One of the delights of scholarship is the wealth of information and exegesis that is attached even to the smallest and apparently most modest subject. The Charlottenhof, a very small building conversion executed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel between 1826 and 1835 is a case in point. Although modest in its dimensions, the Charlottenhof reveals the enormous abilities of the great Prussian architect. Its quality was acknowledged from the moment of its completion. Shortly after Schinkel’s death, the anonymous author of a text on the Charlottenhof noted:

Walter Muir Whitehill’s Spanish Romanesque Architecture of the Eleventh Century was published in 1941 and it is still the only book in the English language given exclusively to the Romanesque architecture of Spain — though, as its title states, it does not cover the full span of the stylistic period.

In almost every respect Weeting Castle represents a challenge. To begin with, the limited remnants of the building do not at first sight suggest that a very full mental reconstruction of the medieval building is a realistic prospect (Fig. 1). However, as this paper is intended to demonstrate, enough survives to allow not just the general form, but also a good deal of the detail to be envisaged with some confidence. The designation ‘castle’ is another hurdle, encouraging a misleading expectation that Weeting should be understood in the context of fortified residences. How it should be categorized is far from straightforward. The notice which greets visitors to the site refers to it as ‘an early medieval manor house’. As we shall see, the building has many of the characteristics of the later medieval double-ended hall house, but there are two problems about regarding it as such. The first is that we categorize it in this way only with the benefit of historical hindsight: it is not likely to have been viewed by its builders as a contribution to an ‘evolutionary’ process. The second is a danger either that Weeting comes to stand as typical of the twelfth-century development of this type, or conversely to be regarded as a ‘freak’, a building which accidentally resembles later hall houses but really has nothing to do with them. The state of our knowledge is such that we cannot say, and indeed may never be able to say how unusual Weeting was. However, that need not stop our trying to see the building in its contemporary setting both as regards understanding where the ideas might have come from and the parallels we adduce in reconstructing it.

It is now almost forty years since W. A. Pantin wrote that ‘the origin and history of the medieval English shop is … a subject which badly needs investigation.’ Since then, although the study of vernacular buildings has become respectable, shops seldom appeared as a subject in textbook indices or, until recently, as a separate topic in bibliographies. Part of the reason, understandably, is that much of the architectural evidence has been obliterated. Few original shopfronts remain; internal features have long since been removed. However, buildings which can be shown to have contained shops — either workshops or retail spaces — in medieval times (taken as broadly the period from 1100 to 1500) can be found in many towns and cities in England. They range from simple one-room lock-ups to substantial multi-storey jettied buildings, from a room in a merchant’s house to whole rows of workshops associated with basic living accommodation. While it is dangerous to draw quantitative conclusions from the evidence of such survivals, they can, with the help of documentary sources, shed some light on how spaces were used. The purpose of this paper is to offer an interpretation of the medieval shop as a place where goods and money were exchanged, as a contribution to the better understanding of surviving structures.

Sherborne Abbey is one of the largest surviving churches in the diocese of Salisbury and has been described as ‘one of the finest examples of Perpendicular work in England’. The established architectural history of the Perpendicular building describes a two-phase programme of reconstructing and remodelling of the twelfth-century church.

Leland, who first visited the church in 1538, recounts that ‘al the este parte of S. Mary chirch was reedified yn Abbate Bradefordes tyme … [and] … Peter Ramesunne next abbate saving one to Bradeford buildid á fundamentis al the west part of the S. Marie church.’ Bradford was abbot from 1436 to 1459 and Peter Ramsam from 1475 to 1504.

Ashley House in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey (Fig. 1), is best known to architectural historians for its detailed and informative building accounts, which date from the years 1602 to 1607. The house was demolished in 1925 without adequate record, and scholars have tended to assume that it was built to a quite unexceptional H-plan design and was, therefore, of no great architectural interest.

A recently-discovered contemporary first-floor plan of Ashley House shows that it was in fact a building of considerable importance. The plan (Fig. 2) demonstrates that Ashley was remarkably similar in layout to both Charlton House and Somerhill in Kent, two Jacobean houses justly famous for their innovative, axially-placed halls (Figs 3 and 4). This architectural development, as is now generally recognized, represented a significant departure from the linear house-plans most often associated with traditional, hierarchical household arrangements.

