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The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (SAHGB)

@thesahgb

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Bringing together all those interested in the built environment's history.

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Member Spotlights: The Medieval gatehouse to Bermondsey Abbey, Dr David McKinstry.

The medieval gatehouse to Bermondsey Abbey and its adjacent C17th buildings on Grange Walk, Southwark are buildings I appreciate - for their tenacity and the way in which they provide a sense of history in an area where almost every trace of periods earlier than the C19th have been erased. Although recognised as significant by antiquarians as early as the 1840s, the buildings themselves were not listed until the 1970s, making their survival even more fortunate.

Within the structure of these houses is part of the late mediaeval stone gatehouse to Bermondsey Abbey, built to protect the access of produce from the grange lands into the Abbey proper. Although the gateway was demolished by 1760 one of the houses retains the hook fixings for the Abbey’s east gate. Surrounded by post-war development, car parks, and the thundering traffic of Tower Bridge Road, these buildings are one of the few visible reminders that the routeway of Grange Walk has been in existence since at least the 1000s and possibly since 715 AD. They are also one of the locations in Southwark where it is possible to have a sense of what parts of the City of London looked like prior to 1666.

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Dr. David McKinstry is the current Chair of the SAHGB. He is a conservation officer at Camden Council and a lecturer in the history of architecture at Imperial College London.

Member Spotlights is our new social media series seeking to highlight short notes from our members, trustees, and wider team. We invite submissions of approximately 250 words accompanied by original photography, via email to website@sahgb.org.uk. by @thesahgb

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11 days ago

Seminar: Five Houses by Edward Prior, @david_valinsky_photography.

Join us on the 8th of October to learn of David Valinsky's research into the work of E. S. Prior. This talk will focus on five houses, which provide a different insight into Prior's work and will be illustrated with archival images, as well as new drawings and photographs.

Thursday 8 October 2026
18:00 - 19:30
IHR London + Online via Zoom

Register via the link in our bio

📷 David Valinsky by @thesahgb

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25 days ago

Member Spotlights: Dulwich Picture Gallery by Hiba Alobaydi, @hiba_alobaydi.

Designed by British architect Sir John Soane, the building is deceptively simple in form. Soane adopted the Palladian tradition of proportion, creating a scale that feels appropriately grand for a gallery without becoming overwhelming. At the same time, the building retains an intimacy that draws the visitor towards the paintings rather than allowing the architecture to dominate them.

Immediately upon entering, there is only one direction to go: onward, further into the gallery. It almost feels as though Soane is inviting you towards the founders’ collection. Once inside the central gallery space, it becomes entirely a matter of choice. One can turn left or right towards the other galleries, or continue straight ahead towards the founders’ mausoleum. Personally, I found this arrangement rather quaint and the overall spatial character of the interior particularly charming.

The gallery’s exterior is equally compelling. Its expressive yet restrained use of material evokes a strong sense of Soane’s primitivist ideals. However, to truly appreciate the mastery of Soane’s brickwork, the building must be experienced in person. Photographs do little justice to the gallery’s presence, nor do they adequately convey the impact of Soane’s uninterrupted use of London stock brick. In person, the materiality gives the building an almost elemental quality.

The gallery consequently cuts a striking, yet entirely appropriate, figure within the Dulwich landscape. Its simplicity does not diminish its presence; rather, it is precisely through this restraint that the building asserts itself.

It is therefore completely understandable why so many visitors return to Dulwich Picture Gallery. It is a national treasure, but also something of a hidden gem, particularly given its South London setting. More than two centuries after its completion, Soane’s gallery remains an extraordinarily intimate and quietly powerful piece of architecture.

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Member Spotlights is our new social media series seeking to highlight short notes from our members, trustees, and wider team. taken in Dulwich Picture Gallery by @thesahgb

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a month ago

MEMBER SPOTLIGHTS: Kilpeck Church (The Church of St Mary and St David), @guymarshallbrown. Kilpeck Church remains a favourite building of mine, largely because of the extraordinary survival of its twelfth-century sculpture.

Built c.1134-40, it contains some of the finest work associated with the Herefordshire School of stone carvers. The south doorway is particularly remarkable: a Tree of Life, beakheads, twisting serpents, foliage, animals and the distinctive paired ‘warrior’ figures. Around the exterior, the corbel table continues this sculptural vocabulary through human heads, animals and grotesques, including the celebrated Sheela-na-gig on the apse.

The Herefordshire School drew on influences from France, Spain, Scandinavia and earlier British traditions, yet the result is unmistakably regional. It feels almost like a quiet act of cultural resistance: imported ideas absorbed, transformed and rooted firmly in the Welsh Marches.

The church is generally associated with Hugh de Kilpeck, probably responsible for its construction and an interesting figure in his own right. Known earlier as Hugh Forester, he inherited responsibility for the royal forests and held the office of forester of the Forest of Dean. His support for Empress Matilda during the Anarchy cost him both this office and his manors in the Dean. In 1134, he nevertheless endowed the new priory at Kilpeck as a cell of Gloucester Abbey, including the church of St David and the castle chapel of St Mary.

Kilpeck was also once a substantial medieval settlement. By 1259 it had a weekly market and annual fair, with its population possibly reaching around 600. Famine, absentee lordship and the Black Death subsequently contributed to its decline.

