The great urban churches that were built for Protestant worship in the three or four centuries after the Reformation have often been compared to theatres. With their common need to seat a large number of people within sight and earshot of a central point, theatres and churches have often adopted similar arrangements: galleried auditoria with carefully contrived patterns of seats and a minimum of columns. Floors were sometimes sloped to improve sight-lines, and private boxes might be provided in either type of building. During the later decades of the eighteenth century the idea of the semicircular auditorium was taken up by leading neo-classicists who went beyond Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico to Roman and Greek models for inspiration. Gondoin’s anatomy theatre (of 1769–74) for the Ecole de Chirurgie in Paris is the most celebrated example, providing a clear view of the proceedings for an audience of some 1,200. It was followed by a number of buildings for drama and opera, in which, as Pevsner noted, there was an associated move away from the provision of tiers of boxes. One might expect this enthusiasm for the practical values of the semicircular theatre to have had its counterpart in church building. To what extent it did is the subject of this essay.

Thanks to his Recollections, published posthumously in 1879, much is known about the early professional life of the illustrious Victorian architect, George Gilbert Scott. Yet the workhouses with which he launched his career between 1835 and 1843 are poorly understood. The papers of neither Scott nor his partner William Bonython Moffatt have survived from that period, and in his reminiscences Scott mentioned only a handful of workhouses by name.

Much of the groundwork involved in identifying and recording Scott and Moffatt workhouses was achieved by Anna Dickens. With her help, David Cole was able to attribute forty workhouses to the partners in his 1980 biography of Scott, but that figure was pared down to thirty-seven in Dickens’ doctoral thesis of 1982. The revised list at the end of this article includes a total of forty-four workhouses.

Long before its completion in 1792 James Wyatt’s restoration of Salisbury Cathedral was the subject of fierce debate within antiquarian circles. Criticism of Wyatt’s activities was at first directed at the destruction of antiquities they involved, but attention also focused on the alleged inadequacies of the Wyatt Gothic style, a criticism inspired by the new fittings and altarpiece, but above all by ‘the most conspicuous object in the whole church’, the reconstructed choir screen and organ loft.

The buildings and landscaped grounds of the nineteenth-century international exhibitions were directly related to the architectural and urban design traditions of the cities in which they were built. At the same time, they possessed idealized qualities that made them innovative and distinct from other contemporary buildings. The result of collaborative planning among architects, engineers, and planning committees, the exhibitions were built to evoke ideal civic settings, their exhibition palaces, pavilions, and gardens forming exemplary complexes that synthesized both invention and tradition. The International Exhibition, the Weltausstellung, held in Vienna, Austria in 1873, was one such event (Fig. 1). Its buildings were both related to the architectural and urbanistic design traditions of nineteenth-century Vienna, and at the same time possessed idealized qualities that were inventive and progressive, marking new technological achievements.

This introduction to the special collection begins with a historiographical overview of the American Renaissance. Here we will see how both popular perception and academic study of the subject have been affected by wider forces, including the advent of modernism, the emergence of the preservation movement and the increased attention given to social inequalities in public discourse today. This is the context in which the articles in the collection are situated and introduced. The final section considers aspects of the subject requiring further work, in particular the American Renaissance as a transnational phenomenon linked to the notion of the ‘Angloworld’.

A book of drawings in the R.I.B.A., a group of buildings at Garendon Park, near Loughborough, in Leicestershire, and a passage in John Nichol's History of Leicestershire combine together to present a reasonably full picture of Ambrose Phillipps, an amateur architect of the 18th century.

His grandfather, also called Ambrose, was a successful London lawyer who purchased the Garendon estate in 1683 from the 2nd Duke of Buckingham, and was knighted three years later. Sir Ambrose died in 1706, when Garendon was inherited by his second son William, who had been a merchant in Constantinople until called home by the death of his elder brother in 1716. William had married, in 1703, Jane, the daughter of Sir Samuel Dashwood, at one time Lord Mayor of London. They had three sons: Ambrose, who was born in 1706 or 1707, and Samuel and William, who both became merchants in Smyrna.

In December 1624, the London draper and merchant adventurer, John Kendrick (Fig. 1), died leaving a large proportion of his considerable fortune to charitable causes. Like other early seventeenth-century metropolitan benefactors, he sought to attack the causes of poverty as well as to relieve its impact, and his legacies included the sums of £7,500 and £4,000, bequeathed respectively to the Berkshire towns of Reading and Newbury, to establish workhouses for the employment of the poor. Workhouses were a relatively new public institution at this date. In the wake of the dissolution of both monasteries and religious guilds in the 1530s and 1540s, and consequent decline in charitable support to the poor, urban authorities experimented with a range of measures to relieve poverty. A small number of towns and cities, including York (1567) and Chester (1577), used charitable funds and locally raised poor rates to establish workhouses to provide work and training to the poor. The workhouses were not residential and in some cases merely acted as distribution points for raw materials to be processed at home. In a parallel development, other towns and cities, including London (1555) and Ipswich (1569) established houses of correction to punish vagrants and to force them to work. Some also provided training schools for the young. The state moved quickly to endorse such measures. Legislation was introduced in 1576 requiring justices of the peace to supply stocks of wool, hemp, flax, iron or other materials to provide work for the poor and to establish houses of correction in each county for incorrigible rogues and those who refused to work. Penalties for non-compliance with the legislation were introduced in 1610.

