The Good, the Bad and the 

Unexpected was co-curated by Charles Hind 

and Vicky Wilson. Charles Hind is Chief 

Curator and H. J. Heinz Curator of Drawings 

at the RIBA, which owns the vast majority of 

Palladio’s surviving drawings. He is a Fellow 

of the Society of Antiquaries and a Visiting 

Fellow at the Centro Palladio, Vicenza. Vicky 

Wilson is Assistant Curator at the RIBA 

Drawing and Archives Collection. The RIBA 

Collections contain more than 350 drawings 

and sketches by Andrea Palladio – some 85 

per cent of all those in existence. 


A Vote of 

Thanks 

The Society of Architectural Historians 

of Great Britain is a bit like a 

constitutional monarchy. At its head 

is a President, an eminent architectural 

historian, usually a professor, who presides at 

the Annual Lecture and the Annual General 

Meeting but who otherwise is restricted to 

Bagehot’s right to be consulted, to advise 

and to warn. 

The actual day-to-day head of the Society is 

its Chairman, who is usually of a slightly 

younger generation than the President and 

who chairs committee meetings. It is he 

whose role it is to set the Society’s tone and 

to maintain impetus. He is also involved on a 

number of the panels and sub-committees 

through which much of the Society’s work 

passes. He is a member of the judging panels 

for the Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Prize, the 

Hawksmoor Essay Prize and the Morris Essay 

Prize for Colonial and Post-Colonial 

Architecture, and one of those who select the 

holders of the Society’s PhD Scholarships and 

who adjudicate on applications for research 

and publication grants. 

The Society has been immensely fortunate in 

having over the past six years two 

outstanding chairmen in first Kathryn 

Morrison, who served from 2009 to 2012 and 

then David Adshead, who stood down in 

September 2015 after three years in post. 

One of the Society’s strengths has been 

attracting to its service scholars of different 

sorts, not just those holding posts in the 

Universities but those in the wider world of 

architectural history. David is Head Curator 

and Architectural Historian for the National 

Trust and has published extensively on the 

Trust’s properties and collections, notably 

with Wimpole: Architectural Drawings and 

Topographical Views, and as the editor of the 

Apollo National Trust Historic Houses and 

Collections Annual. 

When he took over the chair from Kathryn 

Morrison the Society was in good shape, and 

a number of initiatives were beginning to 

bear fruit, notably Julian Holder’s Graduate 

Student Research Forums, the first of which 

was held at the Bartlett in David’s first year. 

SAHGB Secretary Jonathan 

Kewley pays tribute to our 

recently retired Chairman, 

David Adshead (pictured) 

Under his leadership, the Society has moved 

forward significantly on a number of fronts 

over the past three years. 

The first (and the most obvious to readers of 

this) was a complete overhaul of the Society’s 

communications with the outside world. The 

website, which had been restricted and 

antiquated, was completely rebuilt and 

repopulated by Danielle Willkens and now 

serves as a focus for the Society’s activities, 

with announcements, online booking and 

online submission of essay manuscripts. The 

formulaic newsletter, with its repeated lists of 

officers and subscription rates, was abolished 

and replaced by this magazine. The 

newsletter was succeeded as the means of 

communication between the Society’s 

officers and its members by a regular (usually 

monthly) e-update, now developed more 

professionally by Anya Matthews using 

MailChimp and incorporating images and 

links. 

Cuts in Government funding for students 

had exposed the discipline of architectural 

history to a potential crisis in recruitment. 

The Society had some years ago resolved to 

do something towards tackling this by 

funding what were at first called student 

bursaries but are now PhD Scholarships. Over 

the past three years, thanks to energetic 

fundraising by Charles Keighley, enough 

money was raised to increase this so that we 

are now funding four students. 

At the heart of the Society throughout its 

existence has been Architectural History, 

probably the world’s leading journal on the 

subject, which is distributed to all members 

of the Society as well as to many institutions 

at home and throughout the world. The 

retirement of the journal’s longstanding 

printer, Graham Maney, prompted the 

realisation that the world had moved on and 

that Architectural History was in danger of 

being left behind, having no online presence 

other than through JSTOR, and a 

comparatively low profile among universities 

worldwide. This led to a lot of debate, 

with a variety of views on the way forward. 

Quietly but determinedly, David brought 

the committee to the conclusion that 

Architectural History needed to move to an 

international publisher. The result was the 

contract, signed in August 2015, by which 

the Cambridge University Press will take 

over publication from 2016 onwards, 

allowing it to reach literally thousands of 

institutional subscribers globally, and giving 

them (and the Society’s members) 

immediate access to an online version, while 

at the same time the Society retains full 

editorial control. 

The last reform of David’s chairmanship is 

one which may take longer to show visible 

results, but it is the one which may be the 

most significant. It was to begin to bring to 

the Society a sense of developed and joinedup 

thinking to replace ad hoc and reactive 

decisions. The outward sign of this was the 

creation of the new post of Development 

and Fundraising Officer, part of a wider (if 

interim) reform of the constitution to reflect 

changes over the past two decades and to 

make sure all committee members were 

‘official’ and had a vote. The aim of the 

strategy is for the Society’s committee to 

work out, pursuant to its remit as a charity, 

what the Society’s goals should be, what the 

priorities should be among them, and how 

and from whom funding should be sought to 

give them effect. 

We thank David for his work for the Society. 

We know he will continue to be a regular 

attender at the Society’s events and look 

forward to the continued benefit of his 

counsel. 


A Week in the Life… 

of Dr Anna Keay, Director of the 

Landmark Trust 

Monday morning. Up and out early 

to get to Wilmington Priory in 

Sussex at ten sharp, when the 

people who have been staying for the week 

vacate and the Landmark housekeepers 

move in. All the Landmark’s 200 buildings are 

rented out all year round for holidays and 

short stays, it’s how they are enjoyed and 

how we fund the charity, so you have to dart 

in and out during change-overs. Today its 

meeting our ebullient and brilliant 

housekeeping team and Regional Property 

Manager, hearing how things are going, and 

looking at some potential improvements to 

the building. Landmark converted the 

derelict priory in the 1970s, occupying the 

post-monastic house built in the ruins. But 

keeping it warm is a challenge and there’s 

never a substitute for talking through the 

possibilities on site with one of our surveyors. 

Lunch is sandwiches in the kitchen with the 

team. On the train back (I always go by train 

if I possibly can), I work on a speech for a 

fundraising event later in the week. Back just 

in time for our 6.30 slot to meet the teacher 

at the children’s school. 

