Pugin’s Law

• The Work of Sir Gilbert Scott by David Cole
  Architectural Press, 244 pp, £25.00, May 1980, ISBN 0 85139 723 9
• Lutyens Country Houses by Daniel O’Neill
  Lund Humphries, 167 pp, £8.95, May 1980, ISBN 0 85331 428 4
• A Revolution in London Housing: LCC Housing Architects and their Work 1893-1914 by Susan Beattic
  GLC/Architectural Press, 127 pp, £6.95, July 1980, ISBN 0 85139 560 0

‘The history of architecture,’ wrote A.W.N. Pugin in 1843, ‘is the history of the world.’ To judge from the three books under review, present-day orthodoxy is something very different. In looking at British architecture of the 19th and 20th centuries, the authors deal, not with the global issues envisaged by Pugin but with the careers of famous (and, in one case, not-so-famous) architects. The history of architecture, we are asked to believe, is the history of the individuals whose names appeared on architectural drawings.