Gillian Darley

Gillian Darley is an architectural historian whose books include Excellent Essex and biographies of Sir John Soane, John Evelyn and Octavia Hill, the founder of the National Trust.

In Letchworth: Pevsner's Hertfordshire

Gillian Darley, 2 January 2020

The volumes​ of the Buildings of England series initiated by Nikolaus Pevsner unsurprisingly confine themselves to buildings and their settings, but it’s tempting to be distracted by what you already know about a place, about Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, for instance, the latest county to have its volume revised and expanded by Yale.* The mid-18th-century country house designed by...

At the Train Station

Gillian Darley, 20 October 2016

Over the years​, travelling to Birmingham from time to time, I’ve noticed a handsome classical building, a kind of mirage that comes into view briefly as the train approaches New Street Station. Then, like almost everyone else it seems, I forget all about it – not even bothering to find out what it was. Stranded, isolated and distant in a nondescript wasteland of car parks and...

My Father’s War

Gillian Darley, 5 December 2013

Earlier this year I went to Picardy, heading for a tiny, skewed, rectangle I’d drawn on a map of northern France. Here, north of Bray-sur-Somme, south of Albert, in the countryside around Méaulte, Suzanne, Carnoy, Fricourt and Mametz, was where my father lived from August 1915 to March 1917. It isn’t on the Poppy Trail or the official Circuit of Remembrance. I wanted to scan...

My Cat All My Pleasure: Georgian Life

Gillian Darley, 19 August 2010

Cut-paper work from 1707 by the 17-year-old Anna Maria Garthwaite, who later became a designer of patterned silks for dresses

In contrast to the still contentment of a Zoffany conversation piece or the energetic racket conjured up by Fielding’s novels, life indoors in Georgian England was frequently a dull, hard and miserable business. For those who did not fit the norms, social or...

Man on a Bicycle: Le Corbusier

Gillian Darley, 9 April 2009

At the age of 70, we learn from the intimate and largely unpublished letters that are the raw material of Nicholas Fox Weber’s biography, Le Corbusier was still justifying his work, his name and his fame to his mother, by then in her late nineties. As always, he was trying to gain her favour over his (only just) older brother, the gentle but troubled Albert, a musician. The letters add...

It is hard to resist the conclusion that Soane’s central place in architectural mythology is connected to the fact that he can be ‘reinvented’ more freely than those architects whose buildings do...

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