Tuesday. Spent at our office at 

Shottesbrooke Park in Berkshire. Weekly 

catch-up meeting with the team at 9.30, 

followed by our fortnightly projects meeting, 

discussing progress on our two major 

building rescue projects currently on site, 

two auto-architectural projects: Mrs Coade’s 

own house in Lyme Regis, and the presbytery 

Augustus Pugin built at the Grange in 

Ramsgate. Lunch round the office kitchen 

table, with one of our four office dogs eyeing 

my cheese on toast hungrily. Afternoon run 

through of next year’s maintenance 

programme. I walk across the park to the big 

house to have tea with Lady Smith, one of 

the co-founders of Landmark; though she’s 

getting pretty hard of hearing she is as 

hilarious and irreverent as ever. Home in time 

to give children a bath to usual high volume 

Elvis soundtrack. 

Wednesday. Visiting two buildings at risk – 

we see around 25 on site a year and are 

approached about a hundred or so. A derelict 

church in a sensational spot overlooking 

Tintern Abbey and a roofless 1730s 

banqueting house on a ridge gazing down 

towards the Pembrokeshire coast. Both 

spellbinding but challenging. Converting 

churches to domestic use is something we 

have generally avoided and it’s hard to see 

how this one would work. The banqueting 

house is fascinating, it looks like something a 

local builder dreamt up after seeing 

Burlington’s Chiswick. All a bit wrong but all 

the more appealing for it. We stroke our 

chins about how you’d retain the fragments 

of plaster and where on earth you could put 

a bathroom. Back very late. 

Thursday. Morning spent discussing what 

our priorities should be for taking on 

buildings over the coming decade: should 

we be targeting medieval piel towers or cold 

war bunkers? Lively discussion and future 

paper for our trustees scoped. Call with the 

Lundy Island manager to talk through the 

damage done by recent storms. Agree the 

format for the launch of ‘Landmark: a History 

of Britain in 50 Buildings’ at Hatchards next 

month, the book on the Trust that Caroline 

Stanford and I have written to mark our 50th 

anniversary. Tea-time reception at 

Landmark’s 1720s house in Spitalfields for our 

Legacy pledgers (people who are leaving us 

money in their wills), who are full of 

enthusiasm for the projects we have coming 

up. One elderly guest takes me aside to tell 

me she loved my speech, leaving me 

glowing, until she explains that it was 

because she could hear every word. Dash 

into the launch of a former English Heritage 

colleague’s new book just in time for the 

speeches. 

Friday. Take the children to school then 

spend the morning in the London Library 

mining material for a lecture later in the 

month. Quick lunch with our Chairman, then 

over to Channel 4 for a viewing of one of the 

programmes in the news series they have 

made about our work ‘Rescuing Britain’s 

Landmarks’. Manage to get back to the 

Library to collect some books just before it 

closes. Rendez-vous with the children at 

King’s Cross and squeeze ourselves onto the 

5.45 train to King’s Lynn. 

Saturday. Picnic on Holme next the Sea 

beach in soft September sun, tea and ice 

cream at Castle Rising, friends for supper. On 

Sunday morning I spend a couple of hours 

on the proofs to ‘The Last Royal Rebel’, my 

biography of James, Duke of Monmouth, 

which is finally coming out in the new year. 

Afternoon spent baking exotic cakes with the 

children who make free with the food 

colouring. Ely Cathedral is framed against the 

setting sun as we drive back to London. The 

strange smell of black banana cakes fills the 

car, but the children, now fast asleep, are 

oblivious 

Landmark Trust director Anna Keay on Lundy 

Island © photograph by J Watts 

The Architectural Historian Issue Two / December 2015 23

John Foulon: an unknown Architect 1 

Bruce Bailey made an intriguing discovery during his research for the forthcoming Pevsner’s Buildings of England South Hampshire volume. 

Here, he shares his findings with The Architectural Historian 

In January 1887 appeared in the Morning 

Post and several other newspapers, even 

as far away as Dundee, the following 

obituary: 

‘The Marquis de Foulon died on the 22nd inst. 

at his domicile, in the Fulham Road, where he 

had for many years resided. James Marquis 

de Foulon was born in England in 1795, being 

at the time of his decease 92 years of age. He 

was educated as an architect …’ 

This is an architect who used the name John 

Foulon. He was born in 1794 2 at Camarthen in 

Wales, where his father, also John, was 

working in some capacity with the young 

architect John Nash, then at the beginning of 

his career. His baptism record gives his name 

as James but he was probably James John or 

John James, eventually adopting John as his 

name. Nash is recorded as having been the 

young boy’s godfather. Nash built the 

Carmarthen Gaol in 1792, followed by gaols in 

Hereford (1792–95) and Cardigan (1793). 

When Nash moved to London in 1796, the 

Foulons moved with him, living initially in 

Kensington, where it seems the young John, 

having acquired some talent as an artist, 

gained a small employment teaching the 

young Princess Victoria perspective, 

presumably at Kensington Palace. It is most 

likely this commission was gained through 

his godfather Nash, being architect to both 

George IV and William IV. John married in 

1819 Martha Harrison at St James Piccadilly, 

where he is described as “widower” 

suggesting there had been a previous 

marriage. His first child, a daughter Caroline, 

was born in 1822 and this was followed by a 

son, John Alexander, in 1824 and four more 

daughters, Charlotte in 1825, Leonora in 

1827and Jessie in 1828. In 1831 a John Foulon, 

architect, presumably his father, of Thistle 

Grove, Kensington, was declared bankrupt. 

Also in 1831, John and his family moved to 

Hastings, apparently for his health, where 

another daughter Nina was born. 3 About this 

time he provided some drawings of St 

Leonards for the local publisher Charles 

Southall, which were published as 

lithographs in 1835. By 1839 they had 

returned to London and, Nash having died in 

1835, John found employment as a clerk at 

Somerset House, a post he held until the 

mid-1840s. By the 1850s he had turned back 

to architecture, becoming surveyor to Sir 

Phillip Meux, of the Meux Brewery, doing 

some work for him at his country estate at 

Theobalds Park, Herts. He is also recorded 

working for Francis and John Mills of the Glyn 

Mills Bank and built a house at High Beech, 

Essex for Richard Arabin. 4 Around 1855 he set 

up his own office at 470 Oxford Street and it 

was from there that he provided the designs 

for reshaping the exterior facades of Bisterne 

Manor for John Mills, but although some 

work was done there around this time, his 

designs were not fulfilled. Indeed, it would 

seem that his practice was not a success and 

he had few commissions and none of any 

consequence. All this time, his large family of 

five daughters were living with their parents 

at Waterford Road, Fulham, keeping 

themselves by doing sewing. In 1857 tragedy 

shook the family, their son John Alexander, 

who had entered the army, being killed, 

together with his wife and children, in India 

during the siege of Lucknow. In 1879 his wife 

died, having become totally blind. In 1883 Sir 

Henry Meux died and that brought John’s 

employment with the Brewery to an end. In 

his later years he became deaf and had to 

rely on charitable donations for his existence. 

