2017_ArchHist-Feb

The 

ARCHITECTURAL 

HISTORIAN 

Issue 4, February 2017 

ISSN 2056–9181 

IN THIS ISSUE: A trove of Scottish treasures | Leith Hill Place: a home to genius | Space, Hope and Brutalism | 

Innovation in an unexpected place | Remembering Giles Waterfield

The 

ARCHITECTURAL 

HISTORIAN 

Issue 4, February 2017 

Editorial team 

Magazine editor 

nick Jones 

Commissioning editor 

Paul holden 

magazine@sahgb.org.uk 

Production 

derek Brown 

derekbrown.design@gmail.com 

Jackie maidment 

jackiemaidment@gmail.com 

no material may be reproduced in part or 

whole without the express permission of the 

publisher. 

© 2017 society of architectural historians of 

great Britain limited by guarantee. registered 

number 810735 england registered as a charity 

no. 236432 registered office: Beech house, 

cotswold avenue, lisvane, cardiff cF14 0ta 

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 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 SAHGB 

For all general enquiries about the society as 

well as for grants and prizes, please contact: 

Secretary Jonathan Kewley: 

honsecretary@sahgb.org.uk 

Other contacts 

Chairman Professor anthony geraghty: 

chair@sahgb.org.uk 

Conferences (York 2017) dr ann-marie akehurst: 

conference2017@sahgb.org.uk 

Editor for Architectural History david hemsoll: 

architecturalhistory@sahgb.org.uk 

Education including PhD scholarships dr Julian holder: 

education@sahgb.org.uk 

Events andrew martindale and Pete smith: 

events@sahgb.org.uk 

Finances ian Johnson: 

hontreasurer@sahgb.org.uk 

SAHGB 

The Society of 

Architectural 

Historians of 

Great Britain 

Message from 

the editor… 

the society of architectural historians of great Britain has now been active for 60 years, 

during which time it has brought together a wide group of people with a shared 

common interest. the aim of The Architectural Historian is to maintain this momentum 

by presenting a series of engaging and scholarly articles that reflect a varied range of 

topics across a wide period of time. this edition does exactly that. 

after a fascinating tour through the history of leith hill Place in surrey (page 4), 

former sahgB scholar sophie dentzer-niklasson reminds us that architectural innovation 

can happen in the most unlikely places, offering the case of the unassuming 

parish church in Urchfont, Wiltshire, home to one of england’s first net vaults. dentzerniklasson 

raises the question of how architectural historians should deal with such 

unexpected invention: as historical quirk or part of a greater narrative? 

architects, too, can end up in the most unlikely places. owen hopkins (page 28), 

while considering the strange ‘afterlife’ of nicholas hawksmoor for his recent book, 

From The Shadows, paid a visit to the great Baroque architect’s grave, which now lies, 

patched up with concrete, in a suburban garden in hertfordshire. it is a potent 

reminder, not just of the relative obscurity in which hawksmoor died, but also of the 

fragile nature of architectural reputation generally. one of the most telling aspects of 

hopkins’ account is how the stepney churches, so unignorable to modern eyes, were 

seemingly completely ignored for the whole of the nineteenth century. 

the vicissitudes of architectural fortune make collections such as the practice 

records at historic environment scotland (page 8) all the more valuable. in recent 

decades, the archives of the amalgamated scottish heritage body have expanded to 

include not only plans and drawings of notable projects, but also the office archives 

of figures such as Basil spence and alan reiach. these provide a vital insight into the 

history of scottish architectural practice and methods of drawing production, as well 

as the development of careers from practice to practice. they also prompt speculation 

as to what the future of practice archives will be, as software becomes an ever more 

sophisticated tool. as hes curator Jane thomas notes, establishing what should be 

preserved now that most architectural practices rely primarily on digital technology 

to create and store their design and build records is of the utmost importance. 

Nick Jones, editor 

The Architectural Historian would like to thank the following contributors: 

david adshead 

nicholas cooper 

sophie dentzer-niklasson 

claire gapper 

Front cover image 

environment scotland 

John goodall 

stephen hague 

elain harwood 

owen hopkins 

sandy isenstadt 

Peter King 

Patrick newberry 

Jane thomas 

Craigends, Renfrewshire, designed by David Bryce, 1857 (demolished in 1972). © historic 

Back cover image Interior of No. 1 Poultry, London, designed by James Stirling. © tony hisgett / 

creativecommons.org 

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. 

2 The Architectural Historian issue 4/ February 2017

Contents 

Features 

4 A house of beauty, a home to genius 

Patrick newberry on the recently re-opened leith hill Place, childhood home of 

ralph vaughan Williams 

p. 4 

14 Architectural innovation in an unexpected place 

sophie dentzer-niklasson considers the story behind one of england’s earliest 

net vaults 

Regulars 

p.8 

8 Collections in focus 

Jane thomas guides us through historic environment scotland's trove of 

architectural practice records 

17 A scholar’s progress 

stephen hague recalls how an sahgB scholarship led to the publication of his 

first book 

p. 22 

18 News and events 

the sah comes to glasgow; and remembering giles Waterfield 

22 Exhibition review 

Robert Adam’s London at sir John soane’s museum 

31 A week in the life … 

… of John goodall, architectural editor of Country Life 

p. 24 

p. 28 

Books and journals 

24 Space, Hope and Brutalism 

elain harwood reflects on the writing process behind this year’s alice davis 

hitchcock medallion winner 

28 The many lives of Nicholas Hawksmoor 

owen hopkins’ latest book explores the strange power of his architecture and 

why it still exerts a hold on us today 

29 Around a journal in 80 seconds 

introducing The Orchard, the journal of the cFa voysey society 

The Architectural Historian issue 4 / February 2017 3

F E A T U R E 

A house of beauty, 

a home to genius 

Ralph Vaughan Williams learned to play the 

organ in its hall, Charles Darwin studied the 

worms beneath its grounds … Patrick 

Newberry unearths the history of the 

National Trust’s recently re-opened Leith 

Hill Place 

High on the southern slopes of 

surrey’s leith hill, with wonderful 

views over the Weald, stands leith 

hill Place, a handsome, but until recently, 

little known, property of the national trust. 

the childhood home of ralph vaughan 

Williams, it was given by the composer to the 

trust in 1944 but for the next sixty years, was 

only occasionally opened to the public. in 

2007, the then tenant, hurtwood house 

school, handed the property back to the 

trust, which in 2012, notwithstanding an 

almost complete lack of contents, decided to 

open it to the public, enabling visitors to 

enjoy this hitherto secret place. 

What the modern visitor sees on 

approaching leith hill Place is a pleasing 

Palladian house, apparently dating from the 

first half of the eighteenth century. however, 

as is so often the case, appearances are 

deceptive and under the attractive Palladian 

exterior lies a much earlier house, the early 

years of which are a mystery. Unusually for 

an english country house, it has changed 

hands more times through sale than by 

inheritance, the longest recorded ownership 

by one family being the Wedgwood/ 

vaughan Williams family, which owned it for 

three generations between 1848 and 1944. 

consequently, documentary evidence of 

ownership prior to the seventeenth century 

or records of craftsmen working at the house 

are largely lost. 

it is known that two medieval land holdings, 

strikes and Welland, formed the core of the 

estate, which at some point merged, 

becoming known as leth (sic) Place at some 


point before 1628, when it was recorded in a 

list of houses contributing to the fencing of 

nearby ockley churchyard. the house also 

features in a 1664 will of mary millet, a widow 

of harrow, who settled the estate on herself 

for life with a remainder to henry Best of 

gray’s inn. the estate passed to Best’s 

descendants and was bought in 1705 by John 

Worsfold, of ockley, whose executors sold it 

in 1725 to colonel John Folliot, a career 

soldier. Folliot rose to the rank of lieutenant 

general; some indication of the regard in 

which he was held being that, in 1745, he was 

charged with the defence of london should 

Bonnie Prince charlie make it that far south. 

the house that Folliot bought was a 

sixteenth-century, h-shaped, three-storeyed, 

gabled house, built of local sandstone on a 

raised platform, containing brick vaulted 

cellars. We know something of this house 

from two engravings in reverend o. 

manning and W. Bray’s The History and 

Antiquities of the County of Surrey (1804), 

showing the north and south elevations of 

the house in 1700. close inspection and 

comparison with similar houses of the period 

suggests that entrance to the house was 

from the south, via a cross passage, to a great 

hall which occupied the ground floor of most 

of the central block. the window 

configuration suggests a staircase 

immediately to the west of the hall, with 

family parlours and chambers in the west 

wing and kitchen and other offices in the 

east wing. 

little survives inside the house from this 

period, although two first-floor chambers in 

the west wing contain sixteenth-century 

panelling and, in the larger of the two 

chambers, a four-centred arched fireplace. 

the fireplace looks to be in situ, connected to 

a monumental chimney stack which also 

appears to be part of the tudor house. the 

panelling of this room is a little less certain. 

While it is plainly sixteenth century, it looks 

to have been adapted to fit the room; also 

pilasters which punctuate the panelling, end 

abruptly with no significant entablature or 

frieze above them. it is possible that the 

panelling is a later introduction from 

elsewhere in the house or from another 

house, by an occupant with antiquarian 

tastes. 

it is not absolutely certain who transformed 

the sixteenth-century house to its Palladian 

appearance. James lees milne, thought that 

the house dated from around 1730 and that 

Folliot carried out the remodelling. 1 on the 

basis of stylistic dating, Folliot is the most 

likely candidate, which is corroborated by a 

set of sales particulars from 1750 which 

describe the house as being ‘very 

commodiously fitted up’ 2 – an unlikely 

description at that time for a tudor house. 

Whether Folliot was his own architect, or 

whether he was assisted by a professional 

hand is uncertain. a careful examination of 

the south front (see page 6) suggests that a 

professional hand may have been at work. 

detailing such as the pulvinated friezes, the 

fine porch with broken based pediment and 

the receding size of the windows in the 

wings, which create a false perspective 

enhancing the grandeur of the house, all 

suggest a sophisticated creator. on the other 

hand, the asymmetric chimney which 

supports the saloon and first-floor drawing 

room fireplaces, the clumsy way in which the 

staircase cuts across a window and the clash 

of the roof of the porch with the bottom of 

the central window are decidedly amateur, 

suggesting that Folliot may have been his 

own architect or may have entrusted the 

design to a local builder. 

a possible explanation is that Folliot was 

provided with a high level plan and 

elevations, which he then entrusted to a local 

builder or architect to execute. Until more 

substantive evidence is found, the question 

will remain open. one tantalising possibility, 

for which admittedly there is no evidence, is 

that William Kent may have had a hand in the 

house. While it is highly unlikely that Kent 

was the designer, particularly given the 

mistakes noted above, he worked for the 

evelyns at the neighbouring Wotton estate, 

redesigning the interior of a garden room, as 

well as building a townhouse at 16 st James’s 

Place for the family. 3 it is just possible that 

the evelyns introduced Kent to Folliot and 

that he offered thoughts on the remodelling. 

the changes were extensive. the gables 

were removed and the wings heightened by 

a storey in brick, with pediments added to 

the resulting new towers. the tudor south 

front between the wings was replaced with a 

new symmetrical Portland stone ashlar front 

and classical porch. the wings were refaced 

in ashlar, but only up to the first floor, the top 

floor of the towers and the other three 

facades being rendered. on the north side, a 

new entrance hall and first-floor gallery were 

introduced between the wings to improve 

circulation. little survives of the interior from 

this period, except for a handsome staircase 

and two good chimneypieces (see page 6). 

