By the end of the sixteenth century Anglo-Netherlandish architectural interchange was a well established phenomenon. It is well known that Flemish pattern-books were extensively used in the design and decoration of major English buildings of the period. Numerous Netherlandish craftsmen were actively involved in the erection of many of these buildings and in certain cases Netherlandish building forms were directly transplanted to England. Sir Thomas Gresham’s Royal Exchange (1566–70), designed and built by the Antwerp mastermason, Hendrik van Passe, and closely modelled on the Antwerp Burse of 1531, provides one such case; the country house which Gresham’s agent, Richard Clough, had himself built at Bachegraig, Denbighshire, in 1567, another (Pl. 1a).

Ever since the publication of Parentalia in 1750 it has been taken for granted that all the ‘fifty-one parochial churches of the City of London’ listed there by Christopher Wren, junior, were indeed ‘erected according to the Designs, and under the Care and Conduct, of Sir Christopher Wren’. That Wren could not personally have designed every detail of so many churches has long been recognized, and it is well known that in most cases the fittings, and in some even the architectural details, were designed by the craftsmen employed. Even if Wren ‘originated the design of every church’, ‘in many cases the working out and supervision was done by somebody else’ — generally by Robert Hooke or Edward Woodroffe, or after Woodroffe’s death in 1675, by John Oliver, Wren’s deputy as Surveyor of St Paul’s Cathedral. Of the many surviving drawings, relatively few are in Wren’s own hand. Some are clearly by Hooke, whose characteristic draughtsmanship is fairly easy to recognize, some no doubt are by Woodroffe, and some must be by the draughtsmen named in Wren’s accounts for rebuilding the churches: first William Walgrave, who in or about 1673 was paid £2 10s. ‘for taking the ground platts of 12 churches yet unbuilt’, then Henry Hunt, who received £6 10s. for thirteen similar plans in 1676/77, and finally Thomas Lane, who between 1676/77 and 1682 was regularly paid ‘for coppying the Designes of severall Churches’, then ‘for drawing the designes for severall Churches’, and finally for ‘drawing and making designes for severall Churches’.

John Warner, Bishop of Rochester (1580–1666), celebrated in his lifetime for his munificence, left provision in his will for the foundation of an almshouse or hospital for ‘twenty poore widdowes being the relicts of Orthodox and loyall Clergie-men’. His intention was that it should be built adjacent to Rochester Cathedral but this proved impractical, and after an Act of Parliament in 1670 had given them leave to build elsewhere his executors purchased a site at Bromley, not far from Warner’s own episcopal residence. Building was effectively complete by September 1672. Edward Hasted, the historian of Kent, described Warner’s hospital as ‘a charity as unexampled at the time of its institution as it has been without compare since’, and in terms of size and architectural treatment it certainly surpasses its immediate successors at Winchester (1672) and Salisbury (1682).

Ever since the famous lead plate of Sutton Scarsdale was found (and lost again) we have known that its architect was Francis Smith, but the genesis of the design has been something of a mystery. Howard Colvin, for example, is disinclined to believe that Smith could have done it on his own: ‘the contrast between the confident grandeur of Sutton Scarsdale and Stoneleigh’s gauche assemblage of overcrowded windows and leggy pilasters is so striking that one cannot help suspecting a helping hand from Gibbs himself’. The influence at least of Gibbs seems incontestable, and the date when Sutton Scarsdale was begun, 1724, sorts well with this: since 1720 Smith had been surveyor at Ditchley — his earliest known collaboration with Gibbs — and since 1723 was in charge of the rebuilding of All Saints, Derby. Colvin has suggested the 1721 engraving of Gibbs’s (or Burrough’s) design for the University buildings at Cambridge as a source of several elements in the east front of Sutton Scarsdale, though there is no evidence that Smith had anything to do with the building of the Senate House, the completed design of which moves somewhat away from Smith’s elevation, which indeed is far from being a copy of any other known work. A fairly obvious source of general influence is Chatsworth, close enough to Sutton for Smith to have seen it on journeys to the site, confirming what he might have noticed in the first volume of Vitruvius Britannicus: the long unpedimented south façade of Chatsworth is not very unlike the north front of Sutton, both of whose principal elevations show the characteristic frown induced by leading the keystones of the upper windows to meet the lowest fascia of the main architrave — a feature given almost excessive prominence at Chatsworth but, so far as I know, only once used by Gibbs — at Cannons, where the effect is softened by sculptured heads in all the keys. The two main façades of Cannons, however, and John Price’s related design for Chandos’s house in Cavendish Square may nevertheless have something to do with the making of Sutton Scarsdale.