As well as receiving some from various 

friends he also received assistance from a 

fund set up by Sir John Soane for distressed 

architects and also had some small donations 

from Queen Victoria. John Foulon continued 

to live at Fulham until his death in 1887 when 

the extraordinary obituary appeared in the 

Morning Post. His funeral was attended by 

Appliance of science for 

Hawksmoor Medalist 

Winner of the SAHGB’s Hawksmoor 

Essay Medal 2015 is Edward Gillin 

(pictured) of St Cross College, 

University of Oxford. Edward’s winning 

submission was ‘The Stones of Science: 

Charles Harriot Smith and the importance of 

geology in architecture, 1834–1864’. Edward, 

who is originally from Totnes in Devon, 

talked to The Architectural Historian about his 

essay success. 

‘It is a tremendous honour, especially 

looking back at the list of past winners,’ he 

said. ‘As an undergraduate I was given a 

really good background in the history of 

science, but I am less confident when it 

comes to architectural history, so the prize 

really could not be more welcome. There is 

still so much to learn, but it’s great to see that 

things are moving in the right direction.’ 

Hawksmoor winners receive a bronze medal, 

bearing a relief portrait of Nicholas 

Hawksmoor (based on the bust of the 

architect by John Cheere), inscribed with 

their name. In addition, there is a cash prize 


Charles Spagnoletti, the famous electrical 

engineer of the Great Western Railway, there 

described as his nephew. The family 

therefore professed to be of French origin 

and having some connection with a French 

noble Foulon family, perhaps the one whose 

most notorious member was Joseph- 

Francois Foullon, known as Foullon de Droué, 

a hated minister of Louis XV, who on the 

storming of the Bastille in 1789 was captured 

by the mob, beheaded and his head paraded 

around Paris on a pike. John’s father must 

have been in England by 1792 since Nash 

records he was approached by a French 

aristocrat seeking work as a draughtsman in 

that year. How justifiable the claim to be a 

marquis is, remains an open question. 

This then is the story of this intriguing 

character and it is a pity that his architectural 

talents were not more assured, leaving us 

more tangible evidence of his life 

BOOK REVIEWS 

All Saints, Selsley, Gloucestershire, 

designed by G. F. Bodley in 1858 and 

opened in 1862. Photo: Geoff 

Brandwood. 

1 This note derives from information from a variety 

of sources but my thanks are to Aileen Reed, Susan 

Palmer at the Soane Museum and Pamela Clark at 

the Royal Archives for their help. 

2 The obituary is incorrect. 

3 His obituary says it was while in Hastings that he 

taught Princess Victoria but it must surely be when 

he was living in Kensington, relatively near 

Kensington Palace. 

4 There is an Arabin House at High Beech but this is 

recorded as being built in 1848 by the architect 

F.O. Bedford. However, the date fits and Foulon 

may have been involved. 

of £400, and the winning submission is 

considered for publication in the SAHGB 

journal Architectural History. 

Edward, who received his medal at the 

Society's Annual Lecture in October, added: 

‘I really am very grateful indeed. I mean, after 

three years in the Bodleian there comes a 

point where you realise that it doesn't get 

much cooler than a relief portrait of 

Hawksmoor on a bronze medal! 

‘I'd like to take this chance to say thanks to 

the SAHGB and the competition judges.’ 

Edward has just successfully completed his 

DPhil at Oxford, entitled 'The Science of 

Parliament: building the Palace of 

Westminster, 1834–1860' which explored the 

uses of scientific knowledge in the building 

of Charles Barry's Houses of Parliament 

MICHAEL HALL: George Frederick Bodley and the Later 

Gothic Revival in Britain and America (Yale University 

Press, 2014, 508 pp, 200 col. and 100 b&w illus., 

£50.00, ISBN: 9780300208023) 

Every now and then a book comes along 

that is a phenomenon, a publication that is 

as much an experience to engage with in 

itself as it is to read, a book the supreme 

scholarship of which is matched only by its 

peerless production values and hefty size. 

Beautifully written and superbly illustrated, 

this book is Michael Hall’s George Frederick 

Bodley and the Later Gothic Revival in Britain 

and America – a very worthy winner of the 

2015 Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. 

G. F. Bodley was of course one of the greats 

of Victorian architecture. For those who 

know something of the genre, his name will 

be most familiar, not least because Hall has 

laboured for at least the past three 

decades – through numerous lectures and 

articles – to bring to our attention a greater 


understanding of the architect’s work and 

career. But until now there had been no 

definitive monograph. This book has 

therefore been eagerly anticipated, and it 

does not disappoint. 

Trained in the office of G. G. Scott, where he 

could count among his colleagues G. E. 

Street and William White, Bodley had the 

best of beginnings. After leaving Scott’s 

office – partly in reaction to what he saw as 

the increasing tedium of his master’s largely 

conservative idiom – he was at the vanguard 

of that vigorous and exceedingly distinctive 

phase of mid-century Gothic now referred to 

as High Victorian. In this guise he produced 

some of the most widely recognised and 

appreciated churches of the period, such as 

All Saints, Selsley, and St Michael’s, Brighton. 

Unfortunately, Victorian architecture has had 

the particular misfortune, especially in 

architecture circles, of being written off as a 

garish and misguided confusion, having 

indulged fully and unashamedly in the crime 

of ornament. Worse still, it is regularly 

parodied as vacuous – as if the Victorian age 

was the one period during which 

architecture descended into near total 

irrationality and anti-intellectualism, before 

clarity and integrity returned in the form of 

Modernism. This is of course nonsense, but 

Modernism needed a counter-narrative. In 

the immediate post-war period the ‘crimes’ 

of the Victorian age were considered worthy 

of capital punishment, the consequences of 

which are now well documented. 

Regrettably, such ignorance is still prevalent. 

It is therefore important that Hall’s book rests 

at the apex of what can now be identified as 

something of a renaissance in the serious 

study of Victorian architecture, 

demonstrating why the period between the 

1840s and the first decade of the twentieth 

century is not only a critically important one 

for understanding British architecture but 

also a complex and absorbing subject in its 

own right. 