Folliot also improved the estate, clearing 

woodland, enclosing a walled garden and 

building fine new agricultural buildings next 

to the house. 

Folliot died in 1748. his only daughter having 

predeceased him, he left the estate in trust 

for his widow and niece and heir, mary 

harloe. in 1754, the trustees sold the estate to 

richard hull, a Bristol merchant who was mP 

facing page The Palladian north front, dating from 

the first half of the eighteenth century © national 

trUst images/andreW BUtler 

right Engravings from Manning and Bray’s History of 

Surrey showing the north and south elevations of the 

house in 1700 © aUthor’s collection 


© national trUst images/andreW BUtler 

above The south front – 

features such as the fine porch 

suggest the hand of a 

sophisticated designer 

left Little survives from the 

eighteenth-century interiors, 

apart from the main staircase 

and two chimneypieces 

© national trUst images/John 

miller, © national 

trUst/PatricK neWBerry 

for carrysfort, county Wicklow from 1730 to 

1760. Why he decided to move to surrey is 

unknown, but he bought leith hill Place 

aged 64, when he decided to retire from 

public life. 4 

hull acquired a recently modernised house 

and so there was little need to make any 

significant changes. his major contribution 

to the estate was to build a prospect tower at 

the highest point of leith hill, providing an 

eye catcher from the house and a stunning 

view from the tower’s upper chambers. the 

top of the hill actually lay just outside the 

boundary of hull’s land, so he leased four 

acres of the neighbouring Wotton estate. 5 at 

the time, leith hill was largely bare (see 

opposite page), meaning that the tower was 

a much more significant feature in the 

landscape. eccentrically, hull left a 

requirement in his will that he should be 

buried under the tower, despite the fact that 

it was not built on consecrated land. during 

twentieth-century restoration work, human 

remains were found under the tower, 

suggesting that hull’s wishes were fulfilled. 

hull died in 1772, leaving the estate in trust 

for his great nephew, richard supple. in 1777 

the trustees sold the estate to henry 

thompson, an oporto merchant, who owned 

it until 1795 when it passed to Philip Perrin of 

Parkhurst, abinger common, another 

neighbouring estate. it would seem that 

Perrin bought the estate for its land as he 

already had a large house, Parkhurst, in the 

area. leith hill Place was let, first to a george 

Waldron and secondly, in 1810, to the 

reverend rusden, who ran a school at the 

house. a set of 1828 sales particulars describe 

it as ‘capable of great improvement’, 

suggesting that the reverend may not have 

kept the house in the best order. 6 

the house was bought in 1829 by John 

smallpiece, treasurer of surrey, who added a 

service courtyard to the east, cleared more 

woodland for agricultural production, and 

built a shorter drive to the north front, which 

at some point in the latter part of the 

eighteenth century had become the main 

entrance. he also built an attractive gothic 

entrance lodge, which still bears his arms in a 

cartouche over the door. it is likely that 

smallpiece was also responsible for 

redecorating the house in a simple classical 


style, presumably to put right the damage 

caused by the reverend rusden. 

in 1847, following smallpiece’s death, leith 

hill Place became home to the grandson of 

Josiah Wedgwood, the great industrial 

revolution figure. Josiah iii had been 

apprenticed as a potter after eton and 

edinburgh University and had been expected 

to take over the Wedgwood pottery on the 

death of his father, also, confusingly, Josiah. 

Josiah iii duly obliged, but found that 

running a pottery was inimical to him and, in 

1841, sold his interest in the business to his 

brother Frank and moved south. Quite why 

he chose leith hill Place is unclear. his father, 

Josiah ii, had for a time also tried to escape 

from the potteries and had lived in surrey. 

that association might have been enough to 

cause Josiah iii to want to live in the county. 

Josiah iii had married his cousin caroline 

darwin, sister of naturalist charles darwin 

who, in turn, had married Josiah iii’s sister, 

emma. these four were great friends and 

spent a lot of time together at leith hill 

Place, where darwin often researched and 

wrote, particularly on the habits of 

earthworms. Josiah iii and caroline planted 

elaborate formal terraces around the house 

and a fine rhododendron garden in a wood 

north of the house. they made minor 

modifications to the house, removing its 

eighteenth-century balustrade, inserting 

dormer windows in the attic and adding an 

ugly porch to the north front. 

in 1866, the Wedgwoods’ middle daughter, 

margaret, married the reverend arthur 

vaughan Williams, whose father, sir edward, 

had rented tanhurst, a neighbouring Queen 

anne farmhouse. arthur and margaret 

moved to gloucestershire where arthur took 

up the living of down ampney. margaret 

bore three children, hervey, margaret and 

ralph. sadly, arthur died when ralph was 

only two and margaret moved back to leith 

hill Place to live with her parents and her 

unmarried sister, sophie. thus, leith hill 

Place became the childhood home of ralph 

vaughan Williams. 

sophie taught ralph music and, in due 

course, he learned to play a small pipe organ 

that stood in the entrance hall. after 

charterhouse, where his musical talent was 

nurtured, ralph went on to the royal college 

of music and then cambridge. he retained 

throughout life a deep affection for the 

surrey countryside, which may well have 

influenced his attachment to the english 

musical tradition, so evident in his work. 

leith hill Place passed through the family to 

hervey, before being left to ralph when 

hervey died childless in 1944. much as ralph 

loved leith hill Place, he recognised that 

running the estate would interfere with his 

work and, the day after his brother’s death, 

he walked into the office of James lees 

milne, architectural adviser to the national 

trust, and offered him the house. 

the offer was accepted although the house 

was not thought important enough to be 

opened frequently to the public and was let 

to ralph’s second cousin, sir ralph 

Wedgwood Bt, former chief general 

manager of the london and north eastern 

railway. sir ralph and his wife furnished the 

house with many fine Wedgwood artefacts 

and opened it one afternoon a week, with a 

guidebook written by their historian 

daughter c. v. Wedgwood. 

the Wedgwoods gave up the lease in 1965 

and the house was let for school use for the 

next 42 years. Following the return of the 

lease, the trust decided that the house, with 

its Wedgwood and vaughan Williams 

associations, merited wider public access. it is 

now open regularly, but how best to present 

the house is work in progress and there is a 

lot of work still to be done. however, this 

inspirational house is rapidly coming back to 

life and starting to feel loved again. 

Patrick newberry 

1 James lees milne, Prophesying Peace (london: 

chatto and Windus, 1977), p. 76. 

2 Manuscript Sales Particulars dated 1750 (surrey 

record office), 311. 

3 susan Weber, William Kent, Designing Georgian 

Britain (yale University Press: new haven and 

london, 2013), p. 157. 

4 little is known of hull but he was plainly more 

than a merchant, a memorial stone in the tower 

that he built (qv) recorded that he retired to leith 

hill Place and lived the life of a christian 

philosopher, having had ‘early intimacy’ with 

alexander Pope, Bishop Berkeley and John 

trenchard. 

5 Indenture between Sir John Evelyn, 2nd Bart and 

his son Frederick of the one part and Richard Hull of 

the other. (surrey record office, 26 october 1765), 

311/2/1-3. 

6 Sales Particulars of Leith Hill Place, Tanhurst and 

Parkhurst. (surrey record office, 1828), 1217/3/3. 

I am indebted to Gabrielle Gale MA, GRSM(Hons), 

ARAM, LRAM, ARCM, LTCL Visitor Operations 

Manager, Leith Hill Place for her continued 

encouragement in researching the history of the 

house and for her many excellent challenges on 

points of fact and opinions. 

An 1831 engraving of Richard Hull’s prospect tower at 

the highest point of Leith Hill, from Edward Wedlake 

Brayley, A Topographical History of Surrey, Vol. 5 (1841) 

© aUthor’s collection

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

Historic Environment Scotland 

The heritage body’s vast architectural 

practice records cast new light on the 

careers of some of the nation’s most 

prominent designers, from David Bryce to 

Basil Spence. By Jane Thomas 

H 

istoric environment scotland (hes) 

is a new organisation created in 

2015 from the merger of the royal 

commission on the ancient and historic 

monuments of scotland and historic 

scotland. the collections of the joint 

organisation comprise over five million 

objects including archaeological as well as 

architectural records, rare books, 

manuscripts, material associated with 320 

Properties in care and the national collection 

of aerial photographs. the scope of the 

architectural material reflects the broad remit 

of the organisation which encompasses the 

entire built heritage of scotland – 

architectural practice records have been of 

fundamental importance to the 

organisation’s purpose from the beginning. 

at the heart of hes’s architectural collections 

lies that of the scottish national Buildings 

record (snBr). Founded in 1941 to create an 

emergency record of scotland’s historic 

architecture in case of its destruction during 

the second World War, the snBr primarily 

carried out measured surveys and 

photography, but with limited time and 

resources it also copied prints and 


engravings, drawings and historic 

photographs in order to achieve as 

comprehensive coverage as possible. 

original drawings were collected from the 

outset, initially to document buildings, but it 

was not long before their designers became 

the subject of interest. the earliest architects’ 

office drawings to be offered to the snBr as 

a group were by david Bryce (1803–76), a 

leading architect of the Baronial style. these 

presentation perspectives represented the 

surviving office drawings, the remainder of 

which had been destroyed or dispersed. the 

snBr was not simply interested in 

sumptuous examples of architectural 

draughtsmanship however, and in the 1950s 

accepted a large collection of William Burn’s 

office drawings from the royal institute of 

British architects which, at that time, felt the 

scottish projects would be more 

appropriately housed in scotland, an 

facing page Perspective view of Kellie Castle from 

the south-east by Robert Lorimer, 1888 © historic 

environment scotland 

below Unexecuted design for an observatory on 

Calton Hill, Edinburgh, by William Henry Playfair, 

c. 1820 

The scope of the architectural 

material reflects the broad remit 

of the organisation, which 

encompasses the entire built 

heritage of Scotland 

arrangement that has been of great benefit 

to researchers north of the border. 

