Gavin Stamp

Who can resist the appeal of the English country house? Publishers are well aware of their popularity – which is doubtless explained by snobbery and the antique trade as much as anything – so we have a constant stream of books on the subject as well as the phenomenon of those cognoscenti aptly characterised recently in the pages of Harpers and Queen as the ‘National Trust Navy’. When we write about churches, mausolea, town halls or power stations, the only purchasers are from that small, incestuous public interested in architecture, but country houses manage to secure a much wider, even popular, audience. Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House has actually become a best-seller – extraordinary in the field of architectural history – and its unprecedented success has encouraged Yale to issue as a companion volume a new edition of his earlier The Victorian Country House.

The Scott Street exterior of the west wing of Glasgow School of Art in 1933.

I had​ the daily pleasure of seeing the west wing of the Glasgow School of Art, with its castle-like stonework and triple tall oriels rising dramatically from the steep slope of Scott Street, when, for more than a decade, I taught architectural history at the Mackintosh School of Architecture. I also had...

The French​ national necropolis of Notre Dame de Lorette lies on a plateau to the north of Arras where a pilgrims’ chapel once stood. The bodies of some forty thousand French soldiers who died in the Great War were buried here in the 1920s: half of them, unidentified, in mass graves; the other half beneath long lines of concrete crosses, each with a small metal label to give a name....