The year 1603 was one of the British Isles’ most critical dates, due to regnal union. Scotland’s King James VI became, in addition, England and Ireland’s new King James I, and sought immediately to convert regnal into full union, building a Magna Britannia: Great Britain. He sought uniformity in all areas political and religious. That project foundered, not least due to English apprehension towards the influx of Scots promoted to major English posts. One such appointee was the King’s master of works in Scotland, David Cunningham of Robertland, whom James appointed Surveyor of the Works in England.

Cunningham seems therefore to have been a highly significant person, worthy of close study, but current research limits this. How can an architectural figure who may have built nothing be important to architectural study? Who was this Cunningham of Robertland? Why did James appoint him to the highest architectural position in his gift, not once but twice, and when each time there must have been alternative candidates? Seeking an answer to these questions opens up an exploration of the wider issue of the status and function of the master of works and the Surveyor in this period, as will be seen.

Francis Vernon (c. 1637-77) is not a particularly well-known figure in the history of British architecture, but perhaps he should be. In 1675 he became one of the first English people to have set foot in Athens and, the following year, published what was undisputedly the first account in the English language of the city and its architecture. Vernon was a member of the recently founded Royal Society and one of a group of English and French travellers who journeyed through central Greece and Turkey in the 1670s. He was murdered in Isfahan in early 1677. Vernon's account of the time he spent in Athens was published in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions, in 1676, and it included brief but illuminating descriptions of the Erechtheion, the Temple of Hephaestus and the Parthenon, the latter written over ten years before the bombing of the temple by a Venetian army in 1687. The Transactions often contained both travel writing and antiquarian material and, in this respect, Vernon's account was typical of the journal's somewhat eclectic content in its early years. Significantly, Vernon's publication predated more famous accounts of Greece from the period, such as those written by his travelling companions Jacob Spon (who released his Voyage d'ltalie, de Dalamatie, de Grèce et du Levant in France in 1678) and George Wheler, whose A journey into Greece was published in 1682. Unlike Vernon, both Spon and Wheler survived their journeys. The only European publication on Athens that preceded Vernon's was a French text of 1675 that would prove to be a fabrication. As this article will demonstrate, Vernon's initial exposure of this fabrication was one of the reasons why his account of the city became so important in English intellectual culture at the time.

While globalizing trends stimulate the creation of entirely new regions, established regional and local identities remain. Architectural historians, among others, explore the ways in which regionalism has been — and continues to be — defined and redefined. Current issues in this debate include what regional architectural traditions might be; whether regions can be defined by architecture; and how regional traditions of architecture have been defined and interpreted by artists, authors and scholars. Nineteenth-century Belgian architecture is particularly relevant in this context. The formation of Belgian Art Nouveau’s style and identity have both been the object of numerous studies, but while Art Nouveau is probably the best-known creation of Belgian nineteenth-century architecture, it is hardly the only one, nor indeed the only interesting one. One of the sources identified for Belgian Art Nouveau has been the milieu of the so-called Flemish Renaissance Revival, which produced such architectural gems as Emile Janlet’s (1839–1919) Belgian pavilion at the World Exhibition in Paris (1878) and Jean Winders’ (1849–1936) own house and studio (1882–83) in Antwerp (Fig. 1).

How did the restrictions imposed by eighteenth-century society help and hinder women in their fulfilment of the role of architectural patron? This article will examine the case of Henrietta Cavendish Holies Harley, second Countess of Oxford and Mortimer (1694–1755), and patron of the remarkable remodelling of Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

This article explores the provenance of the first draft of Sebastiano Serlio’s sixth book, on dwellings, written in the 1540s. It was acquired by the Avery Library at Columbia University, New York, a century ago and published for the first time in 1978. The article proposes that the manuscript and drawings remained in the vicinity of Paris until the late seventeenth century, when they were mounted and bound into an album that may have been sold by a descendant of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau I, either in Paris or the Netherlands. It goes on to demonstrate that, in the early eighteenth century, the manuscript was owned by Francis Bird, a leading British sculptor of his day, who collaborated with leading architects including Christopher Wren, James Gibbs and, possibly, Nicholas Hawksmoor.

