Architecture

A mid-Victorian competition to design new Government Offices in Whitehall fell victim to a battle between the competing styles of Gothic and Classical. The result proved unworthy of a nation then at its imperial zenith, as Bernard Porter explains.

Richard Bosworth looks at the Vittoriano, the Italian capital’s century-old monument to Victor Emmanuel II and Italian unification and still the focus of competing claims over the country’s history and national identity.

As a major new exhibition on the Aesthetic Movement opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Richard Cavendish explores Bedford Park, the garden suburb inspired by the movement’s ideals.

A project to restore one of the Polish city’s 20th-century monuments has turned into a cultural battleground, writes Roger Moorhouse.

Leo Hollis visits the History Today archive to find an appreciation of Christopher Wren, written by a kindred spirit at a time when both sides of Wren’s genius – the scientist and the artist – were rarely explored.

Harold F. Hutchison introduces the son of royalist gentry, an Oxford graduate, a Professor of Astronomy, a mathematician, and the most distinguished architect that Britain has produced. Leo Hollis added a historiographical postscript in 2010.

Anthony Aveni explains how the people planning great monuments and cities, many millennia and thousands of miles apart, so often sought the same inspiration – alignments with the heavens.

The houses built by Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, are a reflection of his career under Henry VIII, says Maurice Howard, and the King's manipulation of those who served him.

Richard Barber describes the discoveries he made last summer when Channel Four’s Time Team uncovered Edward III’s huge circular building at the heart of Windsor Castle.

Westminster Abbey, England’s necropolis for royalty and other notables, reveals more secrets.

Kevin Kennedy highlights a controversial project to rebuild a one-time Prussian ‘national monument’.