in 1966 the snBr was incorporated into the 

royal commission on the ancient and 

historical monuments of scotland 

(rcahms), at which point it became the 

national monuments record of scotland 

(nmrs). in addition to becoming the 

repository for the survey material that had 

been created by rcahms since 1908, the 

nmrs continued to copy drawings, though 

now more strategically as the survey of 

Private collections. the survey was a 

proactive programme which in the 1970s 

saw staff photographers travel to london to 

photograph the adam drawings held in sir 

John soane’s museum in order that 

researchers in scotland could, for the first 

time, consult the plans alongside records of 

the projects as built. the architectural 

holdings continued to expand, the most 

important acquisition of the 1960s being the 

office drawings of sir robert lorimer (1864- 

1929) – the foundation of what was to 

become, with many subsequent additions, 

the lorimer and matthew collection. the 

lorimer collection is the most significant of 

hes’s nineteenth-century architectural 

practice archives, unique among them 

because of the range of material that has 

survived; the office drawings and 

photographs are complemented by drawing 

instruments, maquettes, office letter books, 

press cuttings, sketchbooks and two items of 

furniture from the drawing office. the 

material spans lorimer’s life from a schoolboy 

painted still life to the office press cuttings 

album for his final, greatest work, the scottish 

national War memorial, which was 

completed just before his death. 

drawing archives of other key figures in 

twentieth-century scottish architecture were 

pursued in the 1970s, the most important 

acquisition of this period being the office 

drawings of ian g. lindsay, restorer of iona 

abbey and the dominant figure in scotland’s 

emerging conservation movement. While at 

this time the focus of collecting was still 

primarily visual – plans and photographs of 

scottish buildings being the priority – the 

© coUrtesy oF historic environment scotland (rias collection) 



concept behind it had moved beyond simply 

recording the projects as built. drawings 

could now also be acquired in order to 

demonstrate the process of design through 

early concept sketches, unexecuted schemes 

and, very occasionally, foreign projects as 

exemplars of scottish architects’ wider 

oeuvre. lindsay’s sketchbooks were 

therefore considered appropriate to collect 

at this time but it wasn’t to be for another 

twenty years, by which time the concept of 

acquiring an entire office archive had begun 

to take root in the organisation, that the 

office files were brought in to be reunited 

with the plans. 

during the latter part of the twentieth 

century, the architectural collections grew 

exponentially, notably through the deposit 

of the collections of the royal incorporation 

of architects in scotland (rias). distinct 

within the wider architectural holdings, the 

rias collection has at its core the cabinet 

collection of drawings built up by the 

architectural profession in the nineteenth 

and twentieth centuries to showcase their 

work. documenting the architectural 

profession took a new turn in the 1990s when 

economic pressures led to an increasing 

number of very large office archives being 

presented to, or salvaged by, the rias. it had 

long been evident that much had been 

destroyed as a result of the scaling down of 

architectural offices in the 1970s and 1980s 

but exactly what remained within architects’ 

practices in terms of historic drawings was 

facing page Contract drawing for the Callender 

Hydropathic Establishment, Perthshire, by Dick Peddie 

and McKay, December 1879 © historic environment 

scotland (dicK Peddie and mcKay collection) 

below Basil Spence’s design for the Sea and Ships 

Pavilion, Festival of Britain, April 1949 © historic 

environment scotland (sir Basil sPence archive) 

unknown. Following a decade of 

initiatives that sought to identify what 

survived, a systematic overview was 

eventually achieved through the scottish 

survey of architectural Practices. From 

1992 to 1996 it surveyed 100 architectural 

practice archives and compiled a listing of 

architectural collections held within 

public institutions. 

as a result of the survey, several large 

practice archives were presented to the 

rias and rcahms. along with those 

already salvaged, this formed a core of 25 

important practice collections, containing 

around 180,000 drawings. such a large 

addition relative to the total holdings 

necessarily had a significant impact on the 

architectural collections; overwhelming 

the organisation’s cataloguing and 

preservation resources and leading to 

several externally funded projects that 

ensured that the material could be made 

available for public consultation. as a 

group, the office archives date from the 

mid-nineteenth century to the 1970s. a 

variety of practices is represented, both 

large and small, from the nineteenth to 

the twentieth century and with a 

geographical spread covering virtually the 

whole of scotland. together they provide 

a valuable insight into the history of 

scottish architectural practice, methods of 

drawing production, draughtsmanship, 

use of materials and the arrangement of 

office drawing stores. 

the movement of individual architects as 

they trained, practiced and eventually ran 

firms can be traced across the collections. 

young architects were employed by other 

firms to prepare presentation 

perspectives, so drawings by Basil spence, 

for example, appear in the archives of 

both dick Peddie & mcKay and reginald 

Fairlie. Business histories are evident in 

above Portrait of Sir Basil Spence, c. 1950 © historic 

environment scotland (sir Basil sPence archive) 

the growth and decline of practices as they 

expanded and merged with others, or shed 

staff as they downsized their offices. 

drawings prepared in boarding houses 

evoke the early stages of fledgling practices 

with many choosing to live and work from 

the same address, a pragmatic arrangement 

dating back to the early nineteenth century. 

individual projects illustrate the continued 

relationship of a practice with a building 

from design through various alterations over 

many years. in some cases, the same building 

appears in several of the archives because

all images © historic environment scotland (sir Basil sPence archive) 

alterations were carried out by different 

firms, and key projects missing from a 

practice collection sometimes turn up in 

another when, in the course of carrying out 

building alterations, the original design 

drawings were acquired from the clients. 

architects’ practice archives continue to be 

selectively collected; the most important 

acquisition of the twenty-first century being 

that of sir Basil spence, which was presented 

by his family in 2003. some 37,000 objects in 

a variety of material from drawings, 

photographs, job files, contemporary film 

footage and slides to models and books 

illustrate the diversity of spence’s career and 

provide a great deal of source material for 

those researching spence as well as those 

studying British architecture of the midtwentieth 

century. With the increased focus 

on the architect’s career and resultant 

widening of scope in terms of hes’s 

collecting policy, it has been possible to proactively 

acquire records of international 

projects should they fall within a scottish 

architect’s body of work. the spence archive, 

for example, contains a significant 

proportion of english and international 

material relating to major projects such as 

coventry cathedral, expo’ 67 in montreal, the 

British embassy in rome and the University 

of sussex. 

But what of the future? there are 

undoubtedly still practice collections of 

national importance in the private domain, 

including those that have been created in 

left Concept sketches for Expo’67, Montreal by Basil 

Spence, c. 1965

The definition of what 

constitutes the archive of a 

practice is evolving 

the last 50 years. establishing what should be 

preserved now that most architectural 

practices rely primarily on digital technology 

to create and store their design and build 

records is of the utmost importance and will 

influence the way in which we curate this 

material for generations to come. the 

definition of what constitutes the archive of a 

practice is evolving as software becomes an 

ever more sophisticated tool, while questions 

of authorship and, indeed, of what 

constitutes an original design object present 

exciting challenges for curators to address as 

we enter the world of the virtual archive. 

Jane thomas is curator of special 

collections Projects at historic environment 

scotland. 

Historic Environment Scotland’s collections can 

be consulted in the Search Room of the 

National Record, 16 Bernard Terrace, Edinburgh 

EH8 9NX and through its online catalogue, 

CANMORE, which holds over a million 

catalogue entries for material relating to 

buildings throughout Scotland as well as 

archaeological, industrial and maritime sites: 

canmore.org.uk 

right View taken by Basil Spence at the opening of his British Pavilion 

for Expo’67, Montreal 

below Design elevation for the Royal Mile redevelopment housing 

scheme, Edinburgh by Basil Spence, c. 1965

S A H G B S c h o l a r s 

Architectural 

innovation in 

an unexpected 

place 

SAHGB scholar Sophie Dentzer-Niklasson 

explores how an unpretentious fourteenthcentury 

Wiltshire church came to be graced 

with one of the first net vaults in England 

Driving forces of architectural 

innovation are numerous and often 

elusive, especially for periods with 

limited documentation: are new designs due 

to the architect or master mason, to the 

patron, to the funds available for the project, 

to the geographical situation of the building, 

or to the existing architectural environment? 

the reconstruction of the chancel in the 

parish church at Urchfont in Wiltshire 

provides a good opportunity to work 

through these questions. the stone-vaulted 

chancel was built in the first decades of the 

fourteenth century (1300–30) and as such is 

one of the first net vaults in england. 

the early fourteenth-century chancel at 

Urchfont replaced another one built c. 1200, 

of which only the chancel arch remains 

today. the designer(s) of the new chancel 

concentrated the sculptural ornamentation 

on the vault; the elevation is plain, enhanced 

only by traceried windows. the twelve 

corbels from which the vault springs rest on 

heads and the nineteen bosses display a 

variety of foliage and figurative subjects. 

there is an important discrepancy between 

cost and effort put into the vault and into the 

elevation: the vault was to be the main 

architectural feature not only of the chancel 

but of the entire church. the visual impact of 

the vault – visible beyond the liturgical 

screen – made it the architectural element 

par excellence to impress and amaze. 

above The chancel at Urchfont – the church's most 

striking (and costliest) architectural feature 


throughout the thirteenth century, english 

masons experimented with the addition of 

extra ribs on vaults’ surfaces. the threedimensional 

articulation of a quadripartite 

vault was usually retained and rib patterns 

were contained within one bay. By contrast, 

net vaults challenged the individuality of bay 

units: ribs were applied to a continuous 

barrel vault with small lateral penetrations, 

and diagonal ribs were stretched over two 

successive bays. at Urchfont, diagonal ribs 

cross over two-bay units so that the 

intersecting lines create smaller quadripartite 

shapes. the arrangement of the vault has 

little to do with the plain elevation below 

(see overleaf). the corbels from which the 

vault springs simply mark an alternation 

between blank wall and traceried windows – 

there is no bay division. 

the first net vaults were built in western 

France in the early thirteenth century, such 

as at and saint-Jouin-de-marnes and airvault 

(see overleaf) in deux-sèvres. they are, 

however, rarely noted in teleologically driven 

architectural narratives since the motif only 

became frequent in the fourteenth century. it 

thus fell to Jean Bony to note similarities 

between the vaults of western France and 

early english net vaults, such as at Bristol, 

Wells and ottery st mary. he even claimed 

that the vault at Urchfont corresponded 

most closely to the angevin model, i.e ‘a unit 

of vaulting, made up of two rectangular bays, 

with four small cross-rib units creating a net 

of two-bay diagonal ribs’. 1 could the design 

of the vault at Urchfont be directly inspired 

by earlier French examples as Bony 

suggested? in england, embryos of net vaults 

– reduced to one bay – were built in the side 

aisle of the choir at st augustine’s, Bristol 

(c. 1300) and in the east bay of the pulpitum 

at exeter cathedral, shortly after 1317 (see 

image 6). large-scale net vaults were 

constructed in the nave at malmesbury 

abbey (c. 1310) and over the presbytery at 

Wells (c. 1326). 

