New books of architectural joys
The Country Houses of Shropshire Gareth Williams (The Boydell Press, £95)
MORE than 700 pages long and generously produced, it’s quite obvious when you pick up this impressive tome by Gareth Williams, the curator and head of learning to the Weston Park Foundation, that you have in your hands an important new work of reference. The book comprises a gazetteer of 347 properties across the county, from 13th-century Stokesay Castle to the new house at Onslow, which was designed by Craig Hamilton and completed in 2013. In between are the great and the obscure; the private and the public; as well as the survivors and the demolished. There is also useful coverage of garden buildings.
In his texts, Mr Williams offers an informed and authoritative outline of the history of each building and its owners to the present day. For those interested in further reach, the entries are also thoroughly footnoted. Quite as remarkable as the text, however, is the accompanying body of illustrations, including prints, drawings, paintings and photographs both old and contemporary. Most entries possess several. Merely flicking through these hundreds of images makes apparent the architectural riches of Shropshire, the largest landlocked county in Britain. Even to the most assiduous countryhouse visitor, there are many buildings and interiors here that will surely come as a complete surprise and a spur to further Shropshire outings.
London’s ‘Golden Mile’. The Great Houses of the Strand, 1550–1650 Manolo Guerci (Yale University
Press, £50)
THE steeply sloping plots of land that dropped from the busy thoroughfare of the Strand in London to the banks of the Thames became highly desirable in the Middle Ages. They lay outside the crush and noise of the city, enjoyed gardens that opened towards the river and had easy access to Westminster. In the aftermath of the Reformation, these properties—many of them already occupied by architecturally splendid residences— were redeveloped by some of the most influential and powerful figures in Tudor and Stuart Britain.
This book presents discrete studies of 11 of these outstanding buildings, including two on the north side of the Strand —Bedford House and Burghley House. Part of its fascination lies in the rich body of historical illustrations it assembles. The tragedy for London today is that hardly a stone described in this book remains visible above ground and only two of the buildings—somerset House and The Savoy, both now completely transformed, of course—are properly represented in the modern streetscape.
Mapperton
Tim Connor (Mapperton Estate, £15)
THIS is a concise study of Mapperton, Dorset, which traces the social history of the house and the estate from the 16th century to the present day. It’s based on extensive primary research and draws on an impressive spectrum of material, from documents and maps to buildings and fittings. It includes coverage of the garden at Mapperton, as well as the parish church and its stained glass. The booklet is A4 in format and well produced, with colour illustrations throughout.
Wingfield. Suffolk’s Forgotten Castle
Elaine Murphy (Poppyland Publishing, £19.95)
THIS book presents a narrative of this important, but little-known building and its owners from the 14th century to 1980. It covers some familiar history, such as the rise and fall of the de la Pole family, who first developed the building on a grand scale before falling foul of the Tudors. It also takes the reader into fresh territory, dealing with the story of the castle from the 16th century onwards.
Accounts of medieval buildings that cover their afterlife in detail remain curiously rare. What they reveal, as in this case, is almost invariably fascinating. Ancient buildings never survive by chance and Wingfield—famously the
inspiration for Dodie Smith’s Godsend in I Capture the Castle (1949)—is no exception.
Sketchbooks George Saumarez Smith (Triglyph Books, £40)
THIS beautifully produced book presents measured drawings from the sketchbooks of the architect George Saumarez Smith. The drawings, which have been compiled over many years during the author’s travels and cover buildings across Europe and the US, are exquisitely executed and reproduced here at size. They are organised by theme into 10 chapters, each one with short introductory notes. There are also discursive captions. The chapter headings have such selfexplanatory titles as ‘Elevations, Sections and Plans of Buildings’; ‘The Orders’; ‘Doors and Windows’; ‘Staircases and Balustrades’; ‘Furniture’; and ‘Geometric Patterns in Floors and Tiles’. These images are at once exacting, technical and beautiful.
As Mr Saumarez Smith has been absorbed by these objects through the process of drawing, so is the reader invited to do the same thing when they examine his sketches closely. At the end of the book is a series of views of buildings. The overall effect, therefore, is of a volume that takes the reader through all the detail and then illustrates why it matters. To anyone seriously interested in Classical architecture, its forms and the technical challenges it presents, this book promises an absorbing, thoughtprovoking and unusual read.
Toddington: The unforgotten forerunner Lord Sudeley (Diehard Books)
BUILT in the 1820s, Toddington, Gloucestershire, was designed by the gentleman architect and Whig politician Charles Hanbury-tracy, 1st Baron Sudeley (d.1858). It remains one of the great monuments of the Gothic Revival in Britain. This is a personal response to the building by a descendant of its creator. At the end, he notes that the ongoing restoration project seems to have stalled. If true, that’s a worrying state of affairs for a house of this scale and importance.
A Bibliographical Dictionary of English Architecture 1540–1640 Mark Girouard
(Yale University Press, £40) A new standard work of reference by one of the great authorities on Elizabeth and Stuart architecture. John Goodall