Has any architecture – even the concrete ‘shoe boxes’ of the 1960s – received such consistent abuse as the neo-Tudor of the first half of the twentieth century – especially in its middle-class, suburban manifestations (Fig. 1)? ‘The abominable Tudoristic villa of the By-pass road’, ‘The worst bogus Tudor housing estates’, and ‘Those repellent, jerry-built, sham-Tudor houses that disfigure England’ are some contemporary judgements. And as far as that enthusiast for the modern, Anthony Bertram, in his 1935 book, The House: A Machine for Living In, was concerned:

The present essay is mainly concerned with the coronation entries staged for James I and Charles II by the City of London in 1604 and 1661, and especially with the temporary arches made out of wood and canvas and erected to mark nodal points along the routes. These events have been the subjects of scholarship keenly attuned to their place in accessions more than usually demanding upon representations of the king’s majesty, in as much as James was the first Stuart king of England and, by the terms of hereditary monarchy, his grandson’s reign began twelve years before his coronation, at the moment Charles I’s head was severed from the neck. Here, however, the arches will explain, or emblematize, a particular way of conceiving architecture: as an assemblage of readily-dismountable parts like Lego bricks, or like a trophy, the ornamental group of symbolic or typical objects arranged for display. In this kind of architecture ‘classical’ ornament comprises, not the material realization of a stable, rational, and universal intellectual system elsewhere promoted by the early Stuarts’ patronage of Inigo Jones, for example, but what Sir Balthazar Gerbier in 1648 called a ‘true History’ of destruction and triumph, the result of more or less random despoliation and reassembly. What follows is not, therefore, directly concerned with majesty, nor with the arches’ iconography or their audiences, their place in London’s ceremonial geography, nor even their elaboration of the ‘complex relationships between two distinct but interconnected political domains’, the City that built them and the monarchy that graced them.

In the seventeenth century London was a walled city, as it had been since the Romans fortified it around 200 AD. The gates erected by the Romans on the most important routes in and out of the city were rebuilt on their ancient foundations in the medieval period, when posterns (smaller passageways) were added in the wall and a huge ditch was dug around the outside. By the seventeenth century, there were seven principal gates in the old wall: from east to west starting from the Tower, they were Aldgate, Bishopsgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate, Aldersgate, Newgate and Ludgate. On the bridge across the River Thames – the only point of entry to the City from the south – there were two more gates. The ditch, as John Stow recorded in his Survey of London (first published in 1598), was ‘of late neglected and forced either to a very narrow, and the same a filthy channel, or altogether stopped up for gardens planted, and houses builded thereon’. This treatment of the ditch points to how the urban fabric had long since pushed through the gates and beyond the old walls; this area ‘without’, but still under the City’s jurisdiction, was known as the Liberties. In Hollar’s map of London in the later seventeenth century (Fig. 1), the walls and gates are a clearly visible feature defining the core of the City, which none the less spreads beyond them, in particular to the west. The limits of the Liberties were marked on main roads by ‘bars’, usually consisting of posts and chains, as at Holborn (to the north) or Whitechapel (to the east). Temple Bar, however, situated on Fleet Street to the west of Ludgate, had been made a gateway by the mid-fourteenth century, a reflection of its importance as the main point of transition between the Cities of London and Westminster. As such Temple Bar was considered one of the City gates; it was the eighth gate in the engraved plate that accompanied John Strype’s version of Stow’s Survey, published in 1720 (Fig. 2).

As we continue to probe the boundaries of architectural history and to seek new approaches to the complex legacy of the past, we have to reassess the body of knowledge produced thus far, exposing its often-hidden agendas in order to be aware of our own engagement with today’s ideologies. The architectural history of Central Europe, although usually marginalized, serves as a particularly instructive field in which to study the mutability of ideological positions and their impact on interpretation. Scholarship on the Wilanów Palace near Warsaw (c. 1677–96) (Figs 1 and 2) offers some of the most interesting examples of architectural history’s appropriations, oversights and extraordinary intellectual constructions devised solely in order to claim a relationship with the glorious past, or to sever ties with certain aspects of it, depending upon the contemporary ideological agendas. This material demonstrates how a single building has been used over the years to express diverse concepts of national identity, either by subjecting that building to certain physical modifications, or by making it serve as a point of departure for narratives that emphasize different characteristics of precisely the same physical fabric. The vocabulary of classical architecture employed in Wilanów was particularly well suited to such cultural practices. Classicism – the paradigmatic architectural language, positioned at the nexus of the indigenous and the foreign – has traditionally been associated with discourses of national identity. It was a universal idiom of authority, easily reflecting diverse (or even conflicting) social agendas, its visual vocabulary lending itself to a succession of new meanings, in line with shifting expectations and ideological priorities. In Wilanów the classical and the universal were continually redefined in an attempt to express in visual form the national and the particular.

