2016_ArchHist-Aug

The 

ARCHITECTURAL 

HISTORIAN 

Issue 3, August 2016 

ISSN 2056–9181 

IN THIS ISSUE: Kerry Downes on English Baroque | Edward Maufe’s other cathedral | The beauty of Brutalism | 

A James Gibbs mystery | The strange world of the long weekend

The 

ARCHITECTURAL 

HISTORIAN 

Issue 3, August 2016 

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Society of Architectural History of Great Britain. 

Welcome to the latest issue of The Architectural Historian. As usual, our features range 

far and wide, from Alistair Fair’s appraisal of Edward Maufe’s Bradford Cathedral (page 

4) and its place in a rather neglected strand of modern architectural history, to Kerry 

Downes’ reflections on the 50th anniversary of his seminal work English Baroque Architecture 

(page 20). 

But sometimes the continuities are as striking as the differences. It is interesting, for 

example, to find Denys Lasdun making an appearance not only in Barnabas Calder’s 

passionate defence of Brutalism (page 24) but also in Downes’ article as one of the first 

modern architects to appreciate the ‘gratuitous lumps of masonry’ in the powerful 

forms of Hawksmoor’s churches. 

Likewise, James Gibbs first enters the scene as the possible architect of Antony 

House, the first Georgian house in Cornwall (page 14). Gibbs’s St Martin-in-the-Fields 

also appears in the mural of Rex Whistler’s extravagant Tent Room at Port Lympne 

(page 18). This theatrical ‘fairy palace’ on the Kent coast, designed by Philip Tilden for 

the Conservative MP Sir Philip Sassoon, captures much of the heady atmosphere of 

the country house between the wars, as brilliantly evoked in Adrian Tinniswood’s new 

book, The Long Weekend. It is a very different world to that of the eighteenth-century 

baronet Sir William Carew, quietly planning his new house at Antony with his mystery 

architect. 

Speaking of Tinniswood, our Q&A kicks off our new ‘books and journals’ section, 

which will include regular interviews with authors, as well as features on classic books 

and periodicals. This replaces the previous book reviews section, which has moved to 

the SAHGB journal, Architectural History. Happy reading, and please do get in touch 

with your own reflections on the content or suggestions for articles – your feedback 

and input are always much appreciated. 

Nick Jones, editor 

The Architectural Historian would like to thank the following contributors: 

Barnabas Calder 

Nicholas Cooper 

Kerry Downes 

Alistair Fair 

Neil Hooper 

Chris Pickford 

Frances Sands 

Adrian Tinniswood 

Cover image The Hermit’s Castle, Achmeluich, by David Scott. © Barnabas Calder / Twitter: @BrutalConcrete 

SAHGB 

The Society of 

Architectural 

Historians of 

Great Britain 

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.

Contents 

p. 4 

p. 10 

p. 18 

p. 20 

Features 

4 A new ‘high place’ in Bradford 

Alistair Fair makes the case for Edward Maufe’s northern cathedral 

14 The first Georgian house in Cornwall 

Paul Holden charts the evolution of Antony House 

Regulars 

10 Collections in focus 

Sir John Soane’s drawing collection by Frances Sands 

12 Competition 

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

13 Society news 

Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion shortlist, PhD donations and upcoming events 

27 A week in the life … 

… of archivist Chris Pickford, as he finishes revising Pevsner’s Warwickshire 

Books and journals 

18 Keeping the party going 

Adrian Tinniswood’s new book, The Long Weekend, sheds new light on the 

country house between the wars 

20 English Baroque Architecture at 50 

Kerry Downes reflects on his seminal work 

23 Around a journal in 80 seconds 

Introducing The James M. MacLaren Society Journal 

24 Back to our Brutes 

Barnabas Calder explains why it’s time to reassess architecture’s angriest era 

The Architectural Historian Issue 3 / August 2016 3

F E A T U R E 

A new ‘high place’ 

in Bradford 

Alistair Fair makes the case for Edward 

Maufe’s northern cathedral and a more 

inclusive history of twentieth-century 

architecture 

ALAN BAXTER AND ASSOCIATES 

In 1919, Bradford was selected as the 

centre of a new West Yorkshire diocese, 

one of several new Church of England 

sees created during the nineteenth and early 

twentieth centuries in response to 

urbanisation and population growth. The 

city’s historic central parish church – largely 

dating from the fourteenth and fifteenth 

centuries, and situated on a prominent 

hillside site – was selected as the diocese’s 

cathedral, and was subsequently extended 

between 1952 and 1965 to the designs of 

Sir Edward Maufe. Today, Maufe’s work at 

Bradford is less well-known than the 

cathedral he designed at Guildford, which, 

unlike Bradford Cathedral, was an all-new 

building, while the fundamentally stylistic 

basis of much of Maufe’s output more 

generally has attracted relatively little 

attention from historians, who have tended 

to focus on more consciously ‘Modern’ 

architects. Yet Bradford Cathedral represents 

a successful reconciliation of architectural 

continuity and modernity. Indeed, these 

values were at the heart of Maufe’s 

understanding of good contemporary 

architecture. 

The question ‘what is a cathedral?’ was 

something which all the new Anglican 

dioceses of this period had to face. Upon the 

enthronement of the first Bishop of Sheffield 

in 1914, one newspaper reported that ‘the 

parish church can never be made to look like 

a cathedral [. . .] We hope, for the sake of the 

dignity of the diocese, that some of the great 

men of Sheffield begin to develop cathedral 

ideas’. 1 ‘Cathedral ideas’ seems to have 

meant something along the lines of York 

Minster, larger and architecturally grander 

than a parish church, and various 

monumental schemes were accordingly 

4 The Architectural Historian Issue 3 / August 2016


facing page Central tower ceiling 

above Maufe’s ‘modern Gothic’ juxtaposed with the 

medieval tower 

drawn up for Sheffield by the architect 

Charles Nicholson, reflecting the provost’s 

view that ‘we need a cathedral, not an 

enlarged parish church’. Something of the 

same spirit is evident in Bradford at the same 

time. During the 1920s, schemes were 

proposed by Nicholson and by Giles Gilbert 

Scott in which the existing church would, in 

effect, become the south aisle of a 

substantial new structure. However, just as 

little came of Nicholson’s contemporaneous 

plans for Sheffield (or, for that matter, Edwin 

Lutyens’ grand Liverpool Metropolitan 

Cathedral), the scale and likely expense of 

Nicholson and Scott’s proposals for Bradford 

counted against them, as well as the decision 

of the newly founded diocese to focus on its 

community mission by supporting its poorer 

benefices. 2 Nonetheless, in 1938, the 

expansion of the building was once again 

back on the agenda. 3 The previous year, it 

had been discovered that the medieval 

chancel had structural problems; in addition, 

the death of the cathedral’s organist, Henry 

Coates, prompted calls for a new Song 

School to be provided in his memory. 4 Maufe 

may already have been working on the 

project; an article of 1955 suggests that he 

was appointed in 1935. 5 

Edward Maufe (born Edward Muff) was from 

a well-known West Riding family. His initial 

work was largely in the Arts and Crafts 

tradition, but by the 1930s he had turned to a 

more stylish moderne idiom for his domestic 

commissions. During the 1920s, he 

developed a notable reputation as a 

specialist in the design of church buildings. 

Guildford Cathedral, the competition for 

which he won in 1931, illustrates many of the 

themes that are evident in Maufe’s churches 

of this period: straightforward massing; plain 

walls with relatively unornamented pointedarch 

windows; a simple range of bespoke 

furnishings and fabrics; and close 

collaboration with artists. His additions to 

Bradford Cathedral reprised these ideas. 

Several key aspects of the finalised scheme 

appear in a sketch of 1940: two-storey wings 

to the north and south of the tower, and a 

baptistery (ultimately not built) between the 

new south-western wing and the south 

porch, whose form recalls the Scottish 

National War Memorial at Edinburgh Castle 

Early sketch by Maufe showing the western extensions 

and the unexecuted baptistery BRADFORD CATHEDRAL 



Bradford Cathedral, phasing diagram 

facing page The choir and sanctuary, looking 

through towards the Lady Chapel ALAN BAXTER AND 

ASSOCIATES 

Cathedral Close, showing the medieval nave and 

Maufe’s Song School extension ALAN BAXTER AND 

ASSOCIATES 

by Robert Lorimer (1927). 6 A series of colour 

plans and elevations of c. 1940–41 show a 

very similar scheme. 7 By January 1941, Maufe 

was also designing eastern extensions. 

Maufe’s proposals for additions to the east 

and west of the historic church contrast with 

the grander proposals of Nicholson and 

Scott. They retained the modest scale of the 

existing building while nonetheless 

providing the additional accommodation 

required by the cathedral: space for the choir 

to robe and rehearse, offices and clergy 

vestries, and an expanded chancel, suitable 

for community and diocesan use with 

peripheral chapels. Nonetheless, status and 

register remained important. As Maufe put it 

in 1955, ‘More room is desirable, but this is 

not as important as making the building as a 

whole worthy of its purpose as a cathedral 

and worthy of the diocese and the city.’ 8 

Although donations to a ‘Rebuilding and 

Expansion Fund’ feature in the cathedral’s 

cash books in 1941, a committee was 

convened in 1945 to launch a concerted 

fundraising appeal, with a new provost, John 

Tiarks, seemingly supplying a catalysing 

presence. Maufe continued to refine his 

proposals. One drawing, for example, shows 

the replacement of the adjacent Post Office 

building with paired flights of steps 

connecting the cathedral close to the new 

inner ring road that was then proposed. 9 

Work began on site in 1953, as post-war 

austerity eased, with the construction of the 

western extensions. The new chancel was 

complete by 1963; the Chapter House 

followed in 1965. But there Maufe’s work 

ended. The baptistery and extended south 

aisle, scheduled for 1966–67, was not built, 

and neither was a western porch. 10 Tiarks had 

left in 1962, but the failure to complete 

Maufe’s scheme was principally the result of 

escalating costs. In November 1967, Maufe 

wrote that a new design for the west porch 

would be ‘considerably less expensive’ than 

his earlier proposal as a result of omitting 

‘the [. . .] Gothic windows and much of the 

carving’. 11 Also unexecuted were Maufe’s 

proposals for the cathedral close, one version 

of which included a medium-rise block of 

flats for clergy. 

