The seventeenth century witnessed the building of a group of houses, which, almost without warning, created a new style or type. The Queen’s House at Greenwich is one, Coleshill was another. Chatsworth might be considered in this context but it was foreshadowed by Thoresby in Nottinghamshire, a house designed by William Talman and possessing equally significant features.

From 1680 until 1700 Talman was the country house architect par excellence, specialising entirely in this field. Excepting the possibility of a visit to Holland he never travelled abroad and was very much a text book architect using an array of French, Italian and Dutch pattern books. His dominence in building can be estimated by comparing his output over this period with that of his contemporaries. To Robert Hooke may be apportioned three houses; to Wren only one; and to William Winde, Talman’s nearest competitor, six, of which one was really a town house and another a commission, perhaps taken over from Talman. The dominence of the Vanbrugh-Hawksmoor partnership began in 1699 when Talman had already built or altered at least fourteen houses, a number exceeding the combined total of these contemporaries.

It is generally held against the Italians that they left so many of their churches for so long with unfinished faҫades and that they were never much concerned to have the faҫades bear a direct relation to the naves.

The best known examples of these peculiarities were the vast medieval cathedrals of Florence, Bologna and Milan. The later examples to be mentioned here will indicate that there were many churches of more recent periods for which new facades were supplied in the nineteenth century. Of the 363 Italian cathedral sites listed in J. W. Franklin’s The Cathedrals of Italy (Hastings House, New York, 1958) more than one third have been treated to major rebuilding, reconstruction, remodelling or such significant additions as new faҫades, since the seventeenth century.

Henry Bell has long enjoyed a minor but honourable place in the history of English architecture. His principal work—the Customs House at King’s Lynn — figures in every book on seventeenth-century architecture, and his status as a provincial designer of some accomplishment—first defined by Mr Geoffrey Webb in 1925—has lately been recognised both by Miss Margaret Whinney and by Sir John Summerson. Very little, however, has so far been known about his career: the nature of his training and even the means of his livelihood have been obscure: the dates of his birth and death have been wrongly stated ever since his monument was accidentally destroyed in 1741: his literary activities have been wholly forgotten: and one important episode in his architectural career has only recently been rediscovered. It is the purpose of this article to set out such facts about Henry Bell as the writers have succeeded in establishing from documentary evidence. Others will no doubt come to light in the future, but meanwhile the evidence here presented will, it is hoped, give a fuller and more accurate portrait of Bell than has hitherto been available to architectural historians.

Antiquity of origin is an attribute of most classes of building. Occasionally, however, additions accrue to the general heritage of building types as, from time to time, a new class of building is called into being by fresh circumstances.

The railway station is of modern inception and its origins illustrate, in our own day, the processes by which a new building type may emerge and develop. Though one might query the universal applicability of Alberti’s observation, it is particularly true in the case of the railway station—“ For all building in general, if you consider it well, owes its birth to necessity, was nursed by convenience and embellished by use; pleasure was the last thing consulted in it.”

For our present purpose, the origins of the railway station may be sought on the early rail-roads of the opening years of the nineteenth century. There is, however, one prior fact to be noted which derives from a more ancient past and which has played, necessarily, a major role in the design of railway structures. This fact is the gauge of the track; for it is width of gauge which is the source of railway scale.

The recent discovery of account books for the period of Sir Joseph Paxton’s association with Chatsworth has thrown further light on several important aspects of his work there. The accounts now available cover in considerable detail the construction of the Great Conservatory or Stove at Chatsworth, from 1836 onwards, under Joseph Paxton’s aegis. It is interesting to note that this one venture cost more than one tenth of the amount of £313,608 spent by the Sixth Duke of Devonshire on “Improvements at Chatsworth House” from 1820 to 1848: an expenditure which, coupled with other lavish outlay, was no doubt responsible for much of the Sixth Duke’s financial difficulty in the eighteen-forties. The total cost of the Great Stove was £33,099 10s. 11d., made up (in round figures) of £1,416 in 1836, £5,221 in 1837, £5,321 in 1838, £6,458 in 1839, £11,673 in 1840, and £3,100 in 1841; this completes the separate account for the Stove, although other minor external works were involved after 1841. Had the Duke been born a century earlier, he would have built a temple or a mausoleum: living in an age when romanticism and scientific discovery went hand in hand, he chose to build rockworks, fountains and great buildings of glass.