This article continues from our previous article on François Cointereaux, published in this journal last year. The aim of this second article is to cast light on the dissemination of the technique of pisé, as perfected by this French agriculturalist and architect, in Europe and its colonies. Although Cointereaux is considered today a minor eighteenth-century architect, the fascicles (cahiers) of his École d’Architecture Rurale were translated shortly after their publication in Paris in 1790–91 into six languages (German, Russian, Danish, English, Finnish, and Italian); these in turn attracted the interest of major architects such as Henry Holland (1745-1806) in England, David Gilly (1748-1808) in Germany, and Nicolai L’vov (1751-1803) in Russia, who founded a school of earth construction in Tiukhili near Moscow based on those of Cointereaux in Paris. Through his publications, Cointereaux generated, at the end of the eighteenth century, an almost universal interest in this vernacular material that was both cheap and abundant. His influence outside France was indeed significant, especially in Europe, where many leading architects used pisé for rural and residential buildings. The sudden interest in this vernacular technique, coinciding with the neo-classical age in revolutionary France and in Europe, might seem surprising. Doubtless this success can largely be explained by a desire to revive rural architecture, as well as by the cheap price of the material and its incombustibility. Although we have no means of assessing the number of pupils who attended Cointereaux’s schools, we do know that there were many visitors, notably foreign ones. In the period 1790–95, they were attracted by the novelty of the material and by his demonstrations of its application; this facilitated the wider dissemination of pisé architecture in Europe, North America and Australasia in 1795–1840.

In summer 1823 John Rennie wrote to the Navy Victualling Board about the new depot he was planning for them at Plymouth. The future Royal William Yard would, as he put it, be ‘capable of embracing every requisite purpose’. The new facility would not just comprise thousands of square feet of stores. There would also be buildings for brewing beer, milling grain, and baking biscuit, a slaughterhouse and a cooperage for making casks to store the prodigious output (Figs 1, 2 and 3).

This article is intended as a companion to ‘Pugin’s Small Houses’ published here three years ago. It follows the same method, tracing the development of Pugin’s ideas about a single building type over the course of his career by way of the most significant examples. It would be impractical to discuss every church, and in assessing significance I have considered how relevant a particular building may be to the overall direction of Pugin’s thinking. Some major buildings, such as St Barnabas, Nottingham, are touched on only briefly because little or nothing followed directly from them. By the same token a relatively minor work, such as St Wilfred’s Hulme, may in this context be revealing. At times it will be necessary to discuss Pugin’s work in other building types.

William Morris died in October 1896, drawing fresh attention to the circumstances of his life at a moment when he was at the height of his fame. In the same month, Hermann Muthesius took up his post as technical attaché at the German embassy, to make a study of recent English developments in architecture and industry. Just over a century ago, in 1904, he published his great Das englische Haws, the book that did more than anything to place Red House in the mainstream of architectural history. Yet already, in 1897, in the first full-length account of William Morris’s work, Aymer Vallance had written that ‘as an experiment on the part of a man who had both the hopefulness and the dauntless will necessary to enable him to make a stand against the tyranny of custom, to William Morris is owing the credit of having initiated, with his Red House, a new era in house-building’. The historiography of Red House is the story of the different versions of that often-repeated view.

Victorian architects and architectural theorists made a clear distinction between ‘building’ and ‘architecture’; for them, a building became architecture when historical references were invoked. The development of new constructive materials, in particular cast iron, directly challenged this perceived distinction. A new material possessed no history; how, therefore, could it be architectural? This paper will address this question by focusing on the treatment of cast iron in a particular building – the Abbey Mills pumping station, of 1865–68 (Fig. 3) – assessing, for the first time, the contribution of its architect Charles Driver (1832-1900). By also referring to Driver’s published writings, this paper will assess how he sought, in this building, to invest cast iron with architectural, and therefore historical, meaning.