That most of Maufe’s work was concentrated 

at the east end of the cathedral is important. 

In 1948, he wrote that a church should 

principally be considered as ‘the setting up of 

a “high place”’. 12 In Bradford, it was this part 

of the cathedral that was most radically 

transformed. The previous chancel was 

replaced with a new choir and sanctuary, and 

a new Lady Chapel. Running around the 

choir and sanctuary is an ambulatory which 



part comprises the two medieval chapels. On 

the north side of the Lady Chapel is the 

Chapel of the Holy Spirit, a simple space for 

private prayer. Along the north side of the 

choir, beyond the ambulatory, is the St Aidan 

Chapel, with the chapter house above. The 

choir itself is arranged in the traditional 

antiphonal manner, with stalls facing each 

other. The organ is also found here, its pipes 

having been moved from the earlier chancel. 

In a study of European churches, Maufe 

praised those which he felt achieved a 

dramatic quality as a result of their 

architecture, seeing the need to achieve a 

‘spiritual’ effect as critical in religious 

buildings. 13 At Bradford, this effect was 

created partly by the arrangement and 

lighting of the various spaces, and partly by 

their decoration and furnishing. On entering 

the nave, the chancel and sanctuary catch 

the eye as a result of three factors: their 

white-painted walls, which contrast with the 

unplastered stone of the historic nave; their 

light airiness, the product partly of these 

white-painted walls and partly the natural 

light admitted at clerestory level; and their 

height, with the choir being slightly raised 

above the level of the nave and featuring the 

tall lantern tower. The narrow arches behind 

the sanctuary not only add to the sense of 

height but also offer glimpses through to the 

William Morris windows at the far east end, 

re-sited by Maufe from the original chancel 

to the Lady Chapel. Characteristic Maufe 

details are abundant, including delicate light 

fittings, blue-painted ceilings with gold stars, 

and limed oak furnishings with Maltese cross 

details. Painted ceilings are a particular 

feature, and are deployed more widely than 

is the case in the rather austere interior of 

Guildford Cathedral, not least in the Song 

Room, which features images of medieval 

musical instruments. 

By the 1950s, Maufe’s architectural outlook 

was sometimes considered old-fashioned, 

neither modern enough for Modernists nor 

sufficiently archaeological to suit 

traditionalists. In February 1956, the 

Architects’ Journal published a letter written 

by the young architectural historian Andor 

Gomme, who dubbed Bradford Cathedral a 

‘heavy, dull, ill-mannered and 

ill-proportioned’ example of ‘queer Tudor’. 14 

He would have preferred something ‘boldly 

modern’. Maufe sought to reassure the 

cathedral’s provost, calling the comments 

‘malicious’ and noting that the AJ was known 

as the ‘boys’ own paper’ for its appeal to 

younger architects. 15 But, later the same year, 

Maufe’s proposals for new buildings at 

St John’s College, Oxford, were sidelined by a 

group of Fellows including the young 

The painted ceiling above the choir 

Howard Colvin, with the avant-garde 

Architects’ Co-Partnership being appointed 

in his place. 16 Maufe, it seemed, was losing 

ground to a new generation. 

Yet Maufe was not entirely reactionary. We 

have, for example, already noted his moderne 

domestic interiors. Furthermore, like many 

architects in inter-war Britain, Maufe enjoyed 

contemporary northern European 

architecture. He was especially impressed 

with Ivar Tengbom’s Högalid church in 

Stockholm (1916–23), which blends simple 

brick elevations with elements abstracted 

from historic precedent. Scandinavian 

architecture, Maufe argued, ‘combined 

freshness without obviously breaking with 

tradition’. 17 As he saw it, twentieth-century 

architecture should be clearly distinguished 

from its forebears, yet without entirely 

abandoning the past. Writing in 1948, for 

example, he argued that ‘we should yet build 

on tradition: our churches should not be 

merely reproductions in the manner of some 

previous style which happens to be 



fashionable’. 18 Good architecture would, he 

felt, reflect contemporary conditions in its 

materials and appearance while 

demonstrating an underlying continuity in its 

‘mass, volume and line’, and in its planning. 19 

Such qualities are evident, for example, not 

only in his churches but also his North Court 

at St John’s, Cambridge (1938–40), which 

fuses Scandinavian influence with 

Cantabridgian tradition. Furthermore, his 

taste could be catholic. Maufe was one of the 

judges who in 1951 selected Basil Spence to 

design the new Coventry Cathedral. Spence’s 

design, though not radical (and criticised in 

some quarters as a result), further abstracted 

precedent, avoiding, for example, Maufe’s 

pointed arches. In 1962, Maufe wrote 

approvingly to Spence that ‘it was comforting 

to find that a young thing like you was 

speaking the same language that I do’. 20 

Ultimately, we should see Maufe’s work as a 

response to the challenges and possibilities 

of the modern world that emphasised 

continuity and permanence over radical 

reinvention. These continuities are 

increasingly of interest to architectural 

historians, as the recent volume on the Neo- 

Georgian edited by Julian Holder and 

Elizabeth McKellar demonstrates, and make 

the point that the avant-garde is one side of 

the story of twentieth-century architectural 

history. More traditional approaches and 

‘middle-of-the-road’ Modernisms are also 

worthy of attention. At the same time, we 

should also recognise the innate appeal of 

Maufe’s Bradford. As the reworking of an 

older church rather than an all-new structure, 

it lacks the single-mindedness of Guildford 

Cathedral or Maufe’s churches, but it is 

perhaps the better for it. Maufe himself was 

Good architecture would, Maufe 

felt, reflect contemporary 

conditions in its materials and 

appearance while demonstrating 

an underlying continuity in its 

‘mass, volume and line’, and in 

its planning 

particularly positive about it, seeing Bradford 

as the best ‘high place’ that he created. 21 

Dr Alistair Fair is a Chancellor’s Fellow and 

historian of 20th-century British architecture 

at the University of Edinburgh. He is currently 

completing a substantial book on the new 

theatres built across Britain between 1945 

and 1985. 

1 David Lunn, chapters Toward a History of the 

cathedral and Parish church of St Peter and St Paul, 

Sheffield (Sheffield, 1987), p. 17. 

2 The original drawings by Nicholson and Scott are 

now housed in the RIBA Drawings Collection: 

Nicholson is PA568/9-11, and Scott is 

PB871/ScGG[15]1-3. Nicholson’s scheme is also 

illustrated in Builder, 17 January 1927, and there are 

copies of some of the drawings in the Bradford 

Cathedral archive, BC9. 

3 Bradford Cathedral archive, PCC minutes, May 

1938. 

4 Yorkshire Post, 17 December 1940. 

5 ‘Proposals for the Extension of Bradford 

Cathedral’, Builder, 23 December 1955, pp. 1088–89. 

6 Bradford Cathedral archive, BC9/2. 

7 Bradford Cathedral archive, BC10/20. 

8 Maufe, quoted in fundraising brochure of 1955, 

copy in Bradford Cathedral archive. 

9 Bradford Cathedral archive, Bradford Cathedral 

restoration and extension: preliminary committee 

minutes, 18 October 1946. 

10 Bradford Cathedral archive, Letters file, Maufe 

to Tiarks, 29 December 1961. 

11 Bradford Cathedral archive, Letters file, letter 

from Maufe to Provost, 7 November 1967. 

12 Edward Maufe, Modern church Architecture 

(London, 1948), p. 6. 

13 See e.g. his Modern church architecture, pp. 31 

and 35. 

14 ‘Bradford Cathedral’, Architects’ Journal 123/3181 

(16 February 1956), p. 201. 

15 Copy of the letter filed with correspondence in 

Bradford Cathedral archive. 

16 Geoffrey Tyack, Modern Architecture in an Oxford 

college: St John’s college 1945–2005 (Oxford, 2005), 

pp. 22–23. 

17 Margaret Richardson, ‘Edward Maufe’, Oxford 

Dictionary of National Biography, online at 

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31429 

(accessed on 27 May 2016); see also Maufe, Modern 

church Architecture, p. 51. 

18 Maufe, Modern church Architecture, p. 3. 

19 RIBA, MaE/136/7, Edward Maufe, ‘Modern 

churches’, unpublished MS. Talk, 1931, and 

MaE/136/2, ‘Present-day Architecture’, 1931. 

20 Historic Environment Scotland archive, MS 

2329/ENG/9/9/2/1, letter from Maufe to Spence, n.d. 

[1962]. 

21 Bradford Cathedral archive, letter from Maufe to 

Tiarks, 12 April 1961. 

This article draws on research undertaken in 

2008 to support the production of a 

conservation Management Plan. Astrid 

Hansen, the cathedral’s archivist, helped by 

providing access to the documents. The Plan 

was co-written with my former colleagues at 

Alan Baxter and Associates, who have kindly 

consented to my reuse of some of the material 

here. i am also grateful to the Dean and 

chapter of Bradford cathedral for permission 

to reproduce images. 

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See page 27 for a week in the life of Chris Pickford 


C o L L E C T I o N S I N F o C U S 

Sir John 

Soane’s 

drawing 

collection 

Frances Sands reveals the pedagogical zeal 

and personal sadness that lay behind the 

vast trove of drawings the architect 

amassed during his lifetime 

above T. Lawrence, Portrait of Sir John Soane, 

aged 76, 1829 

above right Soane office Royal Academy lecture 

drawing, Sir William Chambers’ House of Confucius, 

Kew Gardens, c. 1806–15 

ALL IMAGES COURTESY OF THE TRUSTEES OF 

SIR JOHN SOANE’S MUSEUM 

An architect, teacher and collector, Sir 

John Soane left his house-museum in 

Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London to the 

nation. Among his vast collections – which 

include paintings, sculpture, antiquities, 

furniture, books and architectural models – 

Soane’s collection of architectural drawings 

is worthy of particular note. Ranging from 

the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, 

they probably comprise the earliest 

comprehensive architectural drawings 

collection in Britain. 