even if the three-dimensional shape of the 

vaults is generally similar in western France 

and england – a pointed barrel vault with 

lateral penetrations – they differ in each 

individual case depending on the 

requirements of the elevation. the rib 

pattern of net vaults in england is not 

deployed on the vault’s three-dimensional 

surface in the exact same manner as in 

France, especially in the case of ridge ribs 

(ribs that run on the apex of the vault, 

longitudinally or transversally). the ridge ribs 

in western France, as at airvault, follow the 

semi-circular shape of the barrel and the 

rising angle of the window web so that they 

are made of, at least, two different 

The visual impact of the vault – 

visible beyond the liturgical 

screen – made it the architectural 

element par excellence to impress 

and amaze 

curvatures. the absence of ridge ribs in 

Urchfont and on the barrel at Bristol may 

partly be due to the adaptation of the 

pattern to english preferences, such as the 

tendency to build straight ridge ribs (i.e. with 

no curvature), which was possible only in the 

penetrations at Bristol. Because of this 

adaptation process, it is impossible to be 

certain that there was a direct link between 

the French and english net vaults. the design 

of net vaults may have been transmitted 

through drawings from which the master 

mason could have adapted the rib pattern to 

local traditions. 

net vaults in england are all different and 

their three-dimensional articulation relied 

mostly on the proportions and characteristics 

of the structure over which they were 

erected. the net vault at Urchfont is well 

The chancel’s nineteen bosses display a variety of foliage and figurative 

subjects 

There is no division of the bays – the corbels simply mark an alternation 

between blank wall and traceried windows 

suited to its architectural environment; its 

continuous barrel shape reflects the unity of 

the bayless elevation. the barrel vault was 

also a good solution to vault a relatively low 

space: the springers are situated at barely 

3.3 metres from the current floor and the 

vault barely reaches a height of 6.15 metres. 

vaulting such a low space with a regular 

three-dimensional articulation (as in a 

quadripartite vault) would have visually 

crammed the space. 

the net vaults at airvault and saint-Jouin-demarnes 

were built over pre-existing 

elevations, which may have prompted the 

master mason to disregard the bay division 

(irregular at saint-Jouin-de-marnes for 

example) in favour of the nave-length unity 

of the vault. similarly, the plain elevation of 

the chancel at Urchfont did not impose any 

bay division on the design of the vault; 

neither did the bay unit at Bristol. 

Furthermore, the tower vault of the charles 

Bridge in Prague (1368–73) by Peter Parler is 

now considered to be the first net vault; 

again a space with a plain elevation and no 

bay division. 2 the ingenious solution found 

by western French master masons in the 

early thirteenth century to vault irregular 

The twelve corbels from which the 

vault springs rest on a series of 

sculpted heads 


© tom nicKson 

The nave at Airvault in western France, one of the earliest net vaults 

The vault in the south side aisle, St Augustine’s, Bristol – a likely source of 

inspiration for the masons of Urchfont 

pre-existing elevations with net vaults was 

therefore first replicated in buildings where 

bay divisions were of little relevance. 

the problem of determining architectural 

influences is particularly difficult in 

geographically and chronologically distant 

cases, as for thirteenth-century France and 

fourteenth-century england. visual and 

historical evidence can determine the 

relation between similar forms, and the 

possibility of parallel and independent 

developments should not be excluded. 

medieval patrons and masons did not look 

exclusively to ‘avant-garde projects’, 

however. For instance, fourteenth-century 

english vault patterns were popular around 

the Baltic in the fifteenth century. 3 Because of 

its importance as a centre of trade, Bristol 

appears as the obvious place where new 

architectural forms would arrive. it is 

therefore much more likely that the vault at 

Urchfont was inspired by the side aisles at st 

augustine’s Bristol than by distant French 

precedents. Furthermore, the tracery from 

the lateral windows in Urchfont is a reduced 

variation of a motif present in several larger 

windows throughout the choir at Bristol. Be 

that as it may, it is exceptional to find 

innovative architectural features in parish 

churches such as Urchfont. 

When architectural innovations or ‘great 

church architecture’ are found in remote 

places it is usually because of the patron. this 

was the case with the collegiate church at 

ottery st mary in devon, commissioned by 

Bishop grandisson of exeter in the 1340s, and 

stone church in Kent, built by the bishop of 

rochester in the 1260s. lawrence hoey also 

noted that the construction of stone vaults in 

parish churches is almost always due to a 

prominent ecclesiastical patron. 4 it is 

unknown whether such an act of patronage 

took place at Urchfont but the only extant 

document concerning the chancel in the 

early fourteenth century rather hints at a 

neglect of the fabric of the church. in 

december 1301, the Bishop of salisbury 

deplored the derelict state of the chancel – in 

such a bad state that it rained, snowed and 

hailed inside – and the rector responsible for 

the upkeep of the chancel was found to be 

absent. 5 From one extreme to another, the 

chancel was covered with a stone vault a 

couple of years later. 

the motivations behind the costly 

construction of an innovative vault design at 

Urchfont remain unknown to us but are 

testimony to the importance of vaults as 

desired architectural elements, even for a 

seemingly unpretentious parish church. the 

possibility of French precedents for its design 

highlights the ambition of the project even 

though the sources of the design are most 

likely to be regional, drawing on features 

from the choir under construction at st 

augustine’s in Bristol and adapted to its own 

architectural environment. architectural 

historians are left with the question of how 

to deal with buildings of unexpected 

innovation such as Urchfont. are they curious 

one-offs or do they deserve to be included in 

the greater narratives? as little as we know of 

these smaller places, the creative energy put 

into their architecture demonstrates that 

innovation and experimentation with new 

elements were available to the full span of 

buildings, from parish churches to the great 

cathedrals. 

sophie dentzer-niklasson 

1 Jean Bony, The English Decorated Style: Gothic 

Architecture Transformed, 1250–1350 (oxford: 

Phaidon), 1979, pp. 50–51. 

2 Jana gajdošová, ‘vaulting small spaces: the 

innovative design of the old town Bridge tower 

vault’, in Journal of the British Archaeological 

Association (forthcoming). 

3 Jakub adamski, ‘the influence of the english 

decorated style in the southern Baltic area and 

Poland’, in John munns (ed), Decorated Revisited: 

English Architectural Style in Context, 1250–1400 

(turnhout: Brepols), forthcoming. 

4 lawrence hoey, ‘stone vaults in english Parish 

churches in the early gothic and decorated 

Periods’, in Journal of the British Archaeological 

Association (1995), pp. 36–51. 

5 harry rothwell, English Historical Documents, 

1189–1327 (london: eyre and spottiswoode, 1975), 

pp. 722–23. 


A scholar’s 

progress: 

Stephen 

Hague 

In the first of a series looking at how our 

Scholarships – made possible by members – 

have helped aspiring historians, Stephen 

Hague remembers how our support set him 

on an odyssey through England’s small 

classical houses 

When i undertook doctoral work at 

the University of oxford in 2008 to 

study english houses built by 

eighteenth-century genteel families, little did 

i realise how many remote corners of 

england i might visit as part of my 

investigations. research to houses and 

collections is not an inexpensive proposition, 

and it became evident early on that proper 

research was going to take a lot of time and 

considerable money to do the job well. 

enter the sahgB scholarship, generously 

awarded to me in 2009 by the society. this 

substantial grant was a godsend for a 

postgraduate student from america, 

enabling many days of research in local 

archives and travel to numerous houses. the 

focus of my work was on small classical 

houses built from the late-seventeenth 

century onward, which i argue help to trace a 

measured, incremental process of social 

mobility in provincial england and Britain’s 

north american colonies during the 

eighteenth century. architectural historians 

had largely neglected these houses, despite 

the proliferation of studies of the merchants 

and genteel owners who built them. i sought 

to bring together architectural, social and 

cultural history, which demanded getting out 

and seeing extant houses, as well as mining 

sometimes obscure and out-of-the-way 

archives. 

over the course of my three years in england, 

i visited nearly sixty houses. this was not 

always an easy process. although most 

owners were generous with their time, and 

allowed quite extraordinary access to their 

houses, others refused to allow me to visit, or 

Stephen and his editor at the Institute of Historical Research book launch of The Gentleman’s House in the British 

Atlantic World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) 

only begrudgingly gave me their time. one 

owner, after several requests, finally said, ‘i 

suppose i have to allow you to visit’ (i did not 

disabuse him of the slightly absurd notion 

that he was required to let me into his 

house). despite initial reluctance, however, 

he warmed to the task, showed me all 

around and sent me off in the end with quite 

a cheery, ‘come again. that wasn’t nearly as 

bad as a trip to the dentist’. 

the result of the scholarship enabling my 

work was that i landed a post as a historian at 

an american university in new Jersey, and 

saw publication of my first book, The 

Gentleman’s House in the British Atlantic 

World, in 2015. the book has attracted some 

attention and i have done numerous 

speaking engagements and book talks over 

the last year or so. in this way, it has been 

satisfying to see an academic book intended 

to make a new statement about the 

intersection of architecture and social 

mobility open up horizons to both scholarly 

and general public audiences. indeed, the 

announcement earlier this year that The 

Gentleman’s House had been shortlisted by 

the sahgB for the alice davis hitchcock 

medallion proved a particularly satisfying 

moment along my research path. 

the sahgB scholarship also led to 

publication of a chapter in elizabeth mcKellar 

and Julian holder’s recent Neo-Georgian 

Architecture volume. this piece originated in 

my visits to small classical houses, as i 

became intrigued by how public and private 

owners subsequently used these buildings. 

moreover, the essay points toward my next 

book project, which will consider how 

historic architecture and historical memory 

were important cultural components in 

constructing the idea of ‘greater Britain’ in 

the late nineteenth and early twentieth 

centuries. in this way, support from the 

sahgB is literally a gift that keeps on giving. 

It is the generous support of members that make 

our Scholarships possible. It currently costs us £40,500 

a year to support three scholarships. We’d love to hear 

from you if you can help us carry on this tradition. 

There are many way you can do this, either with a oneoff 

or regular gift, or by remembering us with a future 

gift in your will. Please contact lisa@sahgb.org.uk, if 

you would like to know more. 