The Natural History Museum in London is a spectacular building in many senses (Fig. 1). As one of the outstanding landmarks of high Victorian architecture, it was designed to draw attention both to itself and to its contents. No other museum building in Britain adopted a Romanesque style on this scale; no other building had used terracotta in such a rich and decorative manner, and no other building (other than, perhaps, the University Museum, Oxford) so curiously employed external decoration to illustrate its internal function. It was calculated to appeal to a wide public and its animal sculpture was selfconsciously didactic in the way in which a number of contemporary museum buildings were created to a programme. Planned as a showcase for the nation’s imperial scientific achievements, its appearance was strongly ecclesiastical. When it opened in 1881, The Times leader called it a ‘true Temple of Nature’, which, the writer said, demonstrated ‘the Beauty of Holiness’. But for many visitors in 1881 Nature had abandoned the temple for wilder places; she had bloodied her claws, and the beauty of holiness had been replaced by the more severe, mechanistic principles formulated by Charles Darwin.

The concept of a large museum of natural history was the inspiration of the great naturalist Richard Owen. It was also the crowning achievement of his lifetime in science. The ‘Temple of Nature’ that Alfred Waterhouse built for him embodied Owen’s belief that the history of the natural world was not a matter of randomness and chance but the creation of a transcendent presence. In other words, the Natural History Museum is the expression of an ideology, and its shape, size, position, style and decoration are charged with legible meanings. Some of those meanings are readily interpreted, others less so, and although the building history of the museum has been well documented, many questions remain. Why, for example, was Waterhouse chosen as its architect? What spurred him on to use terracotta in such an original way? And above all why did he risk the unusual Romanesque style? The choice of Romanesque for such a building, although it was later imitated elsewhere, was highly original. But that choice was conditioned by a substantial web of aesthetic, social, and political factors. The Natural History Museum was not just Waterhouse’s creation; it was very much the product of its time. It was born of national and local politics; it was shaped by Owen’s unusual position in the scientific world, and it was an expression of Waterhouse’s passion for early medieval architecture.

The RIBA's Waterhouse Collection can now be consulted in the RIBA Study Room at the Victoria and Albert Museum, having been transferred there from Portman Square, along with the rest of the RIBA Drawings Collection. This transfer has been of particular significance for Waterhouse's work since, in fact, it has opened up the possibility of fully consulting his drawings and archive for the very first time. With well over nine thousand drawings, representing over one hundred and sixty commissions, this forms a substantial collection, indeed one of the largest single holdings of the RIBA Drawings Collection. By a strange twist of historical circumstances, the catalogue for this collection has been completed at virtually the same time as the collection has, at last, become available to scholars. It therefore seems apposite to draw together a series of observations on this collection and its catalogue, and on how the two together can inform our understanding of the workings of a particular Victorian architect's office, and indeed, to some degree, of the ways in which Victorian architects more generally may have worked.

Historical analysis of the 1951 Festival of Britain has tended to overlook its ideological genealogy, and also to give less consideration to the Exhibition of Architecture, Town Planning and Building Research at Lansbury in Poplar on the Isle of Dogs than to the architecture and displays at the South Bank site (Figs 1 and 2). That genealogy reflects an intersection between the formulation of colonial policy and the adaptation of Modern Movement theory and practice during the final phase of British imperialism. Consequently the purpose of this paper is to recover various aspects of this intersection, during the nearly three decades from the British Empire Exhibition of 1924. Focusing on design practice in the Empire, especially the national exhibition buildings erected at those major international expositions that led up to and culminated in the Festival of Britain, it also examines the wider representation of architectural and colonial development in professional media and public propaganda.

The last decade has seen an explosion of scholarly works dealing with colonial architecture and town planning, a domain previously marginal in the historiography. In any case it has aroused the attention of ever more numerous researchers, a fact that has stimulated this attempt to take stock of it, by drawing on cases studied by this author in his own work. The exploration of colonialism now constitutes a significant field of doctoral research, of studies associated with the identification and protection of built heritage, and tends to mould new images in the history of architecture from the last few centuries. In actual fact, the innumerable works on the twentieth century – the subject here – comprise only a fraction of all the studies concerning nearly five centuries of colonization, if the beginning of the colonial era is identified with the discovery of America and the establishment of the first European trading posts in Africa.