When Henry VIII finally took full possession of Hampton Court in 1529 he inherited a house already much embellished by Thomas Wolsey. In 1515 Wolsey had taken a lease from the Order of St John of Jerusalem on the modest manor house of Hampton Court and during the next fifteen years he turned it into one of the largest if not the very largest house in the kingdom. Attached to Wolsey’s lease there is an inventory, and this, together with the results of recent excavation, have revealed much about the earliest house on the site. Wolsey’s additions to this house seem to have been undertaken in two distinct phases. The first group of additions (1515–25) included the vast base court, new kitchens and a remodelling of the main first-floor reception rooms. In a second phase (1526–29) another storey was added to the main range of reception rooms for the queen, a new range was built on the south side of the second court, and the chapel was begun. The chapel, it appears, was still under construction when the king began his first building campaign. Eventually it was to be finished with materials that Wolsey had set aside at Sonning in Berkshire, for the building of the chapel at Cardinal College, Oxford.

The architectural career of Baldassare Peruzzi has traditionally been divided chronologically into halves, each epitomized by one of his two masterpieces, the Farnesina (Figs 1–3) and Palazzo Massimo (Figs 11–33). The commission for the Farnesina was granted him about 1505 by the exceedingly wealthy financier Agostino Chigi, who seems to have taken the young fellow Sienese under his wing. The Tuscan origins of the building’s patron and architect are reflected in its simplicity and lightness, and in the linear delicacy of its details which recalls in particular the style of Francesco di Giorgio Martini, who exerted a formative influence on the young Peruzzi before he left Siena. In the setting of Julius II’s Rome these qualities seem slightly anachronistic, yet the outcome is such a harmonious balance between elegant symmetry and relaxed planning, between architectural and painted decoration, that Vasari was moved to comment that the building appears to have been born rather than built (non murato, ma veramente nato).

While carrying out fieldwork in the Annan area on behalf of the Scottish Development Department my attention was attracted by a remarkable series of Renaissance buckle quoins at Hayknowes farm — at first sight puzzling, since the architectural style of Hayknowes otherwise indicates a building date of somewhere around 1800. These quoins are built in to each of the front angles of the house, and rise to a height of about five feet. And nearby, at Newbie, on the spot identified by the Ordnance Survey map as the site of ‘Newbie Castle’, a single similar quoin exists, built in to one angle of a nineteenth-century cottage.

A clue to the puzzle was provided by the coincidental re-cataloguing of part of the Annandale family archive by the National Register of Archives (Scotland) [NRA(S)], whose secretary drew attention to the existence of a body of material relating to the construction in the later 1650s of a house at Newbie for the Earl of Hartfell. One surviving receipt in this group, for having produced a sundial, is from John Mylne, King’s Master Mason, and dated 1655. This document is of particular interest since, by linking Mylne’s name with Newbie at the same time that a new house, or an addition to a house, was being built there, it indicates the possibility of Mylne having also been involved with the design of the building at Newbie.

The Restoration house in England owed much to the refinements of Roger Pratt and Hugh May who drew their inspiration from architectural forms they had seen in Holland, France and Italy during their peripatetic years under the Commonwealth. In its basic double-pile rectangular form at Pratt's Coleshill of the 1650s, it consisted of placing the principal rooms on the central short axis of the house in a medieval ‘Hall-house’ relationship to one another; that is, a double-height hall with a great parlour next to it and the great chamber above that. At Coleshill Pratt placed the great stairs in the hall itself but in his later version at Kingston Hall of 1663 he increased the depth of the house to form a triple-pile plan and placed the great stairs and the great backstairs on either side of the hall on the long axis of the house (Plan 1).

At the four corners he placed eight identical apartments on two floors, each consisting of a room about 20 ft square with two 10 ft square closets at their outer end. Pratt advocates in his notes that this permits flexible use of rooms for different purposes, and room functions did indeed change.

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Lincoln’s Inn Fields remained one of the largest open sites in central London. It was rectangular, approximately 650 by 450 ft, although sometimes referred to as ‘The Great Square’. To church architects of those years it seemingly offered the opportunity of designing a truly impressive building, one that could be seen with advantage from all sides. Few such sites were available. It is therefore not surprising that there were many proposals to use the site for this purpose.

This article considers the history of a particular architectural drawing convention, the so-called ‘laid-out wall elevation’, which first becomes significant in English practice in the early eighteenth century and was to become a standard form of interior drawing for much of the century and beyond. Concentrating on one drawing-type the discussion will raise wider considerations about the nature and role of drawings in the design process.

It is necessary to begin by defining the essential characteristics of the drawing-type under discussion and it will help in this task if the usual term ‘laid-out wall elevation’ is rejected. Drawings thus termed frequently contain no true elevations at all, but they may well combine sections, ground plans, floor and/or ceiling plans.

In the best room of an otherwise unpretentious house in Lincoln is a ceiling ornamented with octagonal plaster coffering modelled on that of the first-century Temple of Bel, at Tadmor (the ancient Palmyra), in Syria. The most frequently copied antique coffering is composed of octagons whose cardinal sides are each adjacent to, and parallel with, the cardinal side of another octagon. The residual space between any four octagons in this arrangement is a small square. In the Palmyrene variant the octagons meet each other only at their angles. The residual space is a four-lobed star, which always (though not of necessity) inscribes a small square.

In this touching and perceptive memoir written late in his life, John Hardman Powell calls himself Pugin's pupil. He was in fact the only person who had the right to call himself that. Pugin never set up an office in the usual manner of busy mid-nineteenth-century architects. He preferred to work with a small number of close colleagues who understood his aims and could interpret his drawings. George Myers, his builder who worked from London, and John Hardman, the Birmingham metalwork manufacturer, were the principal two members of this group, and the other two were John Gregory Crace, the interior decorator, also London based, and Herbert Minton, the Staffordshire pottery manufacturer. Of these John Hardman was undoubtedly the closest friend.