The one constant in the history of Enmore Castle from its construction, 1751–57, to the present day has been its obscurity. In architectural history its impact has been so slight as to make a very real point about aesthetics and motivation in the early years of the medieval revival. Enmore was a very large moated castle, highly innovatory for its building period, and the creation of a prominent politician, an Irish peer who was a member of the English House of Commons. In spite of this it never captured the imagination of its times nor the interest of later historians of the Revival, only the dismissive mockery of Horace Walpole, reproduction in a few prints and some brief mention in country histories and tours of England.

The history of English medieval architecture is so well explored a subject that it is easy to forget how much we do not know about the buildings of medieval England. What survives is only a part of what once existed, and the accepted story might be materially different if (to give only three examples) Winchcombe Abbey had been preserved instead of Gloucester, Oseney instead of St. Frideswide's, Oxford, Nottingham Castle instead of Windsor. We shall never know whether the surviving sample is truly representative, and there are many problems in the history of English Gothic whose solutions lie buried in the ruins of our dissolved abbeys and demolished palaces. Chief among the latter was the palace of Westminster, for five centuries the principal residence of cur medieval kings and the centre of their government. All that now remains of its many and often magnificent buildings are the great hall, the crypt of St. Stephen's Chapel, and the Jewel Tower, the last now admirably restored and displayed by the Ancient Monuments Department of the Ministry of Works.

The fact that so few of the private papers and drawings of Thomas Hope (1769–1831) have so far come to light makes the recent purchase by the RIBA of a small sketchbook all the more interesting. The book, measuring 10.5 cm by 16.0 cm, is bound in green paper-covered boards containing 86 pages and is initialled T.H. The attribution to Hope is confirmed by the fact that 12 of the drawings (those on pp. 14–15,60, 62, 66–67 and 72–77) were subsequently used for the engravings in An Historical Essay on Architecture by the late Thomas Hope, illustrated from Drawings made by him in Italy and Germany (2 vols, 1835). The sketch-book and its drawings are not dated but a loose page inserted at the end, with drawings in a similar style, is watermarked 1812: this seems a likely date for the whole book since Hope refers to the Villa Aldobrandini in Rome as the Villa Miollis (the villa was occupied by General Miollis who was Governor of Rome from 1808–13). The book seems to be the record of a single journey proceeding from Rome to Florence, Siena, Parma, Modena, Piacenza, with a few drawings made on the way home in Dijon, Auxerre and Paris. A label on the cover reads: Italy 1. Rome, Siena, Florence, Parma, Placenta, Rivoli, France Dijon Auxerre.

It was ironic that Scotland, which Robert Adam had regarded in the 1750s as ‘a narrow place where scarce will ever happen the opportunity of putting one noble thought in execution’, should have provided most of his commissions towards the end of his life. After the financial troubles, frustrations and decline in his practice that marked the later 1770s and early 1780s he spent an increasing amount of time north of the Border on a growing number of commissions which, besides some public works, included the distinctive castles and restrained villas that appealed to a crop of Scottish clients, bankers and merchants, lawyers and soldiers. The year 1785 saw the resumption of work at the Register House. In 1786 he did battle with the South Bridge Trustees over their reluctance to adopt his plans for that scheme in full, travelling back to London in November in company with Sir Samuel Hannay, for whom he was shortly to design Kirkdale House in Galloway. In September 1788 he visited Culzean Castle, accompanied on the journey from Edinburgh by his brother-in-law, John Clerk of Eldin.

Paul Thompson’s monograph on William Butterfield set out to challenge the bizarre misconceptions which had previously warped appreciation of his work. These included Sir John Summerson’s accusation of ‘purposeful sadism’, Ian Nairn’s view of him as an ‘unexpected Heathcliff, and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s description of him as uncivilized, ‘a man who never wrote a book or an article’ and who rarely travelled. Mendacious anecdotes suggested a puritanical and antisocial character, lacking in humanity. Thompson effectively refuted such absurdities, but Butterfield’s letters — very few of which have been published, even in part — provide fascinating evidence of his character. They reveal his humour and his affection for old friends, and his strongly held, but eminently sensible, religious views, as well as his pragmatic and conscientious practice of architecture. This evidence bears out and adds much useful detail to Thompson’s depiction of the man, refining our understanding of him and allowing his personality to come to the fore.

John Stow the historian, writing in the 1590s about his own neighbourhood, described ‘a frame of three fayre houses, set up in the year 1590 on the high streete’, that is, what was then part of Aldgate High Street but soon to be called Leadenhall Street, ‘between Billiter lane and Lyme streete’, that is, on the south side. The way from the Royal Exchange to Aldgate along Cornhill and Leadenhall Street is one of the most ancient principal ways of the City. The site of the three houses, now of an office building called Baltic House, lies almost opposite the church of St Andrew Undershaft.