With this in mind, what Hall’s book 

highlights, through its meticulous research, 

authoritative analysis, and persuasive 

narrative style, is that Bodley, like many of 

the leading designers of the day, was an 

extremely sensitive, able, and sophisticated 

architect – possibly the greatest of the Gothic 

Revival in its myriad forms. Moreover, it 

would suggest to those who take a long view 

of architecture, that Bodley, along with his 

contemporaries, such as William Butterfield, 

G. E. Street, and G. G. Scott, were not merely 

the best of their age but among the very best 

British, even world, architecture has ever 

produced. Here, in twenty-four concise and 

closely argued chapters, Hall showcases 

Bodley’s extensive oeuvre and relays his 

complex development and transformation as 

a practitioner throughout his career. In many 

ways, Bodley’s career mirrored the changes 

and developments of Victorian architecture 

in general, making Bodley as much a history 

of Victorian architecture as an account of the 

man and his buildings. The first few chapters 

in particular – which include titles such as ‘In 

Scott’s Office’, ‘Pre-Raphaelite Architecture’, 

and ‘Modern Gothic’ – are some of the most 

densely-packed yet clear accounts I have 

encountered on the key concerns that drove 

Early and High Victorian architecture. They 

are instant classics, and will immediately go 

down as essential reading for students of 

Victorian architecture. Of particular interest 

here is the chapter on Pre-Raphaelitism, 

which recounts a familiar (at the time) but 

since largely forgotten connection between 

Pre-Raphaelite idealism, architecture, and the 

decorative arts, showing, in a very convincing 

way, just how synthetic Victorian architecture 

could be – formally, theoretically, and 

sacramentally. This is followed a little later in 

the book by an equally intriguing and 

informative chapter entitled ‘Anglo- 

Aestheticism’. 

Even for those among us who know 

something about Victorian architecture, this 

book is brimming with insight and 

revelation. If one had thought that the close 

and sensitive description of buildings and 

their spaces had gone out of fashion in 

architectural scholarship, this book 

demonstrates why it needs to remain one of 

the cornerstones of the discipline. Indeed, if 

one were looking for a model of how to write 

an architectural monograph, then they need 

look no further than Bodley. There is no 

question that it sets new standards in 

scholarship, historical analysis, and 

production. Moreover, lack of overt 

theorising, which has become something of 

a trend (if not tyranny) in much writing on 

Victorian artistic culture in recent years, 

makes for a wonderfully refreshing, powerful, 

and humane prose, one that communicates 

in a direct but no less sophisticated or 

imaginative way. 

As the title indicates, the sub-theme of the 

book is the late Gothic Revival, a subject that 

has not received the attention it deserves 

from historians working on Victorian 

architecture. This concerns mainly the formal 

trajectory and intellectual substance of the 

Gothic Revival as it developed out of that 

vibrant and muscular High Victorian moment 

into something that, by comparison, seemed 

more abstemious, self-possessed, and even 

parochial. This narrative hinges on the 

transition from High Victorian ‘muscularity’ in 

the 1850s to late Victorian ‘refinement’ in the 

‘60s. Hall has written before on this transition 

with respect to Bodley, dealing specifically 

with projects such as All Saints, Cambridge, 

and Holy Angels, Hoar Cross, but here we get 

it in more detail. It is helpfully situated in a 

wider discussion about the general reaction 

against the High Victorian movement by the 

period’s leading architects, setting out a 

crucial episode in the development of 

Victorian architecture. In many ways, the late 

Revival was the most ‘national’ of a 

supposedly national style, the one moment 

where looking for and re-articulating the 

most English of ‘English’ characteristics in 

Gothic architecture became a natural epoch 

of repose (to borrow Morris’s phrase) 

following the internationalist frenzy of 

‘ecclesiological’ Gothic. It was perhaps a 

strange but nonetheless logical 

reinstatement of what Beresford Hope once 

called the ‘Anglo-parochial phase’ of the 

early 1840s. 

Indeed, it is the connection of these two 

phases, separated by some fifteen years, that 

makes High Victorian look like the odd man 

out in the history of Gothic Revival 

architecture in Britain (and later America) – 

what G. G. Scott once ruefully referred to as 

the ‘break up’ and spoiling of its English 

character. Set between these wedges, High 

Victorianism suddenly appears like the Mr 

Hyde to what was perhaps the nineteenthcentury 

Revival’s more natural inclination to 

be Dr Jekyll. But as though locked in some 

Hegelian embrace, the ‘early’, ‘high’, and 

‘late’ necessarily relied upon one another’s 

existence to position and articulate their 

own, and such moments of divergent selfawareness 

are brought out brilliantly in Hall’s 

account. One such tipping point is the 


utterings of Alphonse Warrington Taylor (a 

member of the Morris circle), which are given 

as evidence of a shift in mood and taste 

among the leading lights of Victorian 

architecture and design. From the early 

1860s, recoiling from the ‘foreignness’ of 

High Victorianism, Taylor argued for English 

architects to appreciate and reconnect with 

the ‘Englishness ’of English architecture, 

turning to the Perpendicular for inspiration. 

His appeals to English character and 

language, as well as his predilection for the 

Perpendicular, have eerie echoes of 

E. A. Freeman’s pleas of only a few years 

earlier during the Foreign Office debacle. 

It is precisely Hall’s ability to join so many 

dots across the Victorian artistic landscape 

that makes Bodley such an impressive and 

valuable addition to the literature on the 

subject. He weaves effortlessly all of the 

personalities and themes we have come to 

associate with the rise of the Gothic revival in 

the Victorian period, placing Bodley at the 

very heart of many of these developments. 

The noted American art and architectural 

historian, George Kubler, once observed that 

the job of the historian is to communicate a 

pattern that was invisible to his subjects 

when they lived, and unknown to his 

contemporaries before he detected it. Much 

of this prevails in Hall’s Bodley. After all, 

Bodley is the perfect architect with which to 

trace these complexities and associations, 

given his presence and prominence as a 

practitioner from the near beginnings of the 

mature Gothic Revival in the mid-nineteenth 

century to its dissipation in the early 

twentieth. 

There is no question that Hall’s Bodley will 

stand the test of time. It is a book for the 

ages, and one cannot really see how or 

where it might be bettered. If one were to 

find fault with it, it may be that, seeing the 

title, an American audience would have 

expected to see more about the Gothic 

Revival in the US, but this is a matter of 

packaging rather than content. Indeed, 

covering Bodley’s involvement in the designs 

for Washington and San Francisco cathedrals 

at the end of the book, Hall leaves the Gothic 

Revival in America as something of an open 

question, from which one hopes new 

scholarship will emerge. 

In the end one can only say that this book is 

essential reading for anyone who studies 

seriously Victorian architecture. I thought I 

knew something about Victorian architecture 

before I started this book, I now know a 

whole lot more. 

