If one leaves the campo of S. Stefano in Venice and walks towards the lush garden of Palazzo Cavalli Franchetti, the monumental Palladian facade of S. Vidal looms on the right. If we continue and turn the corner, we find ourselves in precisely the place where Canaletto stood around 1725, when he painted the famous picture now known as The Stonemasons’ Yard.

Strangely, the ideal city of the Renaissance was promoted not so much by Venus, but by Mars — not by an abstract appreciation of beauty but by the necessities of war. Here was surely one of the great ironies made by the peculiar Renaissance belief in the intrinsic power of geometry. To Filarete, Leonardo da Vinci, and others who imagined ideal cities, geometry was a comprehensive ordering system to which streets, walls, and public buildings alike might be subordinated.

In the high summer of 1675 building work finally began on the new Cathedral of St Paul, after nine years of drawings and deliberation by its architect, Dr (and by then Sir) Christopher Wren. The history of those nine years does not need recapitulation, but the reader may be reminded that after the making of several distinct designs and the First and Great Models Wren had become secretive and had privately obtained the sanction of King Charles II to make ‘some Variations, rather ornamental than essential, as from Time to Time he should see proper’, that a royal warrant had notwithstanding been issued on 14 May 1675, approving the set of drawings now consequently known as the Warrant design, and that by a process of metamorphosis which can be only partly retraced, Wren distilled from that pragmatic but generally unloved design another, now known as the Definitive, on which work finally began.

The recognition of a group of drawings as by the French architect Maurice-Louis Jolivet, about whom little more than his responsibility for a survey map of West Wycombe Park, dated 1752, has been known, dispels much of the mystery surrounding this previously enigmatic figure. It also sheds new light on the patronage of Sir Francis Dashwood.

A unique and eccentric translation of Vitruvius’s De architectura made in Ireland around 1770 offers an illuminating insight into the meaning and practical value of Vitruvius for builder-architects during the eighteenth century (Fig. 1). The manuscript, now in the Chester Beatty Library, is a folio volume in a magnificent red morocco and gold-leaf binding, which is considered among the finest of its kind produced in Dublin during the eighteenth century.

In 1811 the authorities at Dulwich College commissioned from Sir John Soane an extraordinary combination of a burial chamber, almshouses, and art gallery; and Soane responded with one of his most inventive designs, a work with an architectonic presence much greater than its modest size and cost would imply (Figs 1 and 2). The building escapes conventional stylistic categories, its classicism having overtones of Gothic, ‘primitive’, and even Egyptian architecture.

In 1858, C. R. Cockerell set out to write the first full account of the Bank of England’s architectural history. The Bank had been famous as an institution and as a building almost since the time of its foundation in 1694. Its first, modest purpose-built quarters were completed by George Sampson in 1734, the institution having occupied a rented hall for its first four decades. Subsequently, Sampson’s structure was expanded, first (1765–88) by Robert Taylor and then (1788–1833) by John Soane, into a mammoth complex of public halls, private offices, residences, barracks, printing works, and bullion vaults.

The cloistered charm of Oxbridge arguably traces its architectural roots to medieval monastic forms. The pattern of buildings — gateway, chambers and studies, master’s lodge, chapel, hall, and library, all arranged round one or more courts — is vividly portrayed in Loggan's 1688 view of Jesus College Cambridge, which was actually established in the redundant building of the Benedictine nunnery of St Rhadegund in 1497 (Fig. 1).

In memory of George Gilbert Scott, M.A., F.S.A., Sometime fellow offesus College, Cambridge, who was bom October 8th 1839 and died May 6th 1897. On whose soul Jesus have mercy. So runs the inscription on the tomb in Hampstead Churchyard where, following his mental breakdown and the scandalous activities which alienated both his family and professional colleagues, Sir Gilbert Scott’s eldest son was eventually laid to rest.