Born in 1753, John Soane was the son of a 

bricklayer. Aged 15 he began an 

apprenticeship in the office of George Dance 

the Younger, and three years later joined the 

Royal Academy as a student of architecture. 

In 1776, aged 23, Soane won the Royal 

Academy gold medal for architecture, 

bringing him to the attention of King George 

III and resulting in his nomination for the 

King’s Travelling Bursary, which was to fund 

his Grand Tour. In 1778 Soane travelled to 

Italy and busied himself making drawings of 

antique ruins and improving his knowledge 

of the classical tradition. Unfortunately, many 

of Soane’s Grand Tour sketches were lost 

when the bottom of his trunk fell out as he 

crossed the Alps on the way home. 1 

However, he was undeterred and on 

returning to London in 1780 he immediately 

established his own architectural practice, 

quickly achieving success thanks partly to his 

characteristically pared-down treatment of 

classical motifs. Numerous commissions 

followed and, most importantly, in 1788 

Soane was appointed as architect to the Bank 

of England. 

In 1790 Soane’s wife Eliza received a 

considerable inheritance from her uncle, 

enabling Soane to purchase the first of his 

three houses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In order 

to accommodate his growing collection, 

Soane acquired – and rebuilt – numbers 12 

(1792), 13 (1807) and 14 (1823); 2 first living at 12, 

then 13, and developing the treble-width 

museum space across the former stables at 

the rear of the properties. It was this building 

and its important collections which Soane 

left to the nation with a private act of 

Parliament, arranged in 1833 under the 

proviso that the museum should be 

changed as little as possible following 

Soane’s death. 3 

It is both wonderful and rather sad that 

Soane left his collection to the nation. His 

eldest son, John junior, had predeceased him 

in 1823, and his younger son, George – who 

was hot tempered and fiscally profligate – 


above Barnardo della Volpaia, Codex Coner, 

sixteenth century 

right J. M. Gandy, View of part of the Collection of 

Antiquities [at Sir John Soane’s Museum], 1825 

Soane had refused to bail from debtor’s 

prison in 1815. George took his revenge by 

publically criticising his father’s work in The 

champion newspaper, but the result of this 

was tragedy. Already suffering with 

gallstones, Eliza was so heartbroken by her 

son’s actions that she took to her bed and 

died. 4 Deeply affected by Eliza’s death, Soane 

blamed George and disinherited him. 5 

While this story of loss and betrayal is 

dramatic, the most important things to 

remember are Soane’s professional and 

pedagogical successes. Aged 53 in 1806, and 

acclaimed for his architectural achievements, 

Soane was elected as Professor of 

Architecture at the Royal Academy. Required 

to deliver six lectures each year on the 

history of architecture, he illustrated key 

buildings with over 1,000 finely finished 

lecture drawings. 6 These were produced by 

the articled pupils in Soane’s office and at 

considerable personal expense. 7 Soane was 

an ardent advocate of quality architectural 

education: the Napoleonic Wars prevented 

his students from travelling, so the lecture 

drawings provided them with a Grand Tour 

in microcosm. 

Prior to his professorship, Soane was a 

relatively cautious collector of drawings, 8 

and it was his teaching which spurred him to 

collect drawings from offices other than his 

own. From 1810 onwards he became a true 

connoisseur and acquired all manner of 

drawings by the likes of Giovanni Battista 

Montano, John Thorpe, Inigo Jones, 

Christopher Wren, Carlo Fontana, William 

Talman, Nicholas Hawksmoor, John 

vanbrugh, James Gibbs, William Kent, 

Charles Bridgeman, as well as his 

contemporaries Robert Taylor, William 

Chambers, Antonio Zucchi, Robert and James 

Adam, Laurent Pêcheux, Thomas Sandby, 

George Dance and John Nash. Added to 

these were a variety of volumes including 

Italian Renaissance drawings and even the 

Codex Coner (see above left). By Soane’s 


Museum is pleased to have reinstated the 

Soane Study Group, meeting roughly bimonthly 

to hear presentations on 

architectural history. 

Dr Frances Sands is Curator of Drawings 

and Books at the Sir John Soane Museum. 

Her PhD, at the University of York, was 

supported by an SAHGB bursary. 

Adam office, design for the library ceiling, Kenwood, 1767 

death in 1837, the drawings collection was 

composed of 30,000 sheets plus many 

volumes. 

Soane’s intention in leaving his housemuseum 

to the nation was to provide an 

‘academy of architecture’ and his drawings 

collection constitutes a crucial element of 

that purpose. Digital catalogues of the 

drawings appended to the Soane Museum 

website have been underway for a decade. A 

similar catalogue of Soane’s books has 

recently been completed, and work to 

digitise the catalogue of Soane’s archive will 

begin soon. Library materials can be 

consulted by appointment, and the Soane 

1 Sir John Soane’s Museum, A complete 

Description, 2014, p. 106. 

2 J. M. Gandy, View of part of the collection of 

Antiquities [at Sir John Soane’s Museum], 1825. 

3 T. Knox, Sir John Soane’s Museum London, 2013, 

p. 36. 

4 Knox, 2013, p. 33. 

5 S. Palmer, ‘Prelude: the death of Eliza’ in Death 

and Memory: Soane and the Architecture of Legacy, 

2015, p. 5. 

6 M. Richardson, ‘Learning in the Soane office’, in 

The Education of the Architect, Proceedings of the 

22nd Annual Symposium of the Society of 

Architectural Historians of Great Britain, 1993, p. 19. 

7 G. Waterfield (ed.), Soane and Death: The Tombs 

and Monuments of Sir John Soane, 1996, p. 75. 

8 M. Richardson, ‘Sir John Soane as a Collector of 

Drawings’ in P. Thornton, Soane, connoisseur & 

collector, 1995, p. 6. 

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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 September 2016 and the first correct 

answer drawn after the closing date will be 

awarded the prize. The competition is free to 

enter. Good luck! 

Did you recognise the building in Issue 2? It 

was the Liver Building in Liverpool (1908–11) 

by Walter Aubrey Thomas. The winner was 

Rosalind Taylor. 

A few more (faintly flickering) Lamps 

of Architecture, No. 3 

Though Vanburgh politely entreated 

That he might see Blenheim completed, 

The duchess, with venom, 

Screeched “Ban him from Blenheim !” 

So he went away sad, and defeated. 

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) 

For full competition rules, please see page 2 


Alice Davis Hitchcock 

shortlist announced 

Four books on subjects ranging from medieval 

Castile to English Brutalism have been shortlisted 

for the 2016 Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion. 

The ADH award is given annually to the author of a 

literary work which, in the opinion of the SAHGB 

award committee, provides an outstanding 

contribution to the study or knowledge of 

architectural history. The work must be by a British 

author (or authors), or deal with an aspect of the 

architectural history of the British Isles or the 

Commonwealth, and have been published within 

the past two years. 

The winner will be announced at the annual 

lecture at the Courtauld Institute on 17 October. 

S o C I E T Y N E W S 

The four shortlisted books (pictured left) are: 

• Stephen Hague, The Gentleman’s House in the 

British Atlantic World (1680–1780) (Palgrave 

Macmillan, 2015) 

• Elain Harwood, Space, Hope and Brutalism: English 

Architecture 1945–75 (Yale University Press, 2015) 

• Tom Nickson, Toledo cathedral; Building Histories 

in Medieval castile (Pennsylvania State University 

Press 2015) 

• William Whyte, redbrick: A Social and Architectural 

History of Britain’s civic Universities (Oxford 

University Press 2015) 

£16,500 of donations for PhDs 

We are delighted to have recently received three 

donations, totalling £16,500, from trusts to help 

fund the SAHGB PhD Scholarships. In May we 

received £11,500 from the H. B. Allen Charitable 

Trust, and in March we received £4,000 (total to 

date £14,000) from the Thriplow Charitable Trust, 

and £1,000 from the Atlas Fund. We are extremely 

grateful to these trusts for their generous support. 

Our PhD Scholarships help to fill a critical gap in 

postgraduate funding. Not only do they foster 

academic excellence by supporting talented 

students, they also help to identify, showcase and 

nurture the next generation of architectural 

historians. If you know of any potential sources of 

Upcoming events 

Annual lecture 

This year’s annual lecture will be given by Konrad 

Ottenheym, Professor of Architectural History at 

Utrecht University and Director of the Dutch 

Postgraduate School for Art History. Ottenheym is 

a specialist on Dutch seventeenth-century 

architecture, its sources in the Italian Renaissance 

and its influence in Europe. 

The lecture takes place on Monday 17 october 2016 at 6:15 pm 

at the Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, The 

Strand, London. Tickets will be available via 

www.sahgb.org.uk in the autumn. 

funding, or if you are able to assist the Society 

by making a donation towards our Scholarship 

Fund, please contact Lisa Hirst at the email 

address below. 

Do also please consider helping the Society in your 

will. Your solicitor will need to know that our full 

name is the Society of Architectural Historians of 

Great Britain and that we are a registered charity 

and a company limited by guarantee. A legacy ‘for 

general purposes’ is generally the most useful type 

in the long term, but if you or your solicitor would 

like to discuss your legacy before including it your 

will, do feel free to contact lisa@sahgb.org.uk. 