Alex Bremner 

A. P. W. MALCOMSON: Nathaniel Clements, 1705–77: 

politics, fashion and architecture in mid-eighteenthcentury 

Ireland, The Four Courts Press, Dublin 

Published January 2015. 290 pp; colour illus. £50/€55 

Hardback. ISBN: 9781851829149 

Anthony Malcomson’s new book Nathaniel 

Clements, 1705–77: politics, fashion and 

architecture in mid-eighteenth-century Ireland 

mines deep into the architectural culture of 

the Irish Protestant elite in the middle of the 

eighteenth century. His focus is, as the title 

makes clear, one figure: Nathaniel Clements, 

a pivotal official of Irish administration at the 

time who has long been described as an 

influential architectural amateur. The 

relevance and reference of this meaty book, 

however, go much wider. Malcomson 

considers himself a political historian, 

although his knowledge of the lives, 

activities, and above all papers, of Irish 

landed families clearly gives him a strong 

platform to tackle his subject. And tackle it 

he does, because this monograph ironically 

strips away much of the architectural 

reputation of Nathaniel Clements as an 

actual designer, although it leaves him with a 

more nuanced and interesting status as an 

influential arbiter of taste at a particular 

moment in the story of Ireland and its 

architecture. 

Clements worked hard to achieve his wealth 

and status, and was an assiduous cultivator 

of alliances through marriage, service, 

hospitality and mutual interest. As the fifth 

son of an Irish landowner and MP, he had 

been put into work at the Treasury, around 

1720, at a young age, and became ‘an official 

pluralist on a staggering scale’, his most 

significant role being that of deputy vicetreasurer. 

He was also an MP and a father of 

MPs – one son became the 1st Earl of Leitrim 

in 1795. Clements had allied himself squarely 

with an ambitious and successful kinsman, 

Luke Gardiner (d. 1755), watchdog of the 

English interest in Ireland, whom he 

eventually succeeded in post as deputy vicetreasurer. 

Through him Clements also 

became involved in the development of 

fashionable Dublin. Clements also became 

Ranger of Phoenix Park, where he built 

himself, in 1752–57, Ranger’s Lodge, a simple, 

but elegant house in the Palladian villa farm 

tradition. This was later purchased as the 

viceroy’s residence, much extended, and 

later became Áras an Uachtaráin, the official 

residence of the President of Ireland). In 1966, 

the pioneering architectural historian, the 

late Desmond Fitzgerald, Knight of Glin, 

published an article in Apollo, which argued 

that Ranger’s Lodge was an autograph work 

of Clements himself, and that he was also 

responsible for designing a number of Irish 

country houses in the same style. 

Much of his argument sprang from one letter 

written in 1745. In this Luke Gardiner wrote 

asking Clements to investigate the most 

effective grates which prevented the ill 

effects of smoke, and also the best flooring 

available, ‘As you are an architect, you should 

be master of all this, as also of lighting rooms 

– to have lustres or hanging metal branches.’ 

It seems now that the 1966 article was 

intended to spark a debate on a number of 

houses with unknown designers, which 

shared links to the Ranger’s Lodge. But the 

attribution and designer status of Clements 

quickly became widely accepted as 

orthodoxy, and not openly questioned until 

more recent times. Malcomson is already an 

expert in Clements’s political career – an 

earlier work published in 2005 is Nathaniel 

Clements: government and the governing elite 

in Ireland 1725–75 – devotes this new book to 

the minute examination and clarification of 

Clements’s architectural projects and 

connections (useful evidence of the Dublin 

works is derived from ‘cess applotment’ 

books). 

Clements was closely involved in the 

development of Henrietta Street, partly as an 

assistant to Gardiner who was an important 

investor in the development of Dublin, as the 

city shifted from its traditional merchantbased 

character, to becoming a capital 

dominated by a landed and parliamentary 

class (at least until the 1798 rising and the 

subsequent Act of Union). That brilliant 

architect Lovett Pearce, who died too young 

in 1733, had been involved early on in these 


Engraving of Ranger’s Lodge by Thomas Milton 

Dublin developments and helped set the 

standards. Incidentally, Malcomson picks out 

an interesting back-story in the quality of 

Henrietta Street, being intended to outshine 

Bolton Street. Gardiner has been in love with 

Henrietta Crofts, illegitimate daughter of the 

Duke of Monmouth, who had married the 

marquess of Winchester, later 2nd Duke of 

Bolton and viceroy of Ireland from 1717–20. 

Clements actively developed about a third of 

the Henrietta Street houses, but seems to 

have been brought in by Gardiner as much to 

share the burden as anything; letters in 1745 

show them, busy men both, cheerfully 

discussing details from chimneypieces to 

portraits and furniture (Clements’s own 

house on Henrietta Street was clearly 

exceptionally well furnished and decorated). 

There is no evidence that Clements was the 

actual designer of the houses he had built, 

and also none for him having, as was once 

thought, a role in the designing of Sackville 

Street (named after the family name of 

another viceroy, the Duke of Dorset) 

although many of those who bought plots, 

and went to live there, were connections or 

political allies of his. 

Clements’s role in the improvement of the 

landscape of Phoenix Park is rather clearer. 

The park was founded in the 1660s and was 

certainly the largest city park in Europe in the 

mid-eighteenth century. Clements became 

Ranger, and was an active improver, planting 

trees, landscaping and ‘beautifying’ it, but 

also controlling and disciplining use of the 

park (excluding undesirables, protecting the 

deer and young trees). He also provided 

spectacular fireworks displays, which were 

open to the whole population. This 

expenditure and careful management added 

not only to his reputation but also to the 

value of his office. 

The Ranger’s Lodge he built was two storeys 

over a basement (additionally raised up on 

an earthworks) with a five-bay central block 

and two L-shaped wings containing offices. 

The single-storey front pavilions were linked 

to the main block by curved screens walls. 

Much extended since, the original 

eighteenth-century appearance of the 

entrance elevation, with its central Diocletian 

window over a tripartite door case, is 

recorded in an engraving by Thomas Milton. 

Fairly austere externally, there were clearly 

several good interiors and contemporaries 

were impressed. 

Indeed, Lady Shelburne wrote in 1770 that 

she was ‘agreeably surprised’ as ‘from the 

outward appearance of the lodge I had not 

expected [it to be] so well worth going to 

see’. The main rooms, including the huge 

Saloon, and the dining room with 

plasterwork confidently attributed to 

Cramillion, she considered ‘very handsome’ 

and ‘elegantly furnished’. There was also a 

library, morning room and business room. 

There is much evidence for the conspicuous 

richness of the Clementses’ decoration and 

hospitality. The eighteenth century artist and 

letter-writer Mrs Delany referred to the 

‘cleverness and elegance’ of them both as a 

couple, while one Richard Cumberland wrote 

of the ‘Parisian luxury’ of their establishment 

at the Lodge. They were quite simply at the 

forefront of fashion. 

But, Malcomson argues, there is no evidence 

to show that Ranger’s Lodge is an autograph 

building, designed by Nathaniel Clements for 

himself. Rather he thinks it is a multiauthored 

work, a culmination of influences 

and advice, of a kind not untypical in mideighteenth-century 

Ireland (Clements is 

known, for instance, to have sought designs 

for a house from John Wood of Bath, but this 

was not the house as built, although some 

ideas may have been sourced in these plans). 