The antiquary John Aubrey, in a well-known passage, wrote of architecture during the reign of Queen Elizabeth that it ‘made no growth: but rather went backwards’, his measure of ‘growth’ being the use of the ‘old Roman fashion’. If he had extended his comments to the architecture of the Pennine region in his own time he would doubtless have found this similarly reactionary, essentially medieval in its forms of composition and much of its detail, with a use of the classical orders notable only for its crudity and its relative sparseness. For the Arts-and-Crafts-inspired generation at the beginning of the twentieth century, however — the first to study this body of work with any seriousness — it represented the essence of a distinctive regional vernacular, to be celebrated for the very fact that its characteristic features could be regarded as being home-grown; while for Sir Nikolaus Pevsner it displayed a combination of both these qualities, a marked conservatism on the one hand and the distinctiveness of ‘grossly fanciful detail’ on the other. The purpose of the present paper is to explore the possibility that none of these interpretations encompasses the whole story and that, on occasion at least, this architecture embodies rather broader cultural horizons and more sophisticated procedures than any of them implies. It is not an attempt at a reinterpretation of Pennine building as a whole along these lines, but is rather an examination of the origins and nature of certain specific and characteristic elements within it, and of the implications of this investigation. The elements in question are two items of architectural detail, the rose window and the truncated ogee; and the building which Pevsner saw as representing the style’s ‘crazy climax’, a house known as The Folly in the town of Settle, in Ribblesdale.

It has long been accepted that St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, and the porticoed houses along the north and east sides of the Piazza, were built to the designs of Inigo Jones in the early years of the 1630s, although this has been based on little concrete evidence. There are no surviving drawings for the project, for example, and there is no mention of the architect in the surviving building accounts for the church or the houses. Jones does, however, mention Covent Garden in a note he made later in his copy of Barbaro’s Vitruvius, and attribution has been confirmed through contemporary allusions to Jones’s authorship, and John Webb’s biographical notes. Jones was the King’s Surveyor of Works, also, and the executive officer of the Commission on Buildings, initially formed in 1618, and as such appointed to implement Charles’s building proclamation of 1625. The licence granted to Francis Russell, fourth Earl of Bedford, in February 1630/31 to develop Covent Garden reflected accurately the mandate of the commission text, and so the King’s Surveyor, obviously, would have exercised control over such an extensive project. As well, Jones’s design of St Paul’s Church, its flanking gates and houses, and the arcaded buildings of the Piazza, have been aptly described as ‘a comprehensive essay in the Tuscan mood, all the way from the high sophistication of the [church] portico to the vernacular of the houses’, and as such can be seen as a continuation of his ‘Tuscan mode’ following on from the Park Gate at St James’s Palace in 1627, and the Sculpture Gallery in 1629–30.

In 1907, the year before its destruction, the parish church of St Peter-Le-Poer, Broad Street (1789–92) in the City of London, was dismissed as architecturally ‘common-place’ (Figs 1–2). Reconsidered almost a hundred years later, it now seems to have been one of the more striking metropolitan churches built during the closing years of the eighteenth century, and surely deserves a closer look.

In February 1760, Robert Mylne (1733–1811) was declared the winner of the competition for the design of a new bridge to be erected at Blackfriars, London. Work on the foundations began immediately. There were delays in the building programme, certainly, but they were not serious and there were good reasons for them. The bridge was fully opened to traffic in November 1769, and was widely admired, both for the aesthetic of its appearance and its commercial success and general usefulness (Fig. 1). Why then should it have taken over six years, until March 1776, to settle the architect’s bill? This article explores possible answers to the question by considering what parts of the project might have gone wrong, or what other reason would explain the City’s prevarication.

Here is an opportunity to introduce further research by the author and others on the Anglo-American architect, William Jay, since the first monograph on him was written by Hanna Lerski in 1983.