Plymouth conference 

At the time of going to press, a few places remain 

for the Society’s 2016 conference in Plymouth, 

from 1 to 4 September. Delegates will not only get 

to explore John Rennie’s Royal Naval Dockyard and 

the post-war city but also venture further afield 

into east Cornwall to see the large Norman church 

of St Germans Priory adjoining Port Eliot (a house 

in part by John Soane and Henry Harrison), as well 

as Ince Castle and Tremanton Castle. Please check 

www.sahgb.org.uk/conference for details. 


F E A T U R E 

The first Georgian 

house in Cornwall 

Paul Holden charts the evolution of Antony 

House, from a ‘poor home’ to one of the 

county’s finest eighteenth-century estates 

For its 2016 annual conference, SAHGB 

is visiting Devon and Cornwall. One of 

the planned visits is to Antony House, 

near Torpoint, home of the Carew-Pole 

family since the early fifteenth century – and 

a building that Christopher Hussey described 

as ‘perhaps the stateliest house in Cornwall’. 1 

The earliest house stood close to a 

picturesque peninsula formed by the rivers 

Lynher and Tamar, only a short distance east 

to where the present mansion is situated. Of 

this early house we know, little although 

John Norden does fleetingly mention its 

situation in c. 1584 as being ‘profitable and 

pleasant’, 2 even if he appeared far more 

enthralled by the impressive fish ponds 

nearby. Antony at this time would have been 

considered a modest house. Richard Carew 

(1555–1620), who ran the estate from 1577, 

described it as ‘our cold harbour . . . the poor 

home of mine ancestors’, adding that men of 

his social class should keep ‘Liberal, but not 

costly builded or furnished houses’. He died 

in his library, leaving the estate to his son 

Richard (1579–c. 1643), a staunch Puritan who, 

despite being created a Baronet by Charles I 

in 1641, supported the Parliamentarian cause 

in Cornwall and, alongside his son Alexander 

(1609–44), attempted to raise the Cornish 

Militia against the Crown. The 2nd Baronet 

questioned his loyalties, was exposed of 

treachery and executed in December 1644. 

Sir John (1635–92), the 3rd Baronet, 

re-established the family’s Royalist links in 

1660 when he formed part of the Convention 

Parliament that returned the king to power. 

Some work was carried out on the old manor 

house in 1710, soon after the inheritance of 

Sir William Carew (1689–1744), the 5th 

Baronet. 

The incentive to improve the estate appears 

to have come from Sir William’s election to 

Parliament, coupled with the dowry and an 

annual £500 jointure from his marriage to the 

wealthy heiress Lady Anne Coventry. Work 

on an impressive new garden started in July 

1713, the Lambeth nurseryman Humphrey 

Bowen presented expenses of £116 3s 2d for 

plants, £118 5s 0d for making the garden, 

£32 5s 0d for the building of a ‘canall’. Other 

features that Carew aspired to included two 

ponds, a meadow, a wilderness garden and 

an orchard of 500 apple trees. Building works 

were entrusted to the Exeter-based John 

Moyle. He erected extensive new walls 

measuring 575 by 254 feet, using some 

400,000 bricks, which were fired on site. 

Plans for a new house were temporarily 

delayed when, in 1715, Sir William was 

arrested as a Jacobite sympathiser and 

imprisoned in Plymouth Citadel. 

Soon after his father-in-law’s death in 1719, 

building began on Sir William’s new house. 

The plan was for a rectangular, nine-bayed, 

two-storeyed (with attic dormers) house, 

politely faced with red bricks and local 

Pentewan stone and sat beneath a hipped 

slate roof with central pediment on both 

façades. Moyle was again employed, this 

time to build the ‘shell of a house and finding 

all materials, [and] finding all labour . . . 

according to a draft agreed upon in a good 

workman like manner, and to the satisfaction 

of Sir William Carew’. 

Yet, Moyle, it would seem, had little to no 

freedom in the design, as the contract 

implies that this was assigned to a third 

party, perhaps James Gibbs who was cited as 

architect in Magna Britannia (1814). 3 This 

accreditation however has never been 

supported by documentary evidence 

although is known that Gibbs worked in 

Cornwall, most certainly at Trewithen near 

Truro in the 1720s when a similar plan to 

Antony was implemented (see facing page). 4 

Sir William was certainly eligible to be a 

patron of Gibbs, being an influential Tory 

landowner and thereby moving in the same 

cultural and social circles. However, Howard 

Colvin later maintained that Gibbs could not 

‘have designed the main block, which is not 

in his style’, although he does recognise that 

the width of the house shown in plate 57 of 

Gibbs’ Book of Architecture (1728) – entitled ‘a 

house designed for a gentleman in the 

country’ and signed ‘Jacobo Gibbs 

Architecto’ – was identical to that of the 

house as built. 5 It might appear 

inconceivable that the architect could 

illustrate a house that he was not involved 

with. Terry Friedman favoured the idea that 

Gibbs may well have ‘considered 

remodelling the entrance front by facing the 

three centre bays with rusticated stonework’; 

he added that ‘the corners are 

unembellished and a substantial attic 

replaces the dormer roof’. 6 More recently Tim 

Mowl considered the house ‘intensely stiff’ 

compared to the more relaxed garden, 


facing page Richard Carew (1555–1620), English 

School, c. 1586. Carew ran the estate – or his ‘cold 

harbour’ – from 1577 until his death 

above Plan of Trewithen c. 1728, where a similar 

plan to Antony was implemented 

attributing the latter work to ‘a first ranking 

architect [who] was employed here and 

Cornwall has, in all probability, if not in 

documented evidence, a garden here by 

James Gibbs’. 7 

A middle way is dealt with by Helen 

Jacobsen, who has argued that the red brick 

wings with arcaded passages, terminating in 

pagoda-like cupolas, were not part of the 

original design, which therefore suggests 

two architects working independently of 

each other. 8 Gibbs, therefore, may well have 

included the old house as built in order to 

contextualise his plans for the new wings, a 

point suggested by the fact that Sir William 

was one of the few Cornish subscribers to 

‘East Anthony in Cornwall Sr William Carew Bart. oct 19th 1727’ by Edmund Prideaux of Prideaux Place near 

Padstow. This image shows that the perimeter wall and gates were as yet unbuilt 

The Architectural Historian Issue 3 / August 2016 15 

COLLECTION OF P.J.N. PRIDEAUX-BRUNE, PRIDEAUX PLACE CORNWALL RECORD OFFICE/ SHARKFIN MEDIA

left The Bath House (before restoration by the 

National Trust) by Thomas Parlby (1727–1802), whose 

obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine described him 

as ‘Master Mason of HM Docks’ at Stonehouse 

right ‘Eastern End of Antony House’, unknown artist 

c. 1835 

Gibbs’ book. This, coupled with the dearth of 

primary evidence, leads us to further 

speculation that the house was designed by 

an, as yet, unknown Plymouth dockyard 

surveyor, as was the case with several other 

Cornish houses of this period. For this author, 

the house is unmistakably by Gibbs, a point 

proven by its authority, articulation and by its 

similarities to other elevations and plans in 

his Book of Architecture. Christopher Hussey 

rationally concludes: ‘If the attributation [to 

Gibbs] can be substantiated, the design adds 

considerably to the reputation of the 

architect of Ditchley, the Radcliffe Camera 

and St. Mary-le-Strand.’ 9 

If the architect remains somewhat of a 

mystery, the instructions to the builder have 

more clarity. Moyle was employed to 

construct a south-east facing house 101 feet 

wide by 55 feet deep, ‘the middle part where 

the pediment comes to project two foot of a 

side more according as expressed in the 

Draught’, while the cellar storey was to be 

‘sunk under ground . . . and paved with 

Purbeck’. As the specified ‘bricklayer’, Moyle 

was paid £1,260, which suggests that he was 

the main contractor overseeing a team of 

local labour. The contract also specified that 

Moyle took some responsibility for the 

interiors – of note were ‘two staircases, one 

of solid oak from top to bottom of the house, 

the other of clean deal, to go from the cellars’ 

and ‘two door cases of the Doric order, one 

to each front’. The hall, dining room and 

passages were to be ‘paved with what stone 

Sir William pleases; either in square Purbeck 

or in octagon with little squares of marble’. 

Progress on the building programme is 

evident in the date 1721 carved above the 

north front door and 1724, the date the 

records show when the staircase was 

installed and paid for, and when the painter 

and glazier were completing their respective 

tasks. Moyle continued to work at Antony 

until 1727 when the wings were completed, 

as shown in a freehand drawing by Edmund 

Prideaux (see page 15). 

The appeal of Antony is in its proportion and 

poise rather that its embellishments. The 

exterior retains a timeless quality in its simple 

use of locally sourced stone and its Tuscan 

orders on the north front door pilasters. The 

pediments lack cartouches, the cornices are 

naive and the windows are without 

entablatures. The plan too is modest, Gibbs’ 

plate 57 showing a double cube pro-forma 

with two symmetrical ranges set back-toback 

with a grand entrance hall and saloon 

beyond, split by a corridor running through 

the spine of the house. Of the early interiors, 

some Tudor panelling found its way into the 

new house from the old, while a list of 

paintings has survived showing that Sir 

William’s wife brought collections from her 

Croome Court home in Worcestershire. 

The 5th Baronet died in 1744 and was 

succeeded by his only son, Sir Coventry, who 

died without heir in 1748. The house briefly 

transferred to cousins before passing to the 

great-great-grandson of Sir John, the 3rd 

Baronet, Reginald Pole (d. 1835), who 

assumed the name Carew as specified in the 

terms of Sir Coventry’s will. In 1758 William 

Borlase sketched the south front just as 

further alterations were planned, while the 

1775 estate map by Thomas Pride shows the 

development of the gardens, with the 

wilderness garden of 1713 fully matured and 

the pleasure grounds situated towards the 

river having a large rabbit warren bordering 

the water’s edge. Soon after, in 1788, Thomas 

Parlby designed a bath house with arched 

windows and doors, a changing room with 

fireplace and a lunge pool measuring 18 feet 

long and 5 feet deep which was filled by river 

water (see above left). 