N E W S A N D E V E N T S 

In memoriam: 

Giles Waterfield (1949–2016) 

An understanding and appreciation of 

architecture ran like a clear stream 

through everything that giles 

Waterfield did, though i cannot ever recall 

him declaring himself, overtly, to be an 

architectural historian. a master of 

understatement, he would scarcely have 

done so. With his polymathic gifts and 

interests, looser labels suited him better. his 

Who’s Who entry simply reads ‘writer and 

curator’, while his recreations are listed as 

‘sightseeing, theatre’. 

i first encountered giles when i began 

volunteering at dulwich Picture gallery in the 

early 1980s, a few years into what proved to 

be his phenomenally successful directorship 

during which he addressed fundamental 

questions of governance, funding, collection, 

conservation, audience, exhibition and 

education. in concert with the most acute of 

museum directors, however, he also took the 

trouble to research and understand the 

building which houses the collection and 

provides the stage for its activities. and 

dulwich, designed by John soane as the first 

purpose-built public gallery in the country, is 

of course exceptional. not only did his 

curiosity enable the informed restoration of 

this long-neglected masterpiece with its 

remarkable top-lit interiors, but it 

engendered two important exhibitions: 

Soane and After: The Architecture of Dulwich 

Picture Gallery (1987), and Soane and Death: 

The Tombs and Monuments of Sir John Soane 

(1996). giles recognised that ‘a high 

proportion of the visitors to dulwich Picture 

gallery come to see not the pictures but the 

gallery’. For the colophon to the earlier show 

he struck upon the idea of inviting living 

architects to express their reactions to the 

gallery and to soane’s work in general; 

among the major 20th-century architects 

interviewed for this purpose were the 

american giants michael graves, Philip 

Johnson, richard meier, and robert venturi 

and denise scott Brown. his novelty has 

become a familiar device in architectural and 

other exhibitions. 

giles arrived at dulwich with his architectural 

antennae already finely tuned; his ma thesis 

(the courtauld institute of art, 1975) was a 

study of the neoclassical architect thomas 

hardwick. But his response to dulwich was 

formative, igniting a life-long and deeply 

serious interest in the history of galleries, 

museums and their role in society as places 

of inspiration and education. latterly, this 

fascination extended to artists’ studios, his 

encyclopaedic knowledge finding its final 

expression in The People’s Galleries: Art 

Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800–1914 

(2015), for which he won the 2016 Berger Prize 

for British art history. he was fearless of 

artificial boundaries such as period, style or 

function and was as adept at dissecting the 

contemporary – see his review of James 

stirling’s neue staatsgalerie, stuttgart 

(apollo, July 1987) – as he was in enthralling 

his students about the far-distant past – i 

think of his tour de force on the medieval 

and early-modern royal tombs in 

Westminster abbey. For giles was a 

remarkable teacher and generous mentor 

too, whether in his work for the courtauld 

institute, for the attingham trust for the 

study of historic houses and collections, or 

via his extensive network of young, and less 

young, curators, who benefited in prodigious 

number from his friendship, advice and 

encouragement. the attingham 

programmes – the summer school, the 

royal collection studies course that he 

devised in partnership with the royal 

collection, and the london house course 

(another of his initiatives) – in particular 

provided a perfect vehicle for giles’s subtle 

genius and his rare ability to move easily 

between the worlds of art and architectural 

history and the history of places, people and 

ideas. among the most illuminating ten days 

i have ever spent were in his company, 

visiting dresden, Wörlitz, Berlin and Potsdam 

as part of a singular study tour he devised 

that embraced the great sweep of european 

history, art and architecture. giles and his 

unique humour, laconic and martini-dry, will 

be sorely missed by his many friends and the 

institutions that he so generously inspired 

and advised. David Adshead 

The Attingham Trust has set up a fund to endow a 

scholarship in Giles’s name to be given every year on 

an Attingham course. For more details, go to 

attinghamtrust.org 

Call for a collaborator on J. P. Gandy biography 

gandy family historian, and author of revised 

and expanded DNB article on architect and 

classical archaeologist, J. P. gandy 

(1787–1850), seeks collaborator in developing 

biographical study. copious unpublished 

mss, (including many in the gandy family 

archive), already identified, many 

transcribed, but more to be explored. 

gandy worked closely with sir William gell 

and William Wilkins, and practised 

successfully as an architect. he had a wide 

acquaintance, including Queen caroline, 

estranged wife of george iv, and lord elgin. 

he was a member of the society of dilettanti. 

youngest brother of the more famous Joseph 

michael gandy, he was a complete contrast 

in career and character to his sibling. 

adopted as a child by a wealthy family friend, 

he became a country squire in his later years, 

and served as a high sheriff and mP. 

anyone interested is invited to contact 

v. a. novarra: vnscircle@talktalk.net 

Send letters and other announcements to the 

Editor at magazine@sahgb.org.uk 


Ottenheym's annual lecture available online 

on 17 october, Konrad ottenheym delivered 

the annual lecture at the courtauld institute 

on the theme of ‘the classicist triangle: 

vicenzo scamozzi, inigo Jones and Jacob van 

campen and the exchange of architectural 

thinking in the early 17th century’. 

ottenheym, who is Professor of architectural 

history at Utrecht University and director of 

the dutch Postgraduate school for art 

history, explored the tradition of 

interchange between england and the low 

Liverpool to celebrate Rickman bicentenary 

this year marks the bicentenary of the 

printing (in liverpool) of thomas rickman’s 

ground-breaking book An Attempt to 

Discriminate the Styles of Architecture. this 

event is being celebrated by exhibitions at 

liverpool’s central library and the University 

of liverpool, and with walks and talks. to 

countries in the early seventeenth century, 

the influence of Jones on dutch design after 

1625, and the subsequent influence of dutch 

architects such as van campen and Pieter 

Post on english architects. the question he 

raised was why these later architects, such as 

robert hook and roger Pratt, looked so 

eagerly to dutch examples if the works of 

Jones were already to hand. 

to answer this question, ottenheym turned 

to the third side of the triangle: scamozzi and 

coincide with these events, a two-day 

conference is being held in association with 

the University of liverpool’s eighteenthcentury 

Worlds research centre on 19 and 20 

may. 

the conference will critically evaluate 

rickman's work and its influence in the 

Recent research and publication awards 

the late sixteenth-century classicism of the 

veneto. the full lecture can be viewed on 

youtube.com – search for ‘sahgB 2016’. 

the evening also saw the award of the alice 

davis hitchcock medallion to elain harwood 

for Space, Hope and Brutalism, her 

authoritative typological study of english 

architecture from 1946 to 1976. 

For Harwood’s reflections on the writing of Space, 

Hope and Brutalism, turn to page 24. 

context of the town where he lived and 

worked, where he discovered architecture 

and underwent the journey from insurance 

clerk to professional architect. Keynote 

speakers include dr megan aldrich, 

dr rosemary hill, dr Joseph sharples and Prof 

rosemary sweet. 

the society makes grants twice every year 

towards research into architectural history, 

and towards the publication of new works of 

architectural history. 

recent awards include: 

• a £395 research grant to amy Boyington of 

cambridge University, whose doctoral 

research investigates the extent to which 

elite women in the eighteenth century 

commissioned architectural works in Britain. 

the grant will be used to consult the 

correspondence of anne robinson (1742- 

c.1815) of saltram house, Plymouth. 

• a £500 research grant to dr graham cairns, 

senior visiting research scholar at columbia 

University, new york, to support a 

comparative UK–Us analysis of the use of 

architecture in political imagery. 

• and a publication grant of £500 to 

dr christine hui lan manley, a lecturer at 

leicester school of architecture, to go 

towards reproduction costs for her 

forthcoming book on Frederick gibberd, 

published by historic england and the 

twentieth century society. 

Learn more about the society’s grants at 

sahgb.org.uk/grants 

Devilish Details 

Where might you find this cheeky monkey? if 

you know, you could be in with a chance to 

win a national Book token for £20. all you 

have to do is correctly identify where this 

detail can be found. Please send your 

answer, along with your name, address and 

email or telephone contact details to 

magazine@sahgb.org.uk with the phrase 

‘Photo comPetition’ in the email subject 

box. the competition deadline is 31 march 

2017 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 3? it 

was the Kensington Palace orangery, 

believed to be by nicholas hawksmoor 

(1704–05). the winner was the reverend Jon 

a. Booth. 

a few more (faintly flickering) lamps 

of architecture, no. 4 

Queen Anne’s footstool lay close to 

her chair, Upside-down, with four 

legs in the air. 

“Mr Archer” she purred, 

“That is far less absurd 

Than your whimsical church in 

Smith Square.” 

nicholas cooper 


left St Vincent Street church, designed by Alexander 

‘Greek’ Thomson and completed in 1859 © steve 

cadman 

facing page The banqueting hall at Glasgow City 

Chambers, designed by William Young and completed 

in 1888 © seBastian rUFF 

have long since vanished. in June, hundreds 

of architectural historians and other 

advocates for the built environment will 

wander these streets with eyes wide open, 

taking in the city’s history as well as its 

aspirations. 

SAH conference 

comes to Glasgow 

The Society of Architectural Historians has 

chosen Scotland’s second city as the setting 

for its 70th Annual Conference. Sandy 

Isenstadt explains why it’s the ideal venue 

for the society’s first conference outside 

North America in 44 years – and gives a 

taste of what visitors can expect 

In the first week of June, hundreds of 

people in countries all around the world 

will leave their homes, find their way to 

an airport and, in many instances, fly 

thousands of miles to converge on a few sites 

in glasgow. they will come to take part in the 

70th annual conference of the society of 

architectural historians (sah). in keeping 

with its mission to facilitate the study, 

understanding and conservation of 

architecture, landscape and urbanism on a 

global scale, sah has been expanding its 

network of international organisations 

pursuing similar objectives, including sahgB, 

and has increasingly been attracting a more 

international membership. the annual 

conference has become in turn a hub for 

teachers and scholars, planners and 

architects, preservationists and policy 

specialists from many countries. this year, 

such people will come to glasgow to hear 

new ideas about the distant past and, in 

many cases, learn from that past in order to 

affect the future. 

many, perhaps most, will be coming to 

glasgow for the first time. they will find a city 

that in its own history and current affairs 

aligns closely with the values of sah. the city 

enjoys a splendid urban fabric rich in 

victorian-era architecture and laced with the 

work of alexander ‘greek’ thomson and 

charles rennie mackintosh, and is 

increasingly studded with more recent 

projects by architects such as norman Foster 

and Zaha hadid. From its gridded streets rise 

historic structures built of local sandstones 

and created by the wealth generated from 

shipping and other heavy industries that 

in many ways, the 2017 sah annual 

conference is not just in glasgow; it is about 

glasgow. the conference will be held at a 

number of unique glaswegian venues, such 

as the Kibble Palace, a nineteenth-century 

iron and glass conservatory, and tours will 

fan out to notable monuments. in glasgow, 

visitors are invited to see sites such as the 

city chambers; the cunninghame mansion 

(now a gallery of modern art); george gilbert 

scott’s University of glasgow campus; 

cottiers theatre, a church conversion 

originally designed by William leiper, with 

interiors by daniel cottier; govan, one of the 

city’s original settlements, including the 

govan old church and the newly restored 

shipbuilding offices of Fairfield govan; and 

many others, including key thomson and 

mackintosh projects in town. the range of 

tours is represented, on the one hand, by 

modern projects such as the planned 

community of cumbernauld, including the 

sacred heart church by gillespie, Kidd and 

coia, and, on the other, by a tour of centuries 

of vernacular architecture in Perthshire. sah 

has also arranged special trips to see 

mackintosh sites, such as hill house and the 

privately owned Windy hill house. 

sah has also been working with local 

educational institutions, such as the 

University of glasgow and the University of 

strathclyde, which is providing some of the 

conference venues. the University of 

edinburgh, has generously offered to host a 

study day of that city on sunday 11 June. 

likewise, several session chairs and speakers 

are based in glasgow and a number of 

papers will focus on the city, and the 

architectural heritage of scotland more 

generally. one of the roundtable sessions will 

be devoted entirely to mackintosh, in 

particular his school of art, which was 

heavily damaged by fire in may, 2014. the 

roundtable will focus on the painstaking 

efforts being made to restore the building. 

