November 2008

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Unlike most architectural catalogues, the contents of this book are determined not by a single architect or collection, but by a place: Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire, a property of the National Trust since 1976. David Adshead is the Trust’s Architectural Historian, and his handsome catalogue pulls together an impressive range of graphic evidence, mostly designs for the house and grounds, but also survey drawings and topographical views. Some is owned by the Trust, but much is drawn from else-where: from the Royal Institute of British Architects, from Sir John Soane’s Museum, from other collections in Britain, and from as far afield as the Hermitage Museum.

This substantial body of evidence – 322 items in all – is carefully related to other kinds of primary source (building accounts, family correspondence, visitors’ descriptions, and so on), enabling Adshead to chart the history of Wimpole from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 20th. The importance of the material more than justifies the treatment.

Wimpole: Architectural Drawings and Topographical Views is intended as the first in a series of National Trust property-based studies. Let us hope so. Several houses in the Trust’s portfolio, notably Nostell Priory and Tatton Park, have major collections of architectural drawings, and these would make excellent sequels. As long ago as 1947, as James Lees-Milne records in his diary, art historians were exhorting the Trust to publish catalogues of its collections. This is now starting to happen, and fine studies of the Dunham Massey silver and Hardwick textiles have appeared in recent years. The publication of these works, moreover, is timely, since they counter the regrettable decline of the Trust’s traditional means of disseminating research – the guidebook. The latest guides to Kedleston and Hardwick, to name but two, signal a depressing lowering of standards.

No such complaint, however, can be levelled against Adshead’s scholarly book. His approach, as with all the best catalogues, is tailored to the material, and his strictly chronological arrangement reveals the accretive nature of the house and grounds. Thus the first entry, an estate map of 1638, ‘reveals in a striking way the degree to which the shape and line of the medieval field and road systems, and the pattern of the planting, influenced… subsequent overlays’. This statement typifies the richness of Adshead’s methodology. By setting the new against the old – the single intervention against the site’s longer history – he draws out the importance of local topography and the developmental history of the house. This continuity occurred in spite of the discontinuous ownership of the estate.

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