This study of the surviving models of Sir John Soane's designs was begun as part of a larger field of inquiry, the history of the architectural model in Europe. However, it soon became apparent that the unique character of this collection merited a separate study of its own. As I grew more familiar with the extent and range of these models the idea of a catalogue raisonee took shape. In the first place, a large number of these works were unknown to visitors to the museum, being in storage due to lack of available space for their display. Secondly, many models contained information relating to the development of certain designs not revealed by the drawings concerned. Finally, there were several models separated in various parts of the museum, the significance of which lay in their relationship to one another.

The Theodosian church of St Sophia was destroyed on the first day of the great Nika rebellion of January 532. Its destruction provided Justinian with the pretext, at least, to rebuild it in a more durable and more magnificent form and presented his principal architects, Anthemius of Tralles and the elder Isidorus of Miletus, with an almost unprecedented opportunity. This opportunity they seized to the full. By a daring combination of structural forms never before attempted on such a scale, they created an interior whose superb spatial qualities still excite and amaze. A partial collapse in 558, little more than twenty years after the solemn dedication in December 537, showed that they had even been a little too daring and called for a partial reconstruction. But, after this had been completed by the younger Isidorus in 563, the rebuilt church acquired substantially its present form and remained for some 800 years the largest vaulted man-made structure in the world.

In the early eighteenth century the traveller from the west entered central London through one of two gates in the Roman-medieval walls: Ludgate or Newgate. In either case he passed under an archway which served also as a prison. The latter, last rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, confined felons and debtors from the City of London and the county of Middlesex, and smugglers and debtors to the Crown. Crowded together as many as thirty to a room, the inmates of Newgate Prison lived in abominable conditions amid filth and vermin. A constant threat was the jail distemper, a form of typhus which frequently proved fatal. The disease spread to the courtroom of the adjoining sessions house in April 1750. Sixty men died, including the Lord Mayor, two judges, an alderman, and several barristers and jurymen. A committee was immediately formed to inquire into the tragedy, and in its report of 11 December 1750 it directed George Dance the Elder, Clerk of the City Works, to make a plan for improving the prison. Nothing, however, came of this, and the only steps actually taken to prevent a recurrence of the epidemic were the installation of ventilators in the prison - in the process seven of the eleven workmen contracted the fever and one died - and the placing of herbs in the justice hall during subsequent sessions.

For a long time Victorian architecture was misjudged because it was criticized in twentieth-century terms. Then teleology fell out of fashion and nineteenth-century buildings began to be judged, rather more sensibly, not as precedents -pioneers or anti-pioneers - but as products of their own environment. Perhaps we are now in danger of carrying this process too far. We are already starting to look at the artefacts of the Victorian age through spectacles which are rosily and uncompromisingly High Victorian. This article sets out to redress that particular imbalance by explaining the Victorian architectural scene in terms of its Regency foundations. Its terms of reference are limited. It is primarily concerned with the attitudes of early nineteenth-century architects and the way these attitudes were conditioned by economics and by education. It deals with two interconnecting themes: firstly the survival of Regency characteristics into the mid-Victorian period; and secondly the explanation offered by these characteristics for some of the primary attributes of Victorian architecture -qualities or weaknesses, according to taste.