Quite a few sessions will be comprised of 

chairs and speakers based in the UK. there 

will be talks on local matters, such as roman 


Britain, maggies’s centre gardens, British 

punk, cedric Price, the scottish coal industry, 

‘virtual london’ and tenements in glasgow. 

But, as with all the conference sessions, 

specific topics open out onto broader 

concerns. neil Jackson, the charles reilly 

Professor of architecture at the University of 

liverpool, chairs the sahgB-sponsored 

session, ‘“a narrow Place”: architecture and 

the scottish diaspora.’ this session features 

five papers that cover key moments in the 

spread of design ideas from scotland to 

places such as canada, malta and africa. 

similarly, another session, ‘landscape and 

garden exchanges between scotland and 

america’, chaired by vanessa Bezemer sellers 

of the new york Botanical garden, and Judith 

K major, from Kansas state University, looks 

at the role scotland has historically played as 

a hub for cross-cultural exchange. 

in addition, glasgow will be the centrepiece 

of the city seminar, an sah conference 

format that began in 2013 in Buffalo. the city 

seminar invites local speakers in an effort to 

draw in the public at large and to promote a 

dialogue between conference attendees and 

the local community. the primary theme of 

the glasgow seminar is the problem of 

balancing the city’s built heritage with 

matters of sustainability and environmental 

below left Govan Old Church, designed by Robert 

Rowand Anderson and completed in 1888 © hUgh 

gray 

below right Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Hill House 

in Helensburgh, built in 1902–04 © hello World 2005 

stewardship. three defined issues will be 

featured: local housing, the use of open 

space, and development of the river clyde. 

While centred on glasgow, these discussions 

are relevant to other post-industrial cities, as 

municipalities throughout the world try to 

align preservation interests with 

development pressures and answer the 

question: how and at what cost can local 

identity, so often embodied in a city’s 

architecture, become an integral part of 

sustainable growth? 

the schedule of sessions also reflects the 

changing nature and focus of research into 

architecture and urban form. there are, no 

doubt, new tools for investigation. digital 

media, for example, not only make ever more 

archival data readily available at multiple 

sites simultaneously. they also offer 

opportunities for three-dimensional 

reconstructions of projects that were never 

built. they can make remote historic sites 

newly accessible, at least in virtual terms, and 

help document sites that have been 

purposefully leveled in recent years. a 

number of collaborative presentations also 

reflect the growing complexity of resources 

available to historians, as well as cooperative 

practices between sometimes far-flung 

individuals and institutions. 

in 2017, with a european city as the 

conference venue, we anticipate a more 

international audience than ever in sah 

history. a large part of the satisfaction of the 

annual conference is in speaking precisely to 

those people who are afflicted with the same 

obsession, a fascination with the myriad 

ways in which the built environment is made, 

inhabited, unmade and reconfigured, across 

varying spans of time. although nearly 

everyone in the world lives in a building of 

some kind, remarkably few are driven to 

understand how those buildings came to 

look the way they do, how they combined in 

countless ways to form the physical fabric of 

daily life and the formal vocabulary of a 

region or nation. sah conference attendees 

are among those few. thus, at the 

conference venue, just outside the door of 

the session room, over lunch, or just outside 

for a bit of fresh air, colleagues who know 

each other only by written works as well as 

old friends can get together and catch up on 

one another’s news. these encounters are no 

less important than the sessions themselves. 

We invite sahgB members to attend the 

glasgow conference and learn more about 

the society, its range of print and digital 

scholarly communications, its initiatives such 

as the Buildings of the United States book 

series, and to meet your colleagues who will 

arrive in scotland from around the world. 

meeting you is one of the reasons they will 

come to glasgow. 

sandy isenstadt is the vice President of 

sah and the 2017 conference chair. 

The 70th Annual Conference of the Society of 

Architectural Historians takes place in Glasgow on 7–11 

June 2017. To register, go to sah.org. A discounted rate 

is available for SAHGB members.

E X H I B I T I O N 

Master of the house 

ROBERT ADAM’S LONDON 

sir John soane’s museum, london 

Until 11 March 2017 

From the treasure chest of the soane 

collection of adam drawings, dr 

Frances sands has made a 

wonderfully varied selection of examples to 

illustrate the wide range of work undertaken 

by robert adam in the capital, where he 

lived from 1758 until his death in 1792. the 

importance of this aspect of his work is 

indicated by the sheer number of drawings 

from which choice had to be made. over 

1,700 examples cover urban palaces, terraced 

houses, public and commercial buildings, 

speculative projects and commemorative 

schemes. the geographical range of adam’s 

work is helpfully displayed on a large map 

speckled with twenty-seven red dots, 

locating the commissions included in the 

exhibition, both executed and unexecuted, 

from Portland Place to King’s Bench Prison, 

southwark; from grove house, Kensington 

gore to lloyd’s coffee house, cornhill. 

although adam was always hoping to work 

on the grand scale on royal or public 

commissions, these more frequently went to 

his rival, sir William chambers, and most of 

adam’s work was domestic. however, this 

did not reduce his lasting influence on the 

architecture of the capital. the introductory 

panel sets out the importance of the london 

townhouse to eighteenth-century patrons 

from a wide social spectrum and one of the 

delights of the exhibition is the way in which 

his skill at manipulating the form of the 

terraced house is displayed. 

alongside a splendid portrait of our hero, the 

first drawings of the exhibition show the plan 

of his own house in lower grosvenor street, 

with an octagonal extension designed to 

house his collection of antiquities, together 

with a sketch of some of those marbles. 

having made a grand tour himself, adam 

was at pains to display the fruits of his travels 

to wealthy patrons who had shared a similar 

experience, enhancing his chances of 

obtaining commissions from them. 

the ensuing displays are divided into ten 

sections, each supplied with text and 

drawings of extraordinary variety – plans, 

elevations, sections; perspectival drawings; 

sketches and finished drawings; coloured 

and black and white. an additional bonus is 

the presence, alongside its design of 1773, of 

the marble torchère made for the drawing 

room at 20 st James’s square. 

adam’s own interpretation of neoclassicism, 

with its emphasis on the visual stimulation of 

projection and recession, light and shade, 

reached its most grandiose in the project 

that would have transformed lincoln’s inn 

into a vast complex with echoes of the 

Pantheon. not surprisingly this scheme was 

unexecuted, given what it would have cost. 

less classical but equally impressive would 

have been the castellar curtain wall designed 

for the King’s Bench Prison. more lighthearted 

was the temporary garden 

illumination of Buckingham house, 

commissioned by Queen charlotte as a 

surprise for george iii’s 25th birthday. 

above Adam office, finished drawing showing a sofa 

for the saloon at 19 Arlington Street, 1764 

But it is his domestic interiors for which 

adam is most renowned and the ingenuity of 

his planning within the confines of the urban 

terrace is displayed not just by the plans 

themselves but most eye-catchingly by the 

spectacular sectional drawing of 20 Portman 

square, with its staircases apparently 

suspended in mid-air. Wealthy widows and 

wives acting for their husbands were 

prominent among adam’s patrons and it is 

suggested that a second marriage could 

have been the impetus for the makeover of 

houses such as 20 st James’s square or 

coventry house. the wide colour palette 

deployed by adam is richly conveyed by the 

coloured drawings, whether of ceilings, 

carpet, walls or furniture. Particularly 

desirable is a gilt sofa upholstered in pink. 

although much of his london architecture 

has been lost, the exhibition ends on an 

upbeat note with the recent restoration of 10 

hertford street, relying on the soane’s 

drawings for guidance. 

after engaging with this spell-binding 

exhibition, one’s appetite may well be 

whetted for the additional scholarship 

available in the accompanying publication 

obtainable in the museum’s shop. 

claire gapper 


Adam office, design for the window wall of the glass drawing room at Northumberland House, Strand, c. 1770–73 

all images reProdUced By coUrtesy oF the trUstees oF sir John soane’s mUseUm 

Adam office, finished drawings showing the ground plan and first-floor plan of 20 

St James’s Square, c. 1771–72 

Adam office, finished drawing showing the principal elevation of 34 Pall Mall, 1765 


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

‘It was supposed to be a simple 

editing task …’ 

Elain Harwood reflects on the 17-year process of researching and writing behind Space, 

Hope and Brutalism, the epic winner of the 2016 Alice Davis Hitchcock medallion 

Space, Hope and Brutalism grew out of 

english heritage’s research on post-war 

buildings, commissioned from a 

number of historians, architects and 

engineers in the mid-1990s. Post-war listing 

had a tortuous early history, and cases like 

robin hood gardens or dunelm house show 

that it remains controversial. a statutory 

instrument in 1987 first permitted buildings 

over thirty years old to be listed in england, 

well after they had begun to be listed in 

scotland and Wales. the Sunday Times 

invited suggestions from the public, seventy 

recommendations were made to what was 

then still the department of the 

environment, but in march 1988 only 

eighteen were listed. a trickle of spotlistings 

included the commonwealth institute and 

economist Building, but less well-known 


uildings were rejected and subsequently 

demolished. the department recommended 

a systematic survey and funded a series of 

reports by building type, which were vetted 

by a steering group of experts from inside 

and outside english heritage. martin cherry, 

head of listing, thought that the reports 

could be pulled together into a book, and 

the Paul mellon centre supported the 

proposal. it was supposed to be a simple 

editing task. 

above Robin Hood Gardens in Tower Hamlets, east 

London, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and 

completed in 1972. It was rejected for listing in 2008 

and now faces demolition © historic england, 

James o. davies 

yet it was clear that a diverse set of reports 

designed to identify candidates for listing 

would not make a book. they had served 

their purpose in supporting an 

unprecedented number of listings, but i put 

them aside. they did, however, suggest that 

each building type had a story to tell, and 

this i determined to tease out, to establish 

why new buildings were needed and why 

they looked and functioned as they did. the 

project was also supposed to identify new 

buildings for listing from the decade after 

1965, when the original work had stopped. 

i began with churches. the decade up to 

1965 had seen prolific numbers of new 

churches, as reflected in the number of 

listings, but a dramatic decline followed. 

i dug deep into the london library to find 

histories of church attendance and the 

liturgical movement. i looked at the records 

of the War damage commission and council 

for the care of churches to try to understand 

the organisations that had encouraged the 

earlier glut, before turning to specialist 

architectural sources such as Churchbuilding 

and the Catholic Buildings Review. i was lucky 

to have begun the book when i did, since i 

benefited hugely from interviewing 

architects such as the late edward mills and 

robert Potter, as well as those like Bob 

maguire who are happily still around. 

railways followed to a similar format, made 

easier by the prodigious histories that exist 

on railway nationalisation and electrification, 


that served as an archive to read through his 

correspondence. i stepped out at around 

8pm to find it had snowed, leaving the 

college magically silent and still. 

years before, i had been through the tyne 

and Wear archives to research the Byker 

estate for listing, but not its files on the 

building of newcastle civic centre, an 

unfashionable building by the time of its 

completion in 1968 that was little known 

before it was listed grade ii*. later i went 

through endless minute books to find the 

story of other town halls and libraries around 

the country, since i wanted to find out why 

some were modern and some were 

traditional, and council debates or the terms 

of their invited competitions seemed the 

only way to find out. For libraries there was 

an extensive literature produced by 

librarians, who looked at the ease of shelving 

their collections and serving the public 

rather than architectural style, but it was 

hard to write a story about civic centres, 

since although a surprising number were 

built after 1945 their planning changed less 

than other types in the post-war period. 