Malcomson also refutes the direct design 

involvement of Clements in a string of other 

attractive country houses, which have been 

attributed to him. Although he accepts that 

he may have had some loose and shared 

advisory role in some, he argues more 

forcefully that his influence was just an 

arbiter of taste in a more general sense. He 

believes that the Ranger’s Lodge, carefully 

conceived as a Palladian villa farm, a model 

which forms a such an important feature of 

the middle-sized Irish country house 

tradition, was justly admired and imitated 

during a period when few major architects 

were working full time in Ireland. Ranger’s 

Lodge was he says, ‘extensively imitated 

because it combined refinement, and in 

places splendour, with practical design and 

affordability’. 

The penultimate chapter of the book is a 

valuable discussion of the idea of the 

amateur architect. This is undoubtedly a 

subject of core significance to this period. It 

will be of interest to any student of 

eighteenth-century country house design in 

the years before the establishment of a 

straightforward architectural profession 

(amateurs leave less evidence in the form of 

bills and accounts and were often rewarded 

with patronage and favours rather than 

straight fees). The ubiquity of amateur 

influence was noted even by near 

contemporaries, including James Gandon 

who became the leading architect in Ireland 

from the 1790s and spoke disparagingly of 

the quality of Irish gentry houses, 

complaining that they were too often 

designed by their owners and built buy local 

masons. 

H. M. Colvin thought it better to stick to the 

idea of the ‘gentleman architect’, and this 


was a phrase used in the period, but 

Malcomson argues the case for retaining a 

distinction between the amateur architect 

and the gentleman architect. He is also 

persuasive in putting forward the idea that 

the amateur had a longer and more 

pervasive influence on Irish domestic and 

public architecture up to the 1790s, different 

from the story in England. Malcolmson points 

to the designs of Francis Bindon, William 

Smyth, Thomas Burgh, and Agmondisham 

Vesey – the latter designed the elegant 

Lucan House for himself, according to James 

Boswell, while asking advice from Chambers 

and Wyatt on the way. Knowledge of 

architecture and judgement in things 

architectural was evidently also used as a 

tool of social advancement and reputation, 

especially among the ambitious and the 

rising nouveau riche. 

Malcolmson also notes the intriguing 

example of Davis Dukart, Piedmontese by 

origin, who designed a number of houses 

and a palace for Archbishop Robinson of 

Armagh, but who was attacked in print in 

1770, as a ‘gentleman adventurer. . . [who] … 

picking up from the tattered remains of an 

old edition of Palladio . . . a [design for a] 

palace for a Rt Rnd P[rimat]e . . . was 

immediately proclaimed all over the west an 

Architect’. The influence of the many pattern 

books and illustrated architectural treatises 

known to have been circulating in mideighteenth-century 

Ireland clearly also adds 

to the complication of who designed what 

and why. 

This book is a prodigious work of scholarship, 

and a valuable addition to the study of Irish 

architectural history. Its density of fact and 

reference do sometimes need careful 

navigation, and, to my mind, the quotations 

from modern architectural historians 

describing buildings distract from the flow of 

an argument effectively illustrated by 

documentary evidence. There are also not 

enough photographic illustrations and plans 

in a book that, in effect, explores so many 

houses in terms of detail and plan (and no 

photographs of the surviving Clements’ era 

interiors of Áras an Uachtaráin). But these 

points are modest quibbles in the face of so 

much original research which deftly clears up 

the flaws of a much repeated orthodoxy, and 

more excitingly realigns this mid-eighteenthcentury 

architectural story as one much more 

about the nature of patronage, social and 

political allegiance, cultural standing and 

fashion than the story of any individual 

design. 

Jeremy Musson 

KATHLEEN JAMES-CHAKRABORTY: Architecture Since 

1400 (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) 515 pp, 

c. 300 illus. £37.50 (pbk.) ISBN: 9780816673971 

It is clear from the outset that Kathleen 

James-Chakraborty’s Architecture Since 1400 

aims to set itself apart from many previous 

surveys of architectural history. The 

introduction opens with the Tomb of Timur 

in Samarqand, Uzbekistan (1404) and the 

Glass House at São Paolo, Brazil, by Lina Bo 

Bardi (1951). These two buildings are not 

drawn from the usual European/North 

American canon that figures in many surveys 

of architectural history; moreover, the Glass 

House was designed by a woman. Over the 

course of the next thirty chapters, James- 

Chakraborty looks not only at the ‘usual 

suspects’ who typically appear in this kind of 

book (from Bramante to Le Corbusier) but 

also sheds light on subjects whose 

geographical locations (Africa, South 

America, Asia) have often caused them to be 

marginalised in English-language historical 

circles, as well as people who have been 

hitherto excluded because of their gender, 

ethnicity, or non-professional status. 

Looking at architecture beyond Europe and 

North America is, of course, not new, and 

there is already a number of surveys that do 

precisely such a thing, such as A History of 

World Architecture by Michael Fazio, Marian 

Moffett, and Lawrence Wodehouse 

(Laurence King, 3rd edition, 2013). Similarly 

the influence of transnational thinking and 

postcolonial theory has prompted the 

welcome engagement in new and deeper 

ways of architectural historians in Britain and 

beyond with the buildings and built 

landscapes of the non-western world, while 

since the 1980s there has been much fruitful 

work on the important roles of women in 

architecture as designers, active patrons, and 

critics. What James-Chakraborty does is 

explicitly to synthesise a lot of this thinking in 

an accessible way, and to add to it her own 

lucid analysis. Furthermore, she is interested 

not only in buildings and designers, but also 

with the social contexts in which architecture 

was created and used. Her survey thus 

proceeds not as a canon of ‘dead white 

males’ or evolving styles, but as a story of 

people creating buildings that convey ideas 

and accommodate functions. 

The consciously revisionist agenda evident in 

the choice of examples discussed in the 

introduction is continued by the opening 

chapters of the book. For James-Chakraborty, 

1400 is a key year in the development of 

ideas of architectural modernity, which she 

considers first in relation to Ming and Qing 

China and then the palace city of Cuzco 

before continuing with Bramante and 

Florence. These subjects, seemingly 

disparate at first sight, are presented as 

having much in common: we read of an 

interest in innovative structural design and a 

growing amount of contact with other 

cultures. Similar contrasts and juxtapositions 

occur through the book, allowing James- 

Chakraborty effectively to develop her 

analysis, in which architecture is critically 

bound up with modernity and the process of 

modernisation. This idea, she argues, is a 

useful lens through which to explore 

multiple contexts, with even those working 

in ostensibly traditional ways seeking to 

evolve their work in the light of new 

possibilities and needs. At the same time, she 

is keen to reject the idea that ideas were 

diffused from a modernising ‘centre’ to a 

backward ‘periphery’. The developments of 

Renaissance Italy are thus not privileged over 

contemporaneous developments elsewhere 

in Europe, while the very real innovations of 

non-western architecture are given ample 

discussion. There is also a sense of ideas 

being fed from the so-called ‘periphery’ back 

to the centre: the idea of the plaza, translated 

from South America to Madrid, is but one. 