Prideaux’s 1727 drawing of the gardens shows 

spectacular tree-lined avenues and a walled 

formal garden, compete with terraced 

parterres. By 1792, Reginald Pole Carew MP, a 

privy councillor under William Pitt, 

considered it was time for a change and 

employed Humphrey Repton to produce a 

‘Red Book’. Pole Carew was overwhelmed 

with excitement, pronouncing on 

20 December 1792 that he ‘could not go to 

sleep until I thoroughly examined the 

treasure you put in my hands’. 10 As with the 

majority of Repton’s commissions, the 

mansion, particularly its position and 

appearance, featured strongly in the 

landscape plan. Of the house itself, Repton 

wanted to remove the parterre garden to the 

north and the enclosure wall. He wrote: ‘The 

arcade and pavilions beyond the office 

wings, will of course become useless in this 

new approach.’ He also considered adding 

an extra storey to Gibbs’s wings ‘to connect 

the house with the offices and give a 

communication on the upper floor’. It 

remains generally unclear what work he 

oversaw himself. Although his advice for the 

house and terrace was not used, it is evident 

that the lodges at Antony Passage and at the 

main gate (which has been attributed to 

John Nash) closely resemble Repton’s 

drawings. 11 Indeed, the lodges appear on 


T. Eastcott’s 1840 estate map. It is likely that 

Repton himself, or his eldest son John Adey 

Repton, oversaw the construction. 12 

Repton also illustrated a ‘new kitchen 

garden’ positioned to the west of the house 

which, if the scale is to be believed, was to be 

400 by 200 feet. In 1793 the Milanese 

architect Placido Columbani, who had a brief 

but fruitful association with the family, 

designed a more modest 209 square foot 

walled garden. The forecourt was still under 

discussion in 1804 while the line of the drive 

was only agreed one year later. During this 

rather laborious process, Pole Carew turned 

his thoughts to his second marriage in 1808 

to Caroline Anne, daughter of Lord Lyttleton, 

and alterations to Antony’s interiors. Charles 

Hutchens, a local carpenter who practised 

architecture, may well have overseen these 

changes, which saw the central passage 

removed, a new staircase built and 

extensions made to the dining parlour 

and library. 

In 1847 the eldest son from this second 

marriage, William Henry Pole Carew (Joseph, 

the only son from the first marriage, 

predeceased his father), commissioned 

William White to build a Tudor Gothic 

schoolhouse for the children of the Antony 

estate. After his inheritance in 1852, he and 

his son Reginald (1849–1924), made further 

changes, most notably with the addition of a 

weighty porte-cochere to the entrance front, 

a Georgian-influenced extension on the east 

side, a glazed outer hall on the south front 

and the re-siting of the kitchen garden. In a 

visit to Antony in 1876, Richard Phillimore 

wrote: 

The house is surrounded by a brick wall nearly 

covered with creepers. Passing through the 

wall gate across a small space to the porch, 

which is new; we entered the house. The 

rooms in the old part of the house are high, & 

large, & wainscoted with oak. There is some 

very fine tapestry supposed to be Flemish. 

Also some very fine paintings. The garden 

which is laid out in the italian style is very 

pretty … The hot houses and kitchen garden 

are very large and full of plants and fruit of all 

description. 13 

In the first decade of the twentieth century, 

Sir Reginald had the inelegant-looking 

extension to the east demolished and 

replaced it with an even more awkward 

addition that completely destroyed the 

symmetry of the house. The architect Philip 

Tilden, who later took great ‘pleasure to 

organise the amputation of this 

disfigurement’, described it as ‘a towering 

red brick wing on one end of the main range 

in the Pont Street, or Dutch-victorian- 

South-east front prior to alterations c. 1860 by Colonel Charles Lygon-Cocks of Treverbyn Vean near Liskeard 

NATIONAL TRUST/PAUL HOLDEN 

Jacobean manner’. 14 Tilden made some 

alterations to the kitchens, created selfcontained 

flats in the wings and oversaw 

some improvements to the gardens. Later, a 

new walled garden was built to the north of 

the house and a fine set of gates, a copy of 

those at the family’s Surrey home 

Beddington House, were installed in the park 

on the south side of the house. 

The house was presented to the National 

Trust in 1961 and has continued to be the 

principal residence of the family – now the 

Carew Poles. Sir Richard (b. 1938), 13th 

Baronet, and his wife Lady Mary moved into 

Antony in 1983 and have made their own 

mark on the formal garden design 

introducing contemporary sculpture by 

Stephen Cox, William Pye and Simon Thomas 

and a new gateway to the summer garden by 

James Horrabin. 

Paul Holden FSA is National Trust’s House 

and Collections Manager at Lanhydrock, 

Cornwall. 

SAHGB’s conference in Plymouth and east 

Cornwall takes place on 1–4 September 

2016. For more details, see page 13. 

1 Christopher Hussey, ‘Antony House, Cornwall’, 

country Life, 19 August 1933, p. 172. I am very 

grateful to Sir Richard Carew Pole for the use of the 

Antony archives. For brevity I have not referenced 

every Antony document; a catalogue is available at 

the Cornwall Record Office (CRO). 

2 John Norden, A Topographical and Historical 

Description of cornwall (Newcastle, 1966), p. 62. 

3 D. and S. Lysons, Magna Britannia (London, 1814), 

vol. 3, p. 16. 

4 Paul Holden, ‘Trewithen and the Brettingham 

Plans’, Georgian Group Journal, vol. XXI (2013), p. 58. 

5 Howard Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of 

British Architects 1660–1840 (New Haven and 

London, 2008), pp. 267–68. 

6 Terry Friedman, James Gibbs (London, 1984), 

p. 132. 

7 Tim Mowl, Historic Gardens of cornwall (Stroud, 

2005) , p. 46. 

8 Helen Jacobsen, ‘Antony House: The Work of a 

Local or of James Gibbs?’, History of Art 

Dissertation Part II. 

9 Christopher Hussey, ‘Antony House, Cornwall’, 

country Life, 19 and 26 August 1933. 

10 CRO CCK23–25, CCL38, CP53–4 Humphrey 

Repton, Red Book for Antony and letters. 

11 Michael Mansbridge, John Nash: a complete 

catalogue (London, 1991), p. 110. 

12 CRO FS/3/93. 

13 Hampshire Record Office (Phillimore Papers) 

115M88/F25/52. 

14 Philip Tilden, True remembrances (London, 

1954), p. 168. 


B o o K S A N D J o U R N A L S 

places. The country house very handily 

symbolises those twin traditions, of history 

and of the rural idyll – the Eden that we’ve 

been cast out of. 

But at the same time, you show how different forms 

of modernity energised the country house – the 

changing role of transport, for example … 

The weekend is only made possible by 

transport, initially with the burgeoning rail 

network and then the dramatic rise in car 

ownership between 1918 and 1939. Of course, 

you find the market for country houses is 

strongest in the Home Counties – with 

people who’ve got a place in the town but 

want a place for weekends. 

So the ‘long weekend’ was a between-the-wars 

phenomenon? 

It starts in the 1890s. I quote a letter in Notes 

& Queries from the end of the 19th century – 

the writer says that, here in Staffordshire, if 

someone goes away on a Saturday and stays 

overnight with friends, we call it a ‘weekend’. 

He then asks, is this usage current anywhere 

else? It was actually very non-U to say 

weekend – it was one of those social 

delineators. The right people called it a 

‘Saturday to Monday’. Of course, only the 

right people could do Saturday to Monday . . . 

Another theme is the growing influence of American 

tastes and money – do you think the ‘American 

invasion’ was a force for change or for conservatism? 

Keeping the party going 

In his new book The Long Weekend, Adrian Tinniswood finds that the death of the English 

country house between the wars has been greatly exaggerated. He talks to The Architectural 

Historian about how new meanings were brought to an old tradition 

Why did you decide to write The Long Weekend? 

I’ve been interested in the between-the-wars 

period for most of my working life. I’ve 

worked for, and with, the National Trust, and 

I’m very familiar with its narrative of 

demolition and decline, the idea that in the 

post-First World War period the country 

house had reached a crisis. That’s absolutely 

true, but I always thought there was a 

parallel story. One of the things that crossed 

my mind years ago was that all of these 

houses were being sold, but most of them 

were also being bought. The vast majority 

weren’t destroyed or dismantled or packed 

off to America. They changed hands – as, in 

many ways, they always had. 

So, in some ways, the wars give an artificial sense of 

periodisation? 

I became aware of that as I was writing the 

book. Readers will soon realise that a lot of 

the movements and ideas that I identified are 

pre-First World War. A lot of the post-war 

romanticism about the country house 

stretches all the way back to the Romantic 

poets and after that to Ruskin, Morris and the 

Arts and Crafts movement – the idea that the 

past and the countryside are somehow safer 

I think change. I noticed that there was a 

second-wave American invasion. Before the 

First World War, you’ve got the traditional 

narrative of heiresses being brought in to 

save an aristocratic dynasty. After the war, it 

gets more complicated because you have a 

lot of Anglo-Americans – the products of 

those unions, like Olive Baillie at Leeds Castle, 

or Lord Fairhaven at Anglesey Abbey, whose 

dad was a sewage engineer from Gloucester 

while his mum was the daughter of an oil 

billionaire. It’s the products of those 

matches that do some of the most 

interesting things with the country house. 

They are not vulgar by a long way, but they 

bring a new dynamism. 

You also find lots of references to Americans 

not only buying houses but also modernising 

them. When William Randolph Hearst 

bought St Donat’s Castle in Glamorgan, one 

of the first things he did was to put in 30 

bathrooms. At Fort Belvedere in Windsor, the 

Prince of Wales said he wanted the kind of 

conveniences he had seen in America, such 

as showers. There’s this idea that Americans’ 

expectations of domestic life were higher 

than ours. 


Figures such as Hearst and Fairhaven brought a ‘joy of 

collecting’ too. How did that affect the aesthetic of 

the country house? 