George Kenyon’s Newcastle Civic Centre, designed and built between 1950 and 1965, and grade II*-listed in 

1995 © historic england, James o. davies 

and the generosity of specialist architects 

including derrick shorten and the late Paul 

hamilton. i became fascinated by highvoltage 

electrification, though the detail was 

pruned in the final edit. ‘not enough 

architecture’, said one reader. ‘too much 

architecture’, said the other. i decided i was 

on the right course. 

meanwhile, the department for culture, 

media and sport commissioned a little guide 

book, in 1999, so the big project was put 

aside and a 220-word description quickly 

written for each of the 400 or so post-war 

buildings so far listed. that meant that i got 

to see most of the buildings that had already 

been listed, and to digest the contemporary 

reviews in the architectural press. i’ve been 

surprised that recent reviews of Space, Hope 

and Brutalism have suggested that i 

concentrated on the more familiar buildings, 

for i spent far longer researching early health 

centres, the wartime national restaurants and 

rural council housing – all unglamorous but 

important bits of history. Perhaps reviewers 

were confounded because the more familiar 

buildings made the best photographs, and in 

many cases they were the only ones that 

merited new photography, since so much 

public housing has been badly altered and 

new town centres or industrial buildings 

demolished. luckily my colleague James 

davies, now historic england’s chief 

photographer, got to buildings like owen 

luder’s tricorn and treaty centres, and st 

Philip and st James at hodge hill, 

Birmingham, before they were demolished. 

yale asked me not to focus on london alone, 

difficult for the post-war period since the 

most progressive architects’ department was 

that of the london county council and the 

capital saw the greatest commercial 

expansion. the development of the 

universities elsewhere helped to redress the 

balance and they include the most ambitious 

buildings of the era. i found that some of 

these buildings were extensively published, 

such as the leicester engineering Building, 

but when in January 2001 i began the large 

chapter on higher education, there was 

nothing on the building of st catherine’s 

college, oxford. the kindly college archivist, 

margaret davies, invited me to lunch with 

alan Bullock, the college’s founder, and lent 

me the key to the cupboard under the stairs 

if this all sounds very bitty, that’s because it 

was. the twelve chapters quickly chose 

themselves, but it was hard to structure each 

one – and was such a long chapter as that on 

universities wise? Private houses was to be 

first, but yale asked me to step straight in 

with public sector planning, so new towns 

got pushed up and the planning of the 

bombed towns cut from the commercial 

chapter to join it. the first chapter still feels 

disjointed to me. Within each chapter i wrote 

up each bit as i researched it, and then 

juggled the material and cut it down – there 

is a longer version available of most chapters 

before the slow torture of chopping down 

began, with quotations and descriptions the 

parts to go. no adjective was safe. archival 

research allows you to become engrossed in 

the mindset of the times while teasing out 

the facts, so you can see what was important 

to the clients at the time and formulate an 

argument and make connections as you go 

along, but other thoughts come only later. i 

am conscious that many people do all the 

research and then the writing, but i find that 

research can go stale if not written up 

quickly, and allows no opportunity to go 

back if you then ask new questions or make 

new connections. at historic england we 

have to forecast carefully how long we will 

spend researching each of our projects, 

which is difficult when you have no idea 

what you will find; SHB got on better when 

there were clear deadlines, as when the first 

draft of the chapter on new towns was 


written in three weeks for an internal policy 

document. 

so, while there was a very vague overall 

structure that did not greatly change, there 

were some sections that grew unexpectedly 

and had to be pruned. the slowest part was 

cutting and pasting to get the structure right. 

Where should the replanning of city centres 

on the back of road schemes go? the great 

changes to central Birmingham, the city of 

london and newcastle shifted from the 

chapter on commercial buildings to sit rather 

uneasily in the transport section since the 

overall concepts are greater than the sum of 

their parts, and libraries left public buildings 

to front a larger chapter on entertainment 

buildings than originally envisaged. no 

chapter changed more than the last one, on 

public buildings, the last to be written, in 

order that hillingdon civic centre – for many 

the end of modernism – came last. 

how much did the book change over 

seventeen years? that first churches chapter 

is shorter and more succinct than the others. 

i did get engulfed in archives as i got on to 

universities and especially libraries and civic 

centres, although i think these sections are 

richer as a result. the chapter on theatres, 

which was based on my first listing report for 

english heritage in 1994, grew into an mPhil 

as the first step for a Phd. then i realised that 

a better Phd could be based on the london 

county council archives for the building of 

the south Bank and those of the Festival of 

Britain – that cost me 2009 and the rewriting 

of about four pages of the book. the editing 

process by yale, reading and requiring 

changes, and making an edit that i was 

unhappy with before gillian malpass 

brilliantly drew together a final version, took 

four years, but in the summer of 2015 it 

progressed very quickly indeed. i got very 

upset by the modern way of using lower case 

for most titles, which in the edit extended to 

‘the queen’ [sic] and made the london 

county council’s title of ‘architect to the 

council’ for its chief architect particularly 

confusing; the Queen became elizabeth ii all 

through but other titles were harder to 

dodge. it is odd how this usage of lower case 

has become all but standard and is second 

nature to me now. 

What really changed was the end result. 

there was no room for the dozens of plans i 

carefully drew out, and the new photography 

gave a greater coherence than the use of 

familiar old images ever could. gillian 

malpass brought in a gifted designer, Paul 

sloman, and suddenly all those pages of 

typescript began to look like a book. the 

disappointing thing is that the book has not 

‘Not enough architecture’, said 

one reader. ‘Too much 

architecture’, said the other. I 

decided I was on the right course 

led to more buildings being listed, but 

surveys of schools and higher education 

buildings begun in the late 1990s are now 

being dealt with, and that of private houses 

commissioned from a consultant was 

completed in 2014. 

What i did not expect when the title was 

suggested to me in 2001 was how Brutalism 

would capture the popular imagination, and 

that SHB would be submerged in a wave of 

titles on heavy concrete structures from 

around the world. But a great many buildings 

i admired have been demolished and the 

battle to win hearts and minds feels as hard 

as ever. 

Space, Hope and Brutalism by Elain Harwood is 

published by Yale University Press (£50). It is reviewed 

by Neil Jackson in Architectural History, vol. 59: 2016 

below The interiors of Newcastle Civic Centre feature 

high-quality materials, including Portuguese marble 

and English oak © historic england, James o. 

davies

The many lives of 

Nicholas Hawksmoor 

Owen Hopkins talks to Nick Jones about the great architect’s strange afterlife, 

from his fall into obscurity to the resurrection of his reputation and his 

irresistible attraction for writers and myth-makers 

Your book, From the Shadows, is half a conventional 

biography of Hawksmoor’s life, half a biography of his 

architectural reputation. Why did you take that 

approach? 

We did an exhibition on hawksmoor at the 

royal academy, focusing purely on the 

cultural side of the ‘afterlife’ – whether it was 

through artists, architects like lasdun and 

stirling, or through the mythology of ian 

sinclair, Peter ackroyd and alan moore. i was 

struck by the way this mythology had built 

up around him and wanted to work out how 

it had come into existence. 

Writing the book, i realised the life and 

afterlife were, in many ways, inseparable. 

there are these weird connections across 

time – particularly the way sinclair, for 

example, conceived hawksmoor’s churches 

existing on these lines of influence and 

power across the capital. that wasn’t so 

different from how hawksmoor saw it – he 

didn’t think about lines connecting them, but 

he certainly thought about how they would 

relate to each other in the cityscape, how 

they would express a kind of dominion over 

their surroundings. this was directly figured 

in the city plans he did for oxford and 

cambridge. 

For a long time though, what you describe is less an 

afterlife, more a descent into obscurity. One of the 

themes of the book is the idea that our responses to 

architecture are socially constructed, and for much of 

the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 

Hawksmoor was practically invisible … 

there’s a contradiction in some of what i 

write, in that i describe hawksmoor’s 

buildings as unignorable, yet they were 

ignored for quite a long time. i would love it 

if there was a quote from a dickens novel, or 

if turner had painted one properly, or if 

soane had said something about 

hawksmoor, but they didn’t. in the 

nineteenth century the churches only really 

appear in topographical accounts, and often 

in quite a strange way – described as 

workhouses, for example. 

that sense of obscurity is brought out by 

hawksmoor’s grave in shenleybury, which is 

above St George-in-the-East viewed from the south 


where the book opens. he ended up in this 

non-descript churchyard in this 

unremarkable hamlet in hertfordshire, which 

is now the garden of a suburban home. 

When i went there, i was talking to the owner 

about a visit she made to st Paul’s, and that 

just put everything into sharp relief – the 

complete contrast in fates of hawksmoor and 

Wren. Wren had this huge architectural 

monument in london that, even when he 

went out of fashion, could not be ignored, 

while hawksmoor had these weird churches 

in relatively unknown parts of the city, and 

he ended up here. 

Part of the reason this mythology arose is 

because a vacuum surrounds hawksmoor 

the person. We know very little about him 

really compared to Wren, and that’s not 

because as a person he was very enigmatic, 

it’s just the way that history left him. 