The oldest free-standing monumental obelisk in these islands still to survive is in the Market Place of Ripon (Pl. 26a). That it has not been recognized as such by historians either of Ripon or of art is due to its inscription, which runs:

MDCCLXXXI
ERECTED AT THE EXPENSE OF
WILLIAM AISLABIE ESQUIRE,
WHO REPRESENTED THIS BOROUGH
IN PARLIAMENT SIXTY YEARS.
THE MAYOR, ALDERMAN AND ASSISTANTS
OF RIPON ORDERED THIS INSCRIPTION,
MDCCLXXXV.
THE HONORABLE FREDERICK ROBINSON,
MAYOR

Despite the 1781 date four illustrations exist showing it before then, S. and N. Buck’s town prospect of c. 1745, Thomas Parker’s town prospect (Pl. 26c), and Thomas Gent’s elevation, the two last illustrating Gent’s History of Ripon of 1733, and Samuel Buck’s drawing of c. 1720 (Pl. 27a). There are, in addition, two written descriptions of it earlier than 1781, the earliest being Daniel Defoe’s, published in 1724, but based on a visit made probably in 1719. He wrote:

The destruction of country houses is no new phenomenon. They have not proved as permanent as they seem or we have wished them to be. Some great houses have barely outlived their creators. Those which survived into our own century to be recorded by the camera are comparatively fortunate. Many did not. Cole Green House, built in 1704 by William Cowper, later first Earl Cowper, and demolished by the 5th Earl in 1801, is such a house. In 1970 Lawrence Stone rescued it from oblivion in his essay published in The Country Seat. Since that time a set of three views of c. 1780, showing the house as it appeared not long before its destruction, have been discovered in the National Maritime Museum (Pls 29a and b). The views, part of a large collection of topographical drawings by a John Charnock of Greenwich, provide a far more complete visual record than has been available hitherto. Together with additional, unpublished, material among the Cowper papers, they make possible a fuller account of this important building as well as a more accurate interpretation of existing evidence.

Thanks, dear Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz.
Thanks, dear Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern.
Hamlet, 11. 1.

As with people, so too with ornament: we need to know the names of the phenomena we observe if we are to appreciate, analyse, and discuss them without mistaking one thing for another. For those wishing to describe the details of Robert Adam’s decorative schemes, a vague confusion about the names of his motifs has long encumbered communication. Adam’s ornamental schemes were formed from rearrangements of a small core of decorative elements, which he selected from the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance sources he studied on his Grand Tour and in contemporary publications. Adam’s decorative vocabulary was efficient and pleasing; he stylized and geometricized the motifs he chose, and by varying their size, treatment, and colour, was able to make countless different compositions from them.

The relationship between the ‘Queen Anne’ movement and the French Renaissance Revival in the late Victorian period has been insufficiently recognized. The Loire-château and ‘Queen Anne’ styles emerged together about 1870 as two different responses to one set of circumstances. Both had their roots in buildings of the previous two decades — very different buildings for the most part, though perhaps there was more common ground than is usually admitted.

The purpose of this article is to make available some interesting documentary material which has come to light concerning Webb’s restoration of Forthampton Court for J. R. Yorke between 1889 and 1892. The letters and other material illuminate Webb’s attitude to the restoration of a historic building at a time when he was closely involved with the work of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. The very extensive alterations and additions that Webb made at Forthampton indicate both the care taken in preserving the character, aspect and individual features of the medieval house (while sacrificing eighteenth-century work), and, equally important, his concern to provide the accommodation, decoration and comfort required by his client. The house as he left it has been further altered over the years, but enough survives today to explain the deep satisfaction expressed by the architect over his work there. He wrote in 1891:

‘When one meets most famous men, it is with a certain sense of disappointment; they so frequently appear to be less than their work, but Adshead seems greater.’ Perhaps this comment by the late Christian Barman explains why the importance of Stanley Davenport Adshead (1868–1947) may be underestimated in the current reassessment of early twentieth-century English architecture. His work as an architect is limited in extent, and as a planner, his achievement was more in preventing change than in causing it. He did not have the reputation as a teacher enjoyed by his self-promoting colleagues C. H. Reilly (1874–1947) and A. E. Richardson (1880–1964), but they and many other notable figures acknowledged his influence and guidance. In the Edwardian classical revival, Adshead introduced a scholarly approach to architecture appropriate to the needs of the time, and as a teacher and practitioner of planning, his attention to the visual qualities of places was exceptional.