It depended on the collector. One of the 

people who really fascinated me, and who 

features in the book a lot, is Philip Sassoon 

[the owner of Trent Park in Hertfordshire and 

Port Lympne in Kent. He just shimmers 

through almost every memoir of the period. 

He is an outsider – he comes from an Indian- 

Jewish family – and he’s constantly subjected 

to a casual racism. It’s enough to keep him on 

the sidelines, but he is enormously rich. He 

collects friends, he collects country houses, 

he has one of the finest collections of 

Georgian paintings and furniture in the 

country. And he was therefore very 

influential in the whole New Georgian 

revival. He held annual exhibitions of art and 

furniture in his Park Lane mansion, and it 

helped to form that taste. It helped to set the 

trend for the neo-Georgian style that is still in 

most country houses today – it was 

astonishingly influential. 

This period also saw the rise of the society interior 

designer and it was the heyday of magazines such as 

Vogue and Country Life. This was where most country 

house owners gleaned their tastes, wasn’t it? 

Absolutely – magazines were influential in 

that they didn’t just reflect a look, they 

created one. There’s been a lot of work 

recently on how stage-managed and 

choreographed country house photography 

was, how everything was artfully arranged to 

create a certain look in houses that never 

looked like that normally. 

Pure architectural history that 

“ 

doesn’t take account of the 

occupants of the building, 

whether it’s a church or a house 

or an office building, is 

incomplete – in fact, it’s 

distorted 

” 

The society decorator is really important 

between the wars but it’s mainly an urban 

movement – the great decorators like Sybil 

Colefax dabble in country houses but the 

majority of their work is in London or New 

York. It’s interesting to contrast with 

someone like Loelia Ponsonby when she 

became the third Duchess of Westminster – 

she just kind of rummages around when she 

moves into Eaton Hall [in Cheshire], finds 

some hangings and gets a servant to hang 

some pictures up. That was the most 

common way of decorating a country house. 

facing page The Tent Room at Port Lympne, designed by Rex Whistler. Tinniswood writes: ‘As so often with 

Whistler’s murals, one has the impression that somewhere, just out of reach, a story lurks …’ © COUNTRY LIFE 

above The entrance hall of Stephen and Ginie Courtauld’s Eltham Palace (1933–36), created by Rolf Engströmer 

with marquetry panels by Jerk Werkmäster © COUNTRY LIFE 

And yet, by the late 1930s some of these houses were 

so grandiose that Harold Nicolson likened Cliveden to 

‘living on the stage of the Scala theatre’. Was that 

sense of artifice also symptomatic of the period? 

With a certain size of house. Port Lympne is a 

classic example of a stage set – the Tent 

Room [see left] and Glyn Philpot’s Egyptian 

frieze are stage decorations. Trent Park, 

which Sassoon rebuilt as a neo-Georgian 

country house in the 1920s, is another stage, 

one on which he could play out his fantasies 

as the Georgian country gentleman. 

The book is full of great stories and larger-than-life 

characters. Why was gossip so central to the 

country house? 

I think they are uncertain social spaces. When 

Sassoon lent Port Lympne to [then prime 

minister] David Lloyd George, he brought 

down a couple of his ministers for the 

weekend with his mistress and secretary 

Frances Stevenson. They were basically there 

for a mini Cabinet reshuffle, and when it was 

all done Stevenson played the piano while 

they stood around it singing music hall 

songs. Can you imagine that today? 

It’s also a very mixed world. On one level, the 

country house continues as it always has, 

with tenants’ balls and massive shooting 

parties. The Duke of Portland inherited 

Welbeck Abbey in 1879 and he is still doing 

exactly what he’s always done in the 1930s. 

And then you’ve got the Sassoons, the Trees 

at Ditchley Park, or the Prince of Wales at Fort 

Belvedere – a rather advanced jazz set. When 

Edward vIII abdicates, the Archbishop of 

Canterbury said he has been corrupted by 

the set he moves in. 

You’ve written books of both social history and 

architectural history. Can you write about buildings 

separate from the people who use them, or is that 

intrinsic to architectural history? 

I firmly believe that architecture is about 

people, it’s about patterns of behaviour, it’s 

about what people do, because what people 

do governs how buildings function and that 

governs how buildings look. Pure 

architectural history that doesn’t take 

account of the occupants of the building, 

whether it’s a church or a house or an office 

building, is incomplete – in fact, it’s distorted. 

You can’t leave the people out. Nick Jones 

The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country 

House Between the Wars by Adrian 

Tinniswood is published by Jonathan Cape 

(£25.00) 


‘Some specimens 

just appeared 

at a turn in a 

country lane ...’ 

Fifty years on from the publication of Kerry Downes’ English Baroque 

Architecture, the author reflects on the key buildings – and chance 

discoveries – that have shaped our understanding of the period 

Ifirst met Baroque in 1946 in Pevsner’s An 

Outline of European Architecture, a book 

that has introduced countless people to 

what architecture is about. At the Courtauld 

in 1948 I began to study simultaneously both 

‘English’ and Continental post-medieval art 

and architecture, and learnt that foreign 

ideas and aims underwent a sea-change in 

transmission but, notwithstanding cultural, 

political and religious differences, they did 

travel. Ideas travel by gift, observation, 

teaching, theft, even misinterpretation. In 

1644 John Evelyn noted in his diary 

Borromini’s fascinating little church of San 

Carlino in Rome as ‘of an excellent oval 

design’. In 1686 he witnessed the opening of 

James II’s Popish chapel at Whitehall both 

with wonder at the marble reredos and 

statues, the ‘fresco’ murals and cupola, the 

thrones and rich vestments, and with shock 

at the thought of the forbidden Roman 

liturgy performed publicly in London. 

For nearly a decade Hawksmoor in his context 

occupied most of my free time. When, after 

the publication of my monograph in 1959, 1 

top Swanton Farm near Bredgar in Kent, with its ‘delightfully curvaceous’ gable-end 

bottom The south front of Hellaby Hall, South Yorkshire, completed around 1692 

people kindly asked ‘What next?’ I had no 

answer. I spent a year on French eighteenthcentury 

architecture and even gave some 

postgraduate seminars at the Courtauld. But 

Hawksmoor had raised a lot of public interest, 

and in Birmingham I lectured on the virtual 

‘Wren school’. Someone suggested a short 

well-illustrated book on vanbrugh, 

Hawksmoor and Archer, but someone else 

said that leaving Wren out would be like 

Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark; 

including him, on the other hand, would 

make the book top-heavy. 

My publisher, Desmond Zwemmer, showed 

me some recent German books of similar 

page size, each with a short text and about 

100 pages of photographs. Besides his Studies 

in Architecture series, he liked the idea of an 

independent architectural book. Eleven years 

my senior, he had been at the Courtauld and 

had an appropriate diploma from the 

London College of Printing. He was a firstrate 

editor. It is true, and it demonstrates his 

confidence, that we never anticipated a 

volume to grow to 80,000 words and 578 

half-tones, stemming from the surprising 

amount of material I found. Nine out of ten 

plates used in English Baroque Architecture 

would be from my own negatives, saving a 

small fortune in reproduction fees. Desmond 

found that the rather grey half-tones 

preserved the detail. Another help – for 

travel – was Birmingham’s location in the 

middle of England. Countrywide coverage 

was nevertheless uneven, favouring counties 

by then published in Pevsner’s Buildings of 

England. Some specimens just appeared at a 

turn in a country lane, like Swanton Farm 

near Bredgar in Kent, an unattributed brick 

house dated 1719, crowned by a delightfully 

curvaceous gable-end (above). 


‘Elegant and well-mannered’ – the garden front of Belton House, Lincolnshire 

A larger building in the same vein only 

turned up recently: Hellaby Hall, Maltby 

(opposite), and only because Captain John 

Platt, R. N., son of the Rotherham architect 

John Platt II, and my maternal greatgrandfather, 

married one Mary Clarke ‘of 

Hellaby’. She was no grand lady: her 

clergyman father rented the house. Hellaby, 

completed around 1692, has been 

rehabilitated as part of a modern hotel. If I 

had discovered it 50-odd years ago I would 

certainly have included it. Whoever designed 

it knew their pattern books and probably 

used one for the big scrolls, but that 

somebody chose it and somebody approved 

the ornament matters more than where it 

was found. 

More than one person has said to me, of 

some deeply provincial building: ‘It must be 

Baroque, it’s illustrated in your book.’ That 

misses the point. My intention was not to be 

definitive, but to report, presenting visual 

and written evidence of a wide range of 

buildings of a particular period, and of a 

particular attitude to design, ornament and 

style – in books current 50 years ago ‘English 

Renaissance’ embraced everything from 

Henry vIII to George Iv. Even between 

Charles II and early George II, Baroque 

buildings are the minority, and a few 

negative examples are included for 

comparison. Now Baroque is respectable, 

and we have Baroque music and Baroque 

orchestras – and London eateries called 

Hawksmoor. Colvin’s Dictionary directed me 

to a fine ‘baroque’ (small b) house of about 

1720 near Wantage: Ardington House, 2 

attributed to the mason Thomas Strong II. It 

is tall and well proportioned, very plain 

outside and scarcely ornate within. It does 

have a few porthole windows, but it seems to 

me that the classification is valid only in date 

and not in style. 

An earlier gentry house is Belton, begun in 

1684 (above). With its regular fenestration, 

dormer windows, hipped roof and cupola, its 

pedigree goes back to Roger Pratt’s Coleshill 

and ultimately to an Inigo Jones drawing. It is 

elegant, well-mannered, and based on a clear 

understanding of the principles of design 

invented by Renaissance Italian and French 

architects and theorists because vitruvius, 

the only known Ancient authority, had failed 

to supply them. 