You go on to explore how his reputation was revived 

in the twentieth century, both architecturally and 

through a variety of other media. How much is our 

response to Hawksmoor’s buildings today seen 

through the prism of first modernism and then postmodernism? 

i think it is definitely a factor. it’s really hard 

to analyse the present moment, or how the 

current revival in interest in brutalism and 

potentially postmodernism will inform 

Peter Buttle, whose suburban garden in Shenleybury 

includes the former churchyard of St Botoph’s – and 

Hawksmoor’s grave 

Around a journal in 80 seconds 

#2 The Orchard 

‘an architect of 

individuality.’ 

duncan 

simpson’s 

phrase in his 

1979 book is the 

perfect 

description of 

charles Francis 

annesley 

voysey. voysey’s 

work was 

unique, modest 

and memorable. he was not simply an 

architect but a designer of furniture, 

domestic fittings and ironmongery, of 

flamboyant wallpaper, fabrics and exquisite 

graphic items. his buildings, principally some 

fifty substantial houses for individual clients, 

based on unspecified vernacular traditions, 

were distinctive, simple and elegant. 

voysey’s work, and the philosophy behind it, 

was well publicised at the time by his own 

writings (including Individuality, published in 

1915, and articles in The Studio and in 

Dekorative Kunst in germany), which gave 

him an international reputation. his 

simplicity of design caused him to be 

labelled as a forerunner of the modern 

movement in architecture, a concept he 

rejected. although he had affinities with the 

work of William morris, Baillie scott, 

mackmurdo and mackintosh, voysey 

remained an individual and declined 

membership of any particular stylistic group. 

his success as an architect was marked in 

1891 by the construction of the tower house 

at 14 south Parade in Bedford Park. his 

practice flourished, and for twenty years he 

became one of the most sought-after 

architects for progressive middle-class clients 

in england. however, a combination of 

fashion and his uncompromising attitude 

may have lost him commissions and the 

work had dried up by the First World War, 

although he continued with furniture, 

wallpaper and competition designs. 

despite his early success he did not receive 

recognition from the establishment until an 

exhibition of his work in 1931 (which was 

accompanied by a significant article in the 

Architectural Review by John Betjeman), the 

rsa award of ‘designer for industry’ in 1936, 

and finally the riBa gold medal in 1940, only 

a year before his death. 

the majority of his buildings are extant today 

and are generally well cared for by their 

appreciative owners. examples of his 

furniture, textiles and decorative items are 

valued worldwide. 

the cFa voysey society exists to celebrate 

his achievement. it is the society’s objective 

to encourage research into all aspects of his 

life and work and to help to maintain his 

legacy. to this end it publishes a journal, 

called The Orchard after the house he built 

for his own family in chorleywood in 1900. 

more information, including contact details, 

may be found on the society’s website: 

voyseysociety.org. Dr Peter King, Secretary 

If you would like to get a wider audience for your 

society’s publication, please contact 

magazine@sahgb.org.uk 


A Giant Reborn! 

the organ of christ church spitalfields 

is as important musically as 

the church is architecturally, and 

was for 100 years after its com - 

pletion, in 1735 by richard Bridge, 

the biggest pipe organ in Britain. 

as part of the restoration of christ 

church, the organ has just been 

completely refurbished, making it 

the perfect instrument to perform 

the wonderful music that 

resounded through hawksmoor's 

london. A Giant Reborn!, released 

by Fugue state records, is the 

first double cd to be recorded on 

it. Featuring music by handel, 

Purcell, Boyce, stanley et al, 

played by gerard Brooks, it is 

available to sahgB members for 

the special price of £18.50. email 

will@fuguestatefilms.co.uk and 

quote the reference code 

‘hawksmoor’. 

how we see hawksmoor. there was 

certainly a moment when hawksmoor 

became very fashionable among architects. 

stirling and lasdun were among the first for 

whom he became very important, and for 

the people that they taught, hawksmoor was 

a key figure in their development. But i think 

he has slipped from that position of fashion 

and importance. i mention in the book a 

project that [founder of Fat architecture] 

sam Jacob did at the University of illinois 

about hawksmoor and when he mentioned 

it to one of the older teachers their response 

was, ‘oh, not more hawksmoor, i thought we 

had done all that in the 1980s’. i can 

understand that in a way – hawksmoor now 

sits at the summit of British architectural 

history next to Wren and soane, he’s hit the 

mainstream. 

The social and urban context of the churches has 

obviously changed a lot in the intervening years, 

dramatically so in the present period. Does this 

change our response to them? Has it changed the 

buildings themselves? 

that’s an interesting question but one that’s 

difficult to answer … the context around 

spitalfields has undergone a radical, 

fundamental change, but it still has that kind 

of edgeland quality to it – even though those 

huguenots houses go for millions. and the 

area around st-george-in-the-east still has a 

weird quality that permeates it, which i’d like 

to think has something to do with the 

church. there’s a fairly awful residential 

development very nearby called ‘the 

hawksmoor’, but i don’t think even that is 

going to have an effect. 

a lot of the debate about gentrification 

currently sits in a historical vacuum, in that 

people forget that cities always change, areas 

always come up and go down, and that’s 

perfectly natural, even though the difference 

now is that it happens so quickly. i think we 

underestimate the capacity for cities to hold 

onto the identities that they’ve accrued over 

time and just how resistant they are to even 

wholesale redevelopment. i’m starting to 

sound a bit like ian sinclair … 

Despite showing how responses to Hawksmoor have 

changed depending on the fashions of the time, you 

also describe him as a genius, which is more of a static 

concept, beyond questions of architectural taste. Is 

that a bit of a contradiction? 

i‘ve always been quite happy with ideas like 

genius and spirit. and if you’re going to use 

that category, i think hawksmoor really does 

qualify – certainly his best work does. When i 

lecture on the churches, i begin with st 

alfege and work my way west, basically 

corresponding with the order in which they 

were designed, and it shows how his work 

developed. st alfege is the least resolved 

internally, then you hit the three stepney 

churches which are virtuosic in every single 

way. st mary Woolnoth’s original interior is 

the greatest of all of them, but then you get 

to st george, Bloomsbury and actually he’s 

gone too far – internally, the spatial 

arrangement is incredibly complicated, but 

nobody understood what he was doing, and 

the exterior takes the idea of quotation over 

the edge. 

of course, then at the end you get arguably 

his greatest building – the mausoleum at 

castle howard. it doesn’t have the ingenuity 

of the three stepney churches but it has that 

long experience in that it is completely 

resolved. he knew instinctively how wide the 

columns should be to create that effect of 

slivers of light coming into view at different 

moments, which you wouldn’t get if they 

were tighter or wider apart. and he knew 

that without even going there. maybe that’s 

genius. 

Of course, there are other takes on Hawksmoor. Where 

do you stand on Peter Ackroyd? You quote John 

Summerson saying he would be sick if his novel won 

the Booker prize … 

i make the point that the renown that 

hawksmoor has now in the public 

consciousness is greater than would ever 

have been possible without ackroyd’s book. 

and in terms of the plight of the buildings 

themselves, the ackroyd effect has been 

undoubtedly positive. that said, in terms of 

whether it has, as summerson says, ‘polluted 

the wells of truth’, i think undoubtedly it has. 

But if ackroyd hadn’t done it, somebody else 

would have – and probably not as well – 

because there was this vacuum and there 

was scope for a rollicking historic novel. 

the risk is that it overshadows the real 

hawksmoor. i find the mythology really 

interesting, but personally i’m interested in 

how it came about, the factors that led to its 

creation. and if you take away the 

mythology, you’re still left with these really, 

really weird buildings. how did they come 

into existence? that is a far more interesting 

question. 

From the Shadows: The Architecture and Afterlife of 

Nicholas Hawksmoor by Owen Hopkins is published by 

Reaktion Books 

The Mausoleum at Castle Howard peering over the 

rambling Yorkshire landscape © oWen hoPKins (all)

A week in the 

life … 

As a high-quality glossy magazine 

produced every week – rather than 

monthly – Country Life is an anomaly 

in the British publishing world. so too in the 

digital age does it’s popularity as a printed 

magazine: this year it has increased its 

readership for the seventh consecutive year. 

if the strengths of the magazine partly lie in 

its regularity and popularity, then so too do 

its challenges. 

as architectural editor, my principal 

responsibility is to oversee the magazine’s 

celebrated series of weekly articles on 

country houses. the process of preparing 

each one begins with a visit to the property 

in question. Whether or not i’m writing the 

article, this allows me to think about the 

photography, to explain the practicalities of 

the production process with the owners and 

also to discuss the focus of the piece. it’s also 

essential for purposes of research and can 

yield unexpected fruits; owners can 

unexpectedly supply historic documentation 

or invaluable information about the recent 

history of a building. 

house visits are one of the great privileges of 

my job. i love travelling in the British isles and 

having the opportunity to see so much and 

meet so many interesting people. looking at 

buildings in the company of owners and 

specialists turns the best visits into 

masterclasses from which i learn an 

enormous amount. Because the architectural 

pages need to cover a wide spectrum of 

material across the full extent of the 

kingdom, they are also necessarily very 

varied in character, taking me from country 

houses to cottages and from medieval 

buildings to newly constructed houses. 

after the visit comes the photography. this 

can require a long lead-in time, particularly if 

… of John Goodall, Architectural Editor of 

Country Life 

John on a recent visit to the Hope Mausoleum (1818), 

probably designed by William Atkinson, at the 

Deepdene, Surrey 

the house is busy and open to the public for 

much of the year. it’s important to 

commission pictures in every season, but the 

lion’s share of the work inevitably takes place 

in the summer, when the light lasts longest. 

it’s also the case that summer photographs 

can be published all year round. By contrast, 

autumn and spring pictures look odd in the 

magazine if published in other seasons. 

the regular photographers i use work 

extremely hard to produce pictures of the 

highest quality. their internal photography is 

taken without artificial lighting. it’s only by 

this means, in my opinion, that you can 

capture the atmosphere of rooms and 

spaces. this approach also distinguishes our 

pictures from the vast majority taken by 

other professionals. the aim is to make 

rooms look lived in with fires lit and tables 

laid. nevertheless, getting photographs right 

– with true verticals, minimal reflections and 

what might be described as decent disorder 

– demands painstaking effort. externally, our 

photographers also have to deal with the 

weather. you can’t make the sun shine and 

you can’t summon up clouds to relieve the 

monotony of a clear blue sky. But you can 

work to get magnificent compositions and 

wait to get magical light. 

Because of this work, it’s a real treat of my job 

to receive new sets of photographs – it’s 

fascinating to see how a photographer 

responded to a particular building. From the 

many photographs taken it’s necessary to 

make a selection of between six and nine. 

the illustration of articles is a complicated 

business. it’s rarely possible to incorporate all 

the main features and aspects of a building, 

so there are hard decisions to be made. there 

needs to be a balance of views and details, as 

well as a mixture of internal and external 

shots. 

When the layout has been agreed, the edited 

text of the article is then run into it and fitted 

with captions to form a proof. articles for 

Country Life need to be authoritative but 

engagingly written for a general audience 

and they should contain new perspectives or 

information. they contain no footnotes, so 

where relevant references need to be spelt 

out in the main text. 

in a typical week all the pages of the 

magazine go to press from Wednesday to 

monday (to appear on the newsstand the 

Wednesday following). in this weekly cycle 

the architecture pages are usually among the 

first to go, so the proofs need to circulate in 

the office in the first half of the week. once 

that has happened, the final work on the 

next week’s article begins. at the same time, 

the foundations for future articles need to be 

put in place – the work of compiling proofs, 

editing text and house visits is concurrent 

and continuous. the only reminder of how 

much is actually being done is the evergrowing 

pile of published magazines … 

above ‘Magnificent compositions and magical light’ 

– a view of Mells Manor House, Somerset © coUntry 

liFe PictUre liBrary / PaUl BarKer 


A new exhibition will examine two iconic schemes 

proposed for the same site in the City of London in the 

second half of the twentieth century. Mies van der Rohe 

& James Stirling: Circling the Square explores Mies’s 

unrealised Mansion House Square project (1962–69) 

alongside its built successor, James Stirling Michael 

Wilford & Associates’ newly listed No. 1 Poultry (1986–96). 

The exhibition will be at the RIBA in London from 8 March 

to 25 June 2017.

2017_ArchHist-Feb

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