And in the book’s closing chapter, which 

returns to China, we are reminded of the 

global context of contemporary design as 

well as the possible locus of the future avantgarde. 

The book is clearly and lucidly written, with 

just enough background detail about the 

buildings it discusses and the wider contexts 

in which they existed to aid the non-expert 

reader without getting bogged down or 

becoming irritating for the more 


experienced. Good use is made of 

architectural drawings, although the quality 

of reproduction of some of the photographs 

(such as that of St Pancras Station) does leave 

a little to be desired. 

Inevitably when reading this kind of survey 

one can always quibble about what is and 

isn’t included depending on one’s own 

interests and preferences. Louis Kahn is given 

plenty of space alongside Le Corbusier and 

Walter Gropius, but Alvar Aalto is relegated 

to a single line. Nicholas Hawksmoor and 

John Vanbrugh are absent, and, perhaps 

bizarrely given James-Chakraborty’s 

relatively even-handed account of other 

continents, there is nothing about Australia 

or New Zealand. (As a historian of twentiethcentury 

Britain, the realisation that my own 

field was not going to get a look-in – beyond 

brief mentions of Letchworth and 

Mackintosh – suggested what it might be like 

to stare into the Total Perspective Vortex of 

Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the 

Galaxy, which revealed to its hapless victim 

their insignificant position within the overall 

cosmos.) 

One might challenge some of the 

fundamental assumptions of the book. While 

James-Chakraborty makes a convincing case 

for modernity as a focus for global 

architectural history over a long period, is 

this the only way? What about conscious 

traditionalisms? What about conservation? 

We might also question what the 

‘Architecture’ in Architecture Since 1400 

means, for it is not defined. Pevsner’s famous 

comparison of Lincoln Cathedral and the 

bicycle shed presumably does not hold water 

in the expanded landscape presented here, 

but what might replace it? 

Ultimately, Architecture Since 1400 attempts a 

tricky task, namely to cover a lot of ground 

whilst dealing with the particularities of 

certain contexts. It more than succeeds in 

this ambitious aim, in a way following the 

Annales school’s approach to social history 

by fusing a broad narrative with microanalysis. 

It therefore deserves a place not 

only on the student reading lists for which it 

has obviously been written but as a valuable 

primer or refresher for the rest of us. 

Alistair Fair 

The Bund, Shanghai, China, with Palmer and Turner, Sassoon House (Cathay Hotel), 1926– 29; and Palmer and 

Turner with Lu Qianshou, Bank of China on right. Courtesy of Don Choi 

ELIZABETH GOLDRING: Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 

and the World of Elizabethan Art (Yale University Press, 

2014, 380 pp, 100 col and 111 b&w illus, £40, ISBN: 

9780300192247) 

Architecture is rarely considered in relation 

to Elizabethan courtiers’ collections of 

paintings in the 1570s and 80s, so it is good to 

meet a work that not only reveals an 

enthusiastic collector, but also considers the 

relation of the artworks to the spaces in 

which they were hung. Elizabeth Goldring’s 

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and the World 

of Elizabethan Art is an ambitious project that 

establishes Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester as 

a major patron and collector, and seeks to 

remove historic prejudices that have 

blighted his reputation since soon after his 

death. 

The heart of the study lies in three 

remarkable appendices that transcribe, 

decode and make sense of the many often 

battered inventories of Leicester’s collections 

at his various properties: Kenilworth Castle in 

Warwickshire, Leicester House in London, 

and Wanstead in Essex. Such archival 

achievement transforms the face of our study 

of Elizabethan art. Goldring has also 

uncovered portions of Leicester’s 

correspondence with his collecting agents in 

Europe, thereby extending our awareness of 

links with the Continent and its worlds of 

collecting. Leicester, keenly conscious of the 

political uses to which portraits could be put, 

pursued artworks energetically, whether they 

were to be found in Italy or Antwerp. 

Goldring also argues that the patronage of 

Leicester and his group, in which his nephew 

Sir Philip Sidney was pre-eminent, enhanced 

the fortunes of painting in England. 

An intricate agenda is thoughtfully and 

clearly presented. Part I, setting out the 


milieu of his powerful and often unfortunate 

earlier sixteenth-century Dudley forebears, 

proposes Leicester as a ‘noble Maecenas’. 

Part II follows Robert Dudley into his earlship, 

revealing how his princely ambitions 

flourished alongside his success as the 

queen’s favourite. He was keen on portraits 

of himself, sitting for at least twenty during 

his career. Such paintings might function as 

tokens of exchange with other powerful 

figures, and as symbols in a desired 

relationship with Elizabeth. They are also 

mirrors of his self-importance and 

remarkably natty wardrobe. His staunch 

Protestantism lead into his engagement with 

the Netherlands in the 1580s, and Goldring 

demonstrates how Antwerp’s riches in artists 

and paintings spurred on Leicester’s 

collecting. Part III, on Leicester’s buildings 

and their relation to his various collections, is 

particularly successful. A tour through 

Kenilworth Castle is lucid and well illustrated, 

ending with the suggestion that the 

paintings – accumulated around Leicester’s 

ambitions to entertain Elizabeth, culminating 

in the Kenilworth festivities of 1575 – were 

housed in the large dancing chamber within 

‘Leicester’s Building’, his addition to the old 

premises. Goldring convincingly argues how 

his gallery must have been shaped by Paulo 

Giovio’s example, whose collection of 500 

paintings, mainly of uomini illustri, had 

become famous across Europe. The sections 

on Leicester House and Wanstead are 

likewise ground-breaking. Goldring pursues 

what may be the famous portrait of Philip 

Sidney by Veronese through Leicester House 

through to its last known location, shortly 

after Leicester’s death, at Benington in 

below The ‘Newnham Paddox’ painting (based on a 

now-lost fresco of c. 1620 at Newnham Paddox, 

Warwickshire), which depicts Kenilworth Castle much 

as it must have appeared at the time of Elizabeth I’s 

celebrated visit of 1575. (English Heritage) 

Hertfordshire. Her suggestion that Leicester 

House bred an ‘English Accademia’ which 

nurtured not only the writing of Philip 

Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, but also the 

development of an early modern English 

discourse on painting, is slightly less 

convincing since many of the texts she cites 

involve the literary conventions of ut pictura 

poesis. Dudley’s death, at the age of fifty-six, 

was unexpected – and resulted in the 

breaking up of his collection. Family feuding, 

his debts to the crown and the accidents of 

time led to the disappearance of the 

majority. 

