From our Post-Modern viewpoint in the 1990s, it is hard to deny that the nave of Lincoln Cathedral was one of the outstanding designs of its generation — not just in England, but in Europe as a whole (Fig. 1). With its colour contrasts, its linear patterns, its sense of space and its richly textured surfaces, it displays some of the most enduring of architectural values. It would be rewarding to know what contemporaries thought of it, not least Robert Grosseteste, the greatest English intellectual of the age, who was bishop of Lincoln at the time the nave was completed. While we have some understanding of Grosseteste’s concept of beauty, his views about cathedral architecture remain unknown. As art historians are well aware, theoretical definitions of beauty in the middle ages rarely seem to have had much effect in practice. Medieval schoolmen based their views on ideas inherited from classical thought and Grosseteste was no exception: ‘For beauty is a concordance and fittingness of a thing to itself and of all its individual parts to themselves and to each other and to the whole, and that of the whole to all things’. This is not a definition that comes readily to mind when contemplating the architecture of Lincoln Cathedral, a building notorious for its inconsistencies. While scholars wrestled with abstract definitions of beauty, contemporary opinion about the great buildings of the age operated at a very different level. Among epithets most favoured by chroniclers when heaping praise on works of architecture were ‘incomparabilis’, ‘varietas’ and ‘sumptuosus’. Anyone looking for these virtues in the thirteenth century would not have been disappointed with the nave of Lincoln.

In the last ten years or so, there has been a growing historical interest in the architecture of post-war Britain, marked by a succession of historical monographs. I must apologize for turning again to what is becoming a rather familiar subject, especially as I have nothing to add to what is already known about it. Instead, I want to reflect on some of the reasons why the period absorbs so much interest, and on some of the things that stand in the way of our understanding of it.

One of the factors which has increasingly come to dominate any discussion of royal residences is the fact that there was a considerable specialization in function between them. Particular residences were used for specific purposes — those purposes may have been influenced by their geographical location, their physical arrangement or merely the monarch’s preferences. The purpose of this paper is to examine the royal lodgings at the Tower of London as used between 1216 and 1327 in exactly this way. It is an attempt to analyze the function of a residence and how that function — a highly specialized one — affected the form of the buildings and the timing of their construction.

Writing on Lulworth Castle in Architectural History in 1990 Mark Girouard pondered why the castle was provided with two kitchens. The only explanation he could think of was that one of them was for the preparation of royal food, which always had to be cooked separately. But we have recently found evidence of paired kitchens in several smallish and middle-sized gentry houses of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, none of which would be likely to have had aspirations to receive royal visits. There must be another answer.

Miraculously, the great Gothic cathedral church of St Peter at York escaped the worst transgressions of both the Reformation and the Civil War, and so survived into the Georgian period more completely intact and with fewer major architectural losses or alterations to the original medieval fabric than perhaps any of the other English cathedrals. Early eighteenth-century visitors were astonished by the building’s state of preservation, and almost unanimously praised its perfection and beauty. The Blathwayt brothers of Dyrham Park, for example, found it in 1703 ‘not quite so large as that of Lincoln, but . . . better lighted . . . and loftier; the windows . . . infinitely more beautiful and the interior very much better decorated’. In 1722 John Macky regarded it as ‘much the finest [cathedral] in England, and not inferior to any I have seen in Italy . . . The Paintings on Glass in the Windows, are better preserved than any where else . . . The Choir is spacious and noble . . . the Chapter House exceeds any thing of the Kind in the World’, and a few years later Defoe described it as possessing ‘much more ornament of a singular kind, than we see any thing of that way of building grac’d with. I see nothing indeed of the kind of structure in England go beyond it’ and he called York ‘the beautifullest church of the old building that is in Britain’.

The story of the Surveyors General in Ireland in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is interesting and at, at times, picturesque. Two of them (William Molyneux and Arthur Dobbs) have been — exceptionally for Irish architects — the subject of full-length published biographies. One of them (Arthur Jones Nevill) was one of only five members to be expelled from the Irish House of Commons in the eighteenth century. A motion to expel another (Sir William Robinson), admittedly after his retirement as Surveyor General, was defeated, the House satisfying itself with committing him to custody in Dublin Castle, and with resolving on 16 October 1703 that he was ‘unfit for any publick Employment in this Kingdom’. For the architectural historian there is the added interest that these men were responsible for the design and erection of remarkable buildings: the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, the Royal (now Collins) Barracks in Dublin, parts of Dublin Castle, and at least one building of European significance, Edward Lovett Pearce’s Parliament House in Dublin. The background to such architectural commissions is inextricably connected with the history of the office of Surveyor General, yet this history has not, until now, been clarified.

Strawberry Hill, the house in Twickenham named, enlarged and made famous by Horace Walpole from 1748 onwards, and latterly celebrated as a herald of both the Picturesque and the Gothic Revival, has been said to be ‘one of the best documented houses of all time’ and ‘studied at least as much as it deserves’. Accounts have placed great reliance on drawings, engraved and painted views, building accounts and, of course, Walpole’s irresistible writings, whether his correspondence or his Description of 1784, which included plans made in 1781 (Figs 1 and 2). As is to be expected virtually all the documentation on the house relates to Strawberry Hill as Walpole made it rather than as he found it. Little regard has been given to the practical circumstances of Walpole’s work, notably the fact that he was not building from new. There has been no clarity on the early development of the house, particularly with respect to its shape when it was acquired by Walpole in 1747. It is well-known that he was working to improve and enlarge a humble dwelling. However, this is not enough. The form of the house in 1747 matters because it set the parameters for Walpole’s architectural adventures. The early house is important simply because, despite its awkwardnesses and oddities, Walpole did not demolish it and start again. There are site-related reasons for this, discussed by Michael Snodin below, but it is clear that he was charmed by the building and that, with knowing conceit, he used it to root his new home in a bogus antiquity. The point of investigating the early form of Strawberry Hill is not perversely to glorify a pedestrian and makeshift vernacular house at the expense of what is truly wonderful about the later house; it is, rather, to arrive at a better understanding of what was the starting point and, in some measure, the inspiration for a great accretive architectural achievement.

