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New perspectives on English architectural history: a review of recent writing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Robert Thorne
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Extract

In two of its aspects the writing of architectural history has as long a pedigree as any kind of historical scholarship. In the first place, the urge to study buildings has been provoked by the sense of loss at their destruction, from the time of the Reformation onwards. The shocked response to the sight of monastic ruins was a spur to recording their past, so producing some of the earliest achievements in historical research and writing. John Aubrey's plea—‘I wished monastrys had not been putte downe, that the reformers would have been more moderate as to that point’—underlines the sentiment that led his contemporaries Sir William Dugdale and Roger Dodsworth to compile their Monasticon Anglicanum (3 Vols., 1655–73), as well as the publication of more purely architectural works such as Dugdale's History of St. Paul's Cathedral (1658) and Anthony Wood's Antiquities of Oxford (1674). Three hundred years later it is easy to observe the same kind of impulse in the countless books written from a sense of outrage at the destruction of buildings by war and redevelopment. Architectural history derives much of its energy, and its wide popularity, from the desire to preserve tangible reminders of the past.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 8 , May 1981 , pp. 80 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 J. Aubrey, Brief Lives, quoted in Aston, M., ‘English ruins and English history: the dissolution and the sense of the past’, J. Warburg and Courtauld Inst. XXXVI (1973), 236.Google Scholar

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4 Looking no further than recently published biographies of British nineteenth-century architects the list includes (in addition to the titles discussed): Cole, D., The Work of Sir George Gilbert Scott (1980)Google Scholar; Fawcett, J. (ed.), Seven Victorian Architects (1976)Google Scholar; Kornwolf, J. D., M. H. Baillie Scott and the Arts and Crafts Movement (Baltimore, 1972)Google Scholar; Linstrum, D., Sir Jeffry Wyatville. Architect to the King (1972)Google Scholar; McFadzean, R., The Life and Works of Alexander Thomson (1979)Google Scholar; Robinson, John Martin, The Wyatts. An Architectural Dynasty (1979)Google Scholar; Simpson, D., C.F.A. Voysey, An Architect of Individualism (1979)Google Scholar; Summerson, J., The Life and Works of John Nash Architect (1980)Google Scholar; Thompson, P., William Butterfield (1971)Google Scholar; Watkin, D., C. R. Cockerell (1974)Google Scholar; Wilkes, L., John Dobson. Architect and Landscape Gardener (1980).Google Scholar

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16 Girouard, M., Sweetness and Light. The ‘Queen Anne’ Movement 1860–1900 (1977), 3, 118.Google Scholar The architectural confusion at the end of the century as the Queen Anne movement lost its hold has been summarized in Summerson, J., Turn of the Century: Architecture in Britain Around 1900, 5th. W. A. Cargill Memorial Lecture in Fine Art (Glasgow, 1976).Google Scholar

17 Prisons and railway stations have continued to lead the field in the study of building types, e.g. Ignatieff, M., A Just Measure of Pain. The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Binney, M. and Pearce, D. (eds.), Railway Architecture (1979).Google Scholar

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20 Forty, A., ‘The modern hospital in England and France. The social and medical uses of architecture’, in King, A. D. (ed.), Buildings and Society (1980), 61–93.Google Scholar

21 Pevsner, op. cit., 147–8.

22 A. D. King, ‘A time for space and a space for time: the social production of the vacation house’, in A. D. King, op. cit., 193–227.

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