Only three years later, work began on William 

Talman’s rebuilding of Chatsworth, an 

Elizabethan courtyard house, for the First 

Duke of Devonshire, starting with the south 

range (page 22). In scale, in size and in its 

lavish interiors it would abroad have been 

called a palace. vanbrugh and Hawksmoor 

were positive that what mattered was that 

English palaces were built by (and for) free 

men and women, those abroad by the feudal 

slaves of absolute rulers. It is relevant that 

Devonshire was not a king but a kingmaker, 

and not the only signatory to the letter 

inviting William and Mary to the English 

throne to build himself a palace. Talman’s 

façade is rectangular with a concealed roof, a 

giant pilaster order and bold details such as 

outsize triple keystones; in scale it outstrips 

Belton. It has an even number of bays, and 

therefore no middle one; in addition, the 

pilasters are concentrated at the ends, so 

that the eye reads not twelve units but three 

very big ones. The change of scale marks the 

beginning of a process that leads to the 

vanbrugh/Hawksmoor fascination with what 

a contemporary of mine called ‘gratuitous 

lumps of masonry’ (for example, the rooftop 

structures of Blenheim), which are also to be 

found in the Hawksmoor churches and were 

first re-appreciated by architects like Denys 

Lasdun and Colin St John Wilson. 

I had learnt when writing Hawksmoor that 

much thought, discussion and polemical 


The south front of Chatsworth, Derbyshire, with its giant pilaster order and outsize triple keystones 

writing of the period, in almost every 

discipline, concerns the philosophical 

question as to whether the achievements of 

the Ancients could ever again be equalled, 

let alone surpassed. The arena was the field 

of philosophy. Psychology was still in its 

infancy, but it was known empirically that the 

human brain and mind worked in two 

different ways, one logically and according to 

rules, the other intuitive and based on what 

Thomas Hobbes called ‘memory’, and these 

two faculties also underlie the battle 

between Palladian correctness and unruly 

Baroque fancy. Bernini learnt architecture 

from Palladio but transformed it by 

embellishment, whereas vanbrugh began 90 

years later to play with pseudo-Palladian 

motifs – notably the Serliana or venetian 

window – ‘incorrectly’. Hawksmoor defended 

himself by citing his sources in Antiquity or 

Renaissance Italy. In January 1724 he gave 

Lord Carlisle his reason: 

i wou’d not mention Authors and Antiquity, 

but that we have so many conceited 

Gentlemen full of this science, ready to 

knock you down, unless you have some old 

father to stand by you. i dont mean that 

one need to coppy them, but to be upon 

the Same principalls. 

At just about this time Hawksmoor 

conceived the biggest and boldest quotation 

of all (opposite). Basing the whole front of 

Christ Church on the Serliana used at the east 

end, he not merely stole the Palladians’ 

thunder but proceeded ‘to pile Ossa on 

Pelion, and over Ossa to roll leafy Olympus’. 3 

This building was no mere quotation or 

enormous frivolity. Today, cleaned and 

restored, it is clever, witty, unique, 

breathtaking. 

This year also sees the twentieth birthday of 

the Grove Dictionary of Art, for which I was 

asked (‘because of the architecture’) to write 

the article on Baroque – which nobody has 

ever admitted to reading. I concluded: 

The Baroque may ... be characterised as a 

style based on a long tradition of growing 

familiarity with the canon and methods of the 

renaissance, and through it with those of 

classical antiquity … a style in which 

appearances take precedence over essences; 

familiarity allows the visual language to be 

adapted, as only a mother tongue can be, to 

metaphor, wit, punning. it achieves its effects 

by a direct appeal to the senses, and through 

them to the emotions as much as to the 

intellect. Thus it is an art related more 

immediately to the beholder than to abstract 

principles. it has the richness and diversity 

of form and language that come at the end 

of a continuous period … specifically that 

of the renaissance, on whose forms and 

language it depends 

1 Kerry Downes, Hawksmoor, Zwemmer, 1959. 

2 Gervase Jackson-Stops in country Life, 15 October 

1981, pp. 1285–86, has a capital B. 

3 virgil, Georgics, I. 281. 

facing page ‘The biggest and boldest quotation of 

all’ – the front of Christ Church, Spitalfields, London 


Around a journal in 80 seconds 

#1 The James 

M. MacLaren 

Society 

Journal 

A huge amount of 

scholarly work 

feeds into 

various learned 

societies and local 

interest groups that we, as a 

society, can learn from. With this in mind, this 

new regular feature will showcase some of the 

smaller periodicals that might otherwise go 

under the radar. First up is a journal devoted to 

the work and influence of Scottish architect 

James Marjoribanks MacLaren. 

James M. MacLaren (1853–90) came from a 

Perthshire farming family, and trained as an 

architect in Glasgow, London and Paris. 

Some of his formative years were spent 

working with Cornish architect Richard Coad 

at Lanhydrock in Cornwall and Ledbury Park 

in Hertfordshire (from where he revised and 

introduced Philip Clisset’s Ledbury chair to 

the Art Workers Guild). In the four years of his 

independent London practice, he moved 

from an inspired eclecticism to a new blend 

of traditional Scottish vernacular building 

with the principles of the Arts and Crafts 

movement, best seen in his designs for Sir 

Donald Currie in Fortingall in Perthshire and 

at Palace Court in London. Other significant 

works included the High School of Stirling, 

Aberfeldy Town Hall and Santa Catalina Hotel 

in the Canaries. His early death stopped him 

from being better known, but his influence 

lived on in the work of his younger 

contemporaries, including Charles Rennie 

Mackintosh and Robert Lorimer. 

Following the publication of Alan Calder’s 

monograph James MacLaren, Arts & crafts 

Pioneer (Shaun Tyas, 2003), The James M. 

MacLaren Society was formed to celebrate 

his work, and that of his contemporaries 

such as William Dunn, Thomas MacLaren 

and Robert Watson. The most recent 

journal (pictured) carries a fascinating 

insight into the life and work of Andrew 

Prentice. Neil Hooper 

For further details on the James M. MacLaren 

Society, contact Neil Hooper on 

rosieneil@hooper.saltire.org or go to 

www.jmmaclaren.org. If you would like to get a 

wider audience for your society’s publication, 

please contact magazine@sahgb.org.uk. 


Back to our 

Brutes 

Barnabas Calder’s new book, Raw Concrete, is a robust 

defence of the twentieth century’s most robust 

architectural movement. The Architectural Historian caught 

up with him at the National Theatre 

Brutalism is having a bit of a moment, isn’t it? There 

have been quite a few books on the subject recently. 

I decided to write this one in 2010 before I 

knew about the others. The fundamental 

structure has been established since then, 

but I adapted a lot of the content as time 

went on because originally it was pitched as 

a lone voice crying in the wilderness. 

Certainly when I started working on Denys 

Lasdun in 2001, Brutalism was still disliked by 

most people – there was actual laughter 

when I said that was my subject. 

I wanted to capture a particular tendency in 

my book, rather than give an overview of 

what was going on in architecture at the 

time. I was trying to isolate examples of one 

strain within 1960s and 70s architecture, 

which is the most heroic and sublime end of 

a period that pushed heroism and sublimity 

more than any other: unless you go back to 

the Edwardian castles of medieval Wales, 

Brutalism’s pretty much as aggressive as 

architecture gets. 

Architecture is rarely accepted in its own moment. 

Fifty years on, is Brutalism simply a historic style 

whose time has come? 

To an extent, but there are other factors as 

well. Within the architectural world, there is a 

reaction against the flimsiness imposed by 

environmental requirements. I completely 

support improving energy performance of 

new buildings, but I find, as a lot of architects 

do, that there is something unsatisfying 

about the multiple layers that go between 

the structure and the facade of a building 

now. Look at the National Theatre – what 

looks like structure is structure, what looks 

like concrete is concrete. You can see where 

the loads are running and there is an 

appealing clarity and robustness. That’s not a 

property that is available to most architects 

most of the time now. 

Brutalism is also totally unthreatening to 

architects now. None of the main 

practitioners are still likely to be looking for 

jobs. Therefore younger architects can 

express frank admiration for them without 

the risk of reanimating the career of a 

potential rival – to put it at its most cynical. 

Brutalism also looks great in digital photographs and 

on Flickr – do you think there’s a danger that people 

appreciate the images more than the buildings 

themselves? 

The architecture that is lastingly appreciated 

always has a strong visual quality. If you look 

back at any architectural magazine, you’ll see 

that any style has a symbiotic relationship 

with the photography that it arrived 

alongside. There is the highly contrasted 

black-and-white of the 1930s, the gritty blackand-white 

of the 1960s, the bursts of colour 

of the 1950s, then again in the 1970s onwards 

– people fall in love with the aesthetic from 

the pictures, then go and design the 

buildings. You can see that in other periods 

too. If you look across the river at Somerset 

House, it’s very, very flat, as a lot of Palladian 

architecture was, because those architects 

spent an awful lot of time looking at 

drawings. They fell in love with Palladio’s 

books, which are two-dimensional and white, 

so they built two-dimensional white 

buildings. Brutalists here knew that Le 

Corbusier painted parts of his buildings in 

very vivid colours but they very rarely did 

themselves because they had fallen in love 

with black-and-white photos of them. 

You say you love the optimism that these buildings 

embody. Is that part of its appeal in a time of 

austerity and pessimism? 


There is a considerable fan-base for Brutalism 

based on its supposed association with the 

Welfare State, which is partially real and 

partially fictive. I was trying to make clear in 

the book that, like any other style there’s 

ever been, it wasn’t exclusive to, or even 

predominantly associated with, a single 

ideology. If I’d done an international sweep, 

it would have taken in Francisco Javier Sáenz 

de Oiza, the architect of the Torre Blancas in 

Madrid, which was built under Franco – who 

was massively opposed to modern 

architecture until the mid-60s then suddenly 

decided that Brutalism was very, very cool. 

Brutalism potentially suits dictators 

reasonably well, just as it suits big Welfare 

State projects. It’s strong architecture that 

makes a statement. 