While Goldring’s detective skills have 

revealed a treasure trove of information 

around Leicester’s paintings, her wish to 

provide the whole picture can lead her to ask 

the data for more answers than it can 

provide, and there are rather many phrases 

of the ‘it is impossible to know’ and ‘it may be 

the case’ variety. And there is perhaps some 

wishful thinking when she hears ‘an allusion 

to the ageing . . . Bronzino’ (p. 68) in the 

correspondence between Leicester and his 

Italian contact. 

Her study raises fascinating critical questions. 

Leicester collected kitchen and market 

paintings by Hubert van Beuckelaar, which 

have the character (visible in the quartet by 

his brother Joachim, in the National Gallery) 

of satisfying what van Mander called the 

greed of the eye. These were paintings that 

could breed ‘delectation’ in ‘the beholders 

eye’, as Thomas Dekker wrote in 1606. Were 

Leicester’s exemplars – and there may have 

been others in London – seen by enough 

people to make a difference to the way 

people talked and wrote about – and even 

saw – such things? Goldring’s achievement, 

in a beautifully presented book, will certainly 

inspire fresh studies into the visual arts of 

early modern Britain. 

Lucy Gent 

CHARLES WEMYSS: The Noble Houses of Scotland 

1660–1800 (Prestel, 2014, 340 pp, 199 b&w and col. 

Illus., £40, ISBN: 9783791347622) 

‘At first sight this may look like a glossy 

coffee-table book in which the illustrations 

bear little relevance to the text . . . ’. One can 

understand why the author worries that it 

will be dismissed as lightweight: the dust 

jacket features a ravishing photo of Glamis 

Castle, sun-bathed pink sandstone emerging 

from green lush summer foliage against the 

lavender background of the Grampians, 

while a quick flick through the contents 

reveals equally luscious photography in 

quantities that appear to outnumber the 

pages with text. Architectural historians are 

so inured to reading standard texts with 

illustrations in inadequate numbers and size 

and of indifferent quality that we are 

instinctively suspicious that such a beautiful 

book can say anything worthwhile. However, 

readers who repress their inner puritan will 

be rewarded with a milestone on the road to 

reassessing early modern Scottish 

architecture, setting it within a wider 

European perspective, as the foreword by 

the leading Dutch architectural historian, 

Konrad Ottenheym, makes clear. 

Charles Wemyss was a student of the late 

Charles McKean at Dundee, and Noble Houses 

can be seen as a continuation of the latter’s 

groundbreaking The Scottish Chateau: the 

Country House in Renaissance Scotland (2001), 

which challenged the myth that the 

persistence of towers and battlements in 

Scottish early modern architecture indicated 

backwardness. 

The body of the book is structured as three 

general chapters followed by three focusing 

on twelve houses from the late seventeenth 

to the late eighteenth centuries, 

exemplifying the interplay between change 

and continuity during the period. 


The first chapter explores why even after the 

Restoration in 1660, many Scottish patrons 

preferred to keep the trappings of 

fortification, when remodelling their 

ancestral seats. Scotland, unable to compete 

with England in terms of wealth, could claim 

superiority in terms of history, believing it 

had been unconquered since 330 BC. Its 

nobles used architecture to emphasise their 

lineage just like the old noblesse de l’épée in 

Holland and France, where so many Scots 

continued to be educated. The second 

chapter is a distillation of the author’s 

fascinating thesis (unpublished but available 

online) on how the organisation of the 

Scottish Treasury post-1660 on the French 

model, allowed its commissioners to cream 

off vast amounts for their personal gain, 

which several spent on house building, 

opting more for classical villas than castles. 

Whatever the exterior style, both types of 

houses opted for modern planning, and for 

including a full state apartment, in the vain 

hope that the monarch might some day visit 

Scotland again. The third chapter looks at the 

impact of new architectural ideas on Scottish 

building practice. British architectural history 

has concentrated on the impact of Palladio’s 

pattern book, at the expense of those of his 

contemporary, Jacques Androuet du 

Cerceau, which, certainly in Scotland, appear 

to have been as influential until at least 1750. 

While Du Cerceau’s chateau designs eschew 

overt military symbolism, the prevalence of 

corner towers evokes the air of a castle, 

characterised neatly by Wemyss as a ‘noble 

silhouette’. 

The dozen houses selected for discussion in 

the second part of the book exemplify 

Wemyss’ themes perfectly. A view in Slezer’s 

Theatrum Scotiae shows the originally 

sixteenth-century Thirlestane Castle 

remodelled with a central pediment, which 

appears never to have been executed. 

Slezer’s engraving probably depends on a 

project drawing of Sir William Bruce, 

Surveyor of the King’s Buildings in Scotland, 

for his patron, the Duke of Lauderdale, virtual 

viceroy of Scotland. Bruce was also a treasury 

commissioner, so effectively lining his 

pockets through crown service that he was 

able to build to Kinross House, the best 

example of the post-Restoration classical 

house, before falling from grace. However, it 

is telling that Lauderdale rejected the 

pediment to his castle, which would have 

undoubtedly diluted its noble silhouette. 

After the 1707 Union, the most successful 

architect, William Adam, furnished the 

nouveau riche legal aristocracy with a series 

of Italianate villas, such as the House of Dun. 

Duff House, however, despite its full classical 

detailing (including a pediment), still has 

corner towers, thus supplying the noble 

silhouette befitting its builder, William Braco, 

who fought tenaciously to become the first 

Earl of Fife. 

The last two houses to be considered are 

both by Robert Adam, and inspired by Italy. 

Robert Adam’s spectacular Oval Staircase at Culzean © 

Fiona Hutchinson 

But while Gosford, a seaside villa for the Earl 

of Wemyss, is modelled on ancient Roman 

baths, Culzean, for the Earl of Cassillis, owes 

its great rotunda to Renaissance castles such 

as those at Tivoli and Ostia, here combined 

with Scottish bartisans. Nothing exemplifies 

better how Scotland maintained its 

architectural distinctiveness until the 

Victorian Baronial revival, its version of 

national romanticism. 

To conclude: besides gracing any coffee 

table and being impeccably scholarly, Noble 

Houses is also eminently affordable. Every 

library should have one. 

Ian Campbell 

Disclaimer 

The views and opinions expressed in the articles 

in The Architectural Historian are those of the 

author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the 

views or opinions of the editor, the reviews 

editor, the society or the publisher. The 

Architectural Historian can in no way be held 

liable for any direct or indirect damage that 

may arise from such views. 

Contact the Book Reviews Editor, Cat Gray, 

by emailing reviewseditor@sahgb.org.uk

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