The wholly suburban and institutional surroundings which characterize Strawberry Hill today have done much to conceal the close link that once existed between Walpole’s famous Gothic villa and its setting. More crucially for architectural history, they have obscured the topography of the land which Walpole found when he arrived at the site in 1747, and which played an important part in the future developments at Strawberry Hill. Indeed, it can be argued that the situation as he found it tended to encourage the retention and accretive development of a pre-existing structure as described above by Peter Guillery. Having decided on retention, the topography and pattern of land ownership seem to have made almost inevitable the asymmetrical plan, created from 1758, which has earned Strawberry Hill a place in architectural history. Finally, the timing of these developments can be seen to have been greatly influenced by Walpole’s progress in land acquisition.

Bridges lined with shops have always been rarities, but Robert Adam’s creation in Bath has more than novelty value. His restrained composition of curves and rectangles was one of the visual delights of English Neo-classicism. The uncluttered lines of the river façades were designed to be effective at a distance, while the elevations to the road provided an interesting play of light and shadow for passers-by.

Paradoxically, the success of the concept destroyed the architecture. Within twenty years of its building, commercial pressures on this prime shop site dictated an expansion upwards, with a butchery of those graceful elevations which fortunately Adam was not alive to witness. Then in the nineteenth century, individual leaseholders enlarged their shop windows or cantilevered out over the river as the fancy took them. Storms and road widening also took their toll. By 1948 the buildings had ‘become pathetic travesties of the original design.’ In that very year, Bath City Council removed a wooden structure from the back of one shop; the tide had turned. From then on the story has been one of gradual restoration.

The later eighteenth century was a period when, as a result of increasingly eclectic and picturesque taste in the use of the classical language of architecture, young British architects were effectively compelled to spend some years studying in Italy if they wished to reach the forefront of their profession. The importance of this first-hand experience of Italy is attested by the physical and financial hardships many architectural students were prepared to endure in order to gain it, as well as by the fact that the pattern of travel continued unabated in the face of political hostilities in which Britain was periodically engaged within Europe. During the Seven Years War of 1756–63, for example, when the British found themselves at enmity with the French, the Austrians and, after 1762, with the Spanish, no fewer than eight British architects nevertheless travelled on the continent and did so relatively unimpeded. In fact there was at least one British architectural student present in Italy in every year between 1740 and 1797. This consistent pattern of travel was brought to an enforced end, however, when the Italian peninsula itself became the setting for overt military action after Napoleon had invaded Piedmont in April 1796. While five British architectural students managed to reach Italy during the brief peace which followed the conclusion of the Treaty of Amiens in March 1802, one finding it possible to travel ‘through the heart of France without the least molestation’, the deterioration of Anglo-French relations after Trafalgar in 1805 left the peninsula largely inaccessible to the British until the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo on 18 June 1815.

Frank Jenkins identified the second half of the eighteenth century as the period during which the architectural profession began to emerge as ‘something approaching. . . . the pattern which we accept today.’ This may be true of the London scene, but even by 1800, the availability of professional services in the provinces was still decidely patchy. It was during the first half of the nineteenth century that the profession developed to an extent where almost every moderately important town could boast of an architect or two. In West Yorkshire a mere handful of practitioners in the late eighteenth century had grown to dozens by 1853: twenty-three firms in Leeds, thirteen in Bradford, ten each in Halifax and Huddersfield, and three in Wakefield.

Gordon Barnes should have written about Henry Woodyer’s life and work. He discovered scores of previously unrecognized buildings by this once obscure architect. He photographed practically every one that survives, and he researched them extensively in county, diocesan and parish archives, as well as in the press. They are rather better-known now, even though he never set down a full account of his findings. He did publish a short paper on the architect and glass painter Frederick Preedy, and he also inspired the production of The Faber Guide to Victorian Churches, for which he intended to write the entries on Woodyer; but in 1985, before he could do so, he died.

As it turned out, I wrote them in his place. We had often discussed Woodyer’s career, and I had full access to the archive of Woodyer material that he had amassed and bequeathed to the Council for the Care of Churches. Since that archive forms the basis of this account, my first debt is to Gordon Barnes himself, my second to the Council for the Care of Churches for allowing me access to it and to quote from it, and my third to the National Monuments Record for permission to reproduce his photographs.

In 1992 the National Trust launched a campaign to ‘Save 2 Willow Road’, a house in Hampstead built in 1938 by Ernö Goldfinger for his own use (Fig. 1). Goldfinger, born in Budapest in 1902, studied in the cosmopolitan artistic milieu of Paris in the 1920s. It was there that he met his wife, the painter Ursula Blackwell. They moved to London in 1934 and, along with other architectural émigrés or visitors helped introduce into Britain mainstream Modernist ideas from the Continent. Unlike most of the émigrés, the Goldfingers stayed on, living in their Hampstead house. The campaign leaflet describes 2 Willow Road as ‘a remarkable survival’ because it is ‘still filled with the furniture [Goldfinger] designed for it and the contemporary paintings and sculpture he and his wife collected. . . . today it retains the atmosphere of Hampstead between the wars. . . ’ (Fig. 2) This period piece of a house, this ‘modern masterpiece’ was, the reader was informed, now ‘at risk’ because the contents of the interior might be sold off. The National Trust sought to raise money to buy the property to conserve its integrated and historical ambience.