My treatment of this subject falls into two parts. In the first (and longer) part I shall look at the three major theories of the role of history in architectural education that have held sway in English architectural education this century: what I term the ‘realist’ (derived from Lethaby), the classicist and the modernist. In the second I shall criticize all three, discuss the ideas that have guided the teaching of history at the Bartlett School in the past ten years and make some broader proposals for the development of architectural history as a discipline.