Jay was born in 1792, later becoming articled to the architect and surveyor D. R. Roper in c 1807/8. His first independent commission was the Albion Chapel, Moorfields, London of 1815–16. He emigrated in 1817 to America where he designed a series of acclaimed Greek Revival villas in Savannah, Georgia and Charleston, South Carolina. They are generally regarded as amongst the earliest Greek Revival buildings in America. In 1822 the Georgian economy collapsed, and Jay had little option but to return to England to rebuild a once-promising career.

The Conservation Plan currently being put into effect for St George’s Hall, Liverpool, has occasioned new research into the history of a building which, since its completion in 1855, has been universally hailed by architects and historians alike as an outstanding example of European neo-classical architecture. However, the unusual functional arrangements of the building (particularly the disposition of Crown and Civil Courtrooms either side of a Concert Hall and consequent difficulties with public access) have been subject to criticism over the past century and a half, mainly by those who have had cause to use it. This article is concerned with one part of St George’s Hall, the south front and its approaches, the form and function of which have been perhaps the most problematic aspect of the building from its conception through to the present day.

In January 1929, John Summerson, then just twenty-five, wrote a pre-emptive article on James William Wild, ‘An Early Modernist’, for The Architects’ Journal. The focus of the piece was Wild’s ‘unusually interesting’ Christ Church, built at the top of Brixton Hill in Streatham, London, in 1840–42. Of this he said:

The development of a scholarly discourse about Maori ‘architecture’ has been somewhat hampered by a perception, amongst architectural historians, that Maori buildings are part of a building tradition in which purpose, design, and construction, are unchanging and solely determined by custom. Until the last two decades, architectural historians in New Zealand have largely accepted this view of Maori building, possibly because the discipline is still influenced by Banister Fletcher’s ‘tree of architecture’, which never had an Oceanic or Maori branch. In Fletcher’s influential opinion architecture could only be a Western concept. As a consequence only a few scholars have attempted to attach the word ‘Maori’ to the word ‘architecture’. Even in the revised edition of Fletcher’s History of Architecture (1996) which claims to ‘contain more information about vernacular buildings’ by contemporary contributing editors, the entry for New Zealand warns that Maori architecture ‘cannot be easily related to architecture derived from Europe’.

Almost all of Philip Webb’s work was for a small circle of artists and art-patrons known to one another and, in some cases, related. His reluctance to accept commissions from clients whose taste and judgement were not in sympathy with his has been well documented. He was consistently retiring and self-contained, and during his entire life-work of forty years only fifty to sixty complete buildings, large and small, were erected, an unusually small number. Those who trusted him acquired houses which were unique, each reflecting their own lifestyles and the characteristics of the chosen location; houses which possessed, according to the late John Brandon-Jones, ‘a feeling of reality and solidity that contrasted with the scenic effects achieved by his rivals’ (Fig. 1).

The construction of New Delhi is often presented as the peak of British colonial architecture, a monumental undertaking that was nevertheless the Empire’s swansong. Although the city was dedicated only half a generation before the Raj was terminated and the whole Empire set out down the road of decolonization, New Delhi was not the last and final chapter in the history of British colonial architecture. The buildings erected by the British Mandatory government of Palestine — first and foremost, the British High Commissioner’s Residence (completed 1931) and the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem (dedicated 1937 and now called the Rockefeller Museum) — were architectural achievements of considerable merit, and, more importantly, they carried further the architectural discourse of New Delhi with commanding sophistication. It was, perhaps, in Palestine that the Empire produced its last intellectually ambitious architectural statement.

This is the fifth list of corrections and additions to the third edition of my Dictionary. For the first time a section of ‘Additional Biographies’ has been included to provide details of some further architects active during the period 1600–1840, of whose careers enough can be reconstructed to justify giving them a place. The remaining sections are as usual lists of bare facts to be added, subtracted or amended.

Attention should be drawn to the Biographical Dictionary of Architects at Reading by Sidney M. Gold, privately published at Reading, 1999, and to the Dictionary of Land Surveyors and Local Map-Makers of Great Britain and Ireland 1530–1850 by Sarah Bendall, published by the British Library, 1997.