You open the book at the Hermit’s Castle on the north 

coast of Scotland, which you describe as ‘a building 

with no purpose, miles from anywhere’. Was it a 

conscious decision to start as far from the concrete 

jungle as possible? 

Yes, the Hermit’s Castle had three 

advantages. It is small enough that I didn’t 

have to explain the wider complexities of 

1960s building campaigns to start with – it’s 

just one project and one architect’s vision. 

And because it is designed and built by and 

for one person, it doesn’t have the same 

agenda or complexity that emerges with 

some of the other buildings, with all the 

different voices involved. The third reason 

was that part of the point of this book is to 

challenge hostility to Brutalism. If it does fall 

into the hands of anyone who doesn’t 

already love Brutalism, it should help them 

towards it step-by-step, almost like a selfhelp 

guide. Step one is recognising that 

concrete doesn’t necessarily have to have 

these negative associations. The Hermit’s 

Castle is not dirty or frightening, it’s very 

small, rural and isolated. 

You present concrete almost as a natural, geological 

material . . . 

Exactly. How much more natural is stone, 

which has been chopped out of a mountain 

by machine and planed and smooth by other 

machines, then bolted in place in thin 

sections onto a building made of something 

else? Is that really so much more natural than 

grinding the stone up and remixing it into a 

new form? 

You talk a lot about the skill and craft of concrete 

construction. For example, the board-marked finish 

to the walls of the National Theatre is amazingly 

precise . . . 

Brutalism’s detractors assume that these 

were uncrafted buildings thrown up cheaply. 

But there was no cheaper way throughout 

most of this period to put up a loadbearing 

wall than using brick, because the British 

brick industry was so quick and so 

facing page The Hermit’s Castle (1955), designed 

and built at Achmelvich on the north Scottish coast by 

David Scott. Calder writes, ‘I would take Scott’s 

inspired coarseness and artistic haphazardness every 

time over the highly crafted perfection of a building 

like Mies van der Rohe’s Farnworth House’ 

above An escape stair at Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron 

Tower in Poplar, east London (1965–67) 

below Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre in Waterloo, 

London (1969–77) – ‘a breathtakingly fine piece of 

abstract architecture and concrete craft’ 

ALL PHOTOS BARNABAS CALDER/TWITTER: @BrutalConcrete 


Engineering Building, University of Leicester by James 

Gowan and James Stirling (1961–64) – ‘a sneering, 

hip-thrusting Elvis of a structure’ 

experienced. Concrete would almost always 

have been a more expensive option, but it 

was chosen for its technical superiority, for its 

beauty or the particular requirements of the 

building. At the National Theatre this quality 

of concrete finish was rumoured – fairly 

plausibly – to be more expensive than 

marble cladding. The quality of carpentry 

was exceptional – if you think about the 

weight of concrete that’s inside the 

formwork, this rough-looking wood had to 

be extraordinarily steady in order not to 

buckle and bow and produce distortion. This 

was all done to the tolerance of a 16th of an 

inch. The perfectionism of the workers 

producing it and the architects and 

engineers overseeing it was very, very sharp 

on this building, and a great many others. 

The availability of cheap energy was vital to Brutalism 

– you write: “There was never before such a fertile 

soil for those designing buildings, and there may 

never be again.” Is it still possible for architecture to 

be heroic now, in a time of restraint in terms of 

materials and energy? 

I think there are different forms of heroism. 

One of the most heroic architectural 

moments in British history is the immediate 

post-war school building campaign that 

started in Hertfordshire. Every discipline got 

together and reinvented the way they 

quantity-surveyed, the way they thought 

about the servicing, the relationship 

between production and building 

components. The buildings are completely 

unheroic, but that seems to me to be the 

heroism that’s required now. Much 

contemporary architecture is on a spectrum 

between Frank Gehry and a more elegant, 

less controversial late modernism, and the 

aesthetics of both are relatively hard to make 

genuinely sustainable. There is still too much 

glass, too many high buildings standing on 

vast amounts of concrete in the subsoil and 

in the structure. To be truly heroic, architects 

need to work out how much they can not do. 

Cedric Price campaigned successfully for 

architects to be able to suggest solutions 

that weren’t always architectural. Previously 

they were bound by RIBA regulations to 

recommend building, but he said, ‘Look, 

architecture isn’t always the answer. Let’s be 

allowed to say that.’ 

Will the energy-intensiveness of Brutalist buildings be 

viewed as somehow tasteless in the future? Will it 

count against them? 

As energy becomes more critical, they do 

hold a kind of ancien regime position – 

although not as much as early High-Tech, 

which actively gloried in the wasting of 

energy. But the sins were committed at a 

time when they weren’t known to be sins, 

unlike the new concrete high-rises for the 

rich in places like vauxhall and Wandsworth, 

where investors know the damage they are 

doing. I want Brutalist buildings to be loved 

and appreciated, so I hope the general 

attitude will be that they’re forgivable 

because they didn’t know they were doing 

harm. Nick Jones 

Raw Concrete: The Beauty of Brutalism by 

Barnabas Calder is published by William 

Heinemann (£25.00) 


A week in the life… 

… of Chris Pickford, who has just finished revising Pevsner’s Warwickshire (Yale University 

Press, June 2016) 

During the time I’ve been working on 

Warwickshire, quite a few people 

have commented, ‘Revising a 

Pevsner – that’s something I’d really like to 

do’. It’s easy to understand why. The job 

provides a wonderful opportunity to explore 

and research an amazing range of buildings 

and to get to know an area in depth. Yet one 

is constantly in Pevsner’s shadow, respectful 

of his writing while also seeking to update, 

expand and improve the original text. This 

article, based on a period in July 2015, 

illustrates a fairly typical week. Not that there 

is such a thing – the work is too varied for that. 

Monday was a day of preparing for visits, at 

home in Staffordshire. I always take with me 

a well-spaced print-out of the original entry 

for each place along with research notes, 

copies of old illustrations etc. Pevsner used 

to fill the car with books and files. Home days 

are long, often 8am to 11pm, and sedentary. 

The spare room is my office. It’s not tidy but 

the main reference materials I need are all to 

hand. These include the Pevsner boxes filled 

with notes, articles and cuttings accumulated 

since the publication of the first edition in 

1966. I take exercise by walking a neighbour’s 

dog – walking time is good for thinking too. 

Tuesday was a day for visits, accompanied by 

my long-suffering wife, who has helped and 

supported me throughout the project. With 

good planning and preparation it’s possible 

to do three or four small villages in a day but 

places with a number of important buildings 

require more time. Every detail in Pevsner’s 

original text needs to be checked and 

updated. Word limits are tight but there is 

room to mention extra details and expand 

descriptions. Additional buildings can be 

included. It’s not all routine though, and 

excitement is provided by discoveries and 

delights. One is on the go from morning till 

evening and the pace can be quite gruelling. 

A packed lunch saves time (Pevsner never 

stopped for lunch). A camping stove in the 

car means we can always brew tea when 

needed. 

Wednesday saw a research expedition taking 

in three record offices in one day – at 

Stratford, Warwick and Lichfield. This was 

unusual. So often, the increasingly restricted 

opening hours don’t allow anything so 

ambitious. The search was for very specific 

details. Documents were ordered in advance 

for speed. The route also allowed me to visit 

Pooley Hall – a complex fifteenth and 

sixteenth century house in divided 

ownership. 

Thursday was spent at home. It’s easy for a 

backlog of work to build up so time has to be 

allowed for consolidating after each day’s 

visits, for follow-up research (often online) 

and – most importantly – for writing. Time is 

needed for seeking information or advice 

from historian colleagues or specialists. But 

writing time is often cut short by the need to 

be ready for further visits – in this case a busy 

three-day weekend. 

This expedition began on Friday with a visit 

to see the church (now a private chapel) at 

Compton Wynyates in the morning. Sadly it 

was raining. The lovely house there is one I 

was not allowed to see and even exterior 

photography was expressly forbidden. The 

afternoon, still in heavy rain, was spent in 

Warwick, mainly at the splendid Lord 

Leycester Hospital. We stayed in Kenilworth. 

For his hotel stays Pevsner took a powerful 

Rugby School, New Schools, by William Butterfield, 1867–72, extended c. 1885 

light bulb to allow him to work in the 

evenings. Nowadays the vital extra is a 

mobile phone with data bundle. 

Saturday’s weather was much better. A walk 

round the back streets of Kenilworth, taking 

in the 1913 cemetery and its chapel, took us 

to the castle. Even with the aid of the 

marvellous English Heritage guide book by 

Richard Morris, it took nearly all day to get to 

grips with this remarkable site. In the 

evening, after a quick meal, work continued 

in the hotel room – sorting and titling the 

day’s photographs, noting key revision 

points etc. 

Sunday saw an early start, leaving the room 

at 7.30 am to pop into St John’s – one of 

Ewan Christian’s less dull churches – before 

the 8am service. After breakfast we 

completed missing bits of the Kenilworth 

perambulation before visiting the ruined 

mansion at Guys Cliffe. By now it was again 

pouring with rain, a real spoiler. Later we 

headed for Stoneleigh, the last church visit 

in the whole county. The weather was just 

too bad for a walk around the rest of the 

village. Instead we headed home for a 

relaxing evening. 

For the following week? More visits, varied, 

interesting and challenging in equal 

measure. The constant is a whirl in the brain 

– buildings visited, buildings to be seen, 

facts, arrangements, comparisons, wording, 

dates, and questions, always questions 

YALE UNIvERSITY PRESS 


The view through the doors of the Velvet 

Drawing Room into the Saloon at Robert 

Adam’s Saltram House, Devon. Dr Frances 

Sands will be conducting a tour of Saltram 

on Thursday 1 September as a prelude to the 

Society’s annual conference in Plymouth 

and east Cornwall. For details, please go to 

www.sahgb.org.uk/conference. 

© National Trust Images/John Hammond

2016_ArchHist-Aug

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