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Dr Guy Marshall Brown is the SAHGB Manager, an artist, researcher and educator specialising in ceramic and glass sculptural practices, with particular interests in materiality and architectural ruination.

Member Spotlights is our new social media series seeking to highlight short notes from our members, trustees, and wider team. We invite submissions of approximately 250 words accompanied by original photography, via email to website@sahgb.org.uk. taken in Church of St Mary and St David, Kilpeck by @thesahgb

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The final episode of our podcast series on 'The Public Architect' has now been released. In this episode, we explored how architects have moved beyond designing individual buildings into planning, policy and landscape.

Historian Otto Saumarez Smith joined city architect Finn Williams to discuss the rise of the postwar "architect planner," the exchange of ideas between the London County Council and Sweden, and how that role has fragmented in the decades since. We were then joined by landscape historian Luca Csepely-Knorr, alongside practitioners Kendra Inman and Maddy Gunn, to trace the shift from garden design to large-scale infrastructure work, and why collaboration, community and care remain central to landscape architecture today.

Image: Part of the model prepared to the plans of Donald Gibson (Coventry City Architect) for the post-war rebuilding of Coventry's bomb damaged city centre. Ministry of Information Second World War Official Collection, D15521 (Imperial War Museum, no date). by @thesahgb

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a month ago

EVENT: From 1909, E. S. Prior received five domestic commissions in quick succession, at a time when the Arts and Crafts Movement was steadily overpowered by neo-Georgian tendencies in domestic design. These five houses provide a different insight into Prior's work from that with which we have become accustomed: they share a consistency of design approach, material, and detail previously unseen in his career.

Our October seminar with David Valinsky will focus on these five houses, illustrated with archival images as well as new drawings and photographs prepared by Valinsky.

Thursday 8 October 2026
18:00-19:30
London + Online

Comment ‘register’ to receive the link to book.

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David Valinsky studied architecture and architectural history, practised as an architect for over a decade and now works as an award-winning architectural photographer. He has been intermittently researching the work of E. S. Prior since 2007 and his new monograph – The Architecture and Writings of E. S. Prior, Challenging the Arts and Crafts – was published by Lund Humphries in May 2026 and will be available to purchase at the seminar. by @thesahgb

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2 months ago

From the 1790s to the 1820s, John Soane made extensive use of caryatids, the female statues serving as architectural supports in place of columns in classical architecture. Ciarán Rua O'Neill argues the idiosyncratic application of the motif reveals attempts to negate the caryatid’s entrenched, symbolic associations with slavery.

O’Neill’s article in the latest edition of Architectural History, the journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain considers how Soane’s employment of caryatids reflected his own sentiments and beliefs, particularly as they related to the modern slave trade.

Comment “link” to receive a DM with the article. by @thesahgb

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2 months ago

Now published in Architectural History, the Society’s peer-reviewed journal, Conrad Thake analyses the Lady Hamilton Gordon chapel at Ta’ Braxia Cemetery, Malta (1893–94), designed by the Victorian architect John Loughborough Pearson (1817–97). Although Pearson’s ecclesiastical works in England, spanning an architectural career of over six decades, are well known, his memorial chapel in Malta, which together with St John’s Cathedral in Brisbane (1901–2009) constitute his only overseas works, has to date not been comprehensively researched.

Read the contribution now via the link in our bio.

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Architectural History is a double-blind, peer-reviewed journal of international standing, recognised for advancing significant original and interpretive research on buildings, the built environment, architectural theory, and historiography across all places and periods. Articles are intended to be rigorous, analytical, and contextual, situating their subjects within broader debates about the history and understanding of architecture.

📷 Lady Rachel Hamilton Gordon chapel, Ta’ Braxia Cemetery, Malta, John Loughborough Pearson, 1894, photograph by Joseph P. Borg. by @thesahgb

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Published today: In the fourth episode of our new podcast series, we explore the colonial context of the public sector and the place of the British architectural profession within it, spanning the Second World War through to decolonisation.

We spoke to Harshada Deshpande about her father Sharad's career, from training as an architect in India to working in the Architects' Department of the Greater London Council in the 1960s. We were then joined by Ibiyemi Ola and Rixt Woudstra to discuss their research into architects working within colonial bureaucracies in British Africa, and how that experience of expertise carried through independence and into organisations like the UN and World Bank.

📷 Gordon Ogilvie, The housing of Africans in the urban areas of Kenya (Nairobi: Kenya Information Office, 1946) by @thesahgb

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2 months ago

The Society has learnt with immense sadness of the death of Christine Casey, our former Trustee (2021-2024), and Professor of Architectural History at Trinity College, Dublin.

Christine was renowned both as an outstanding scholar, a wonderful colleague, and as an inspirational and enthusiastic teacher in her academic posts at University College, Dublin (1994-2008) and then at Trinity College (2008-2026). Her early work focussed on Irish architecture and she wrote two volumes in the Pevsner Buildings of Ireland series; ‘Leinster’ with Alistair Rowan (1993) and ‘Dublin’ (2005). Her expertise lay in the eighteenth century and she pioneered new ways of interpreting its architecture in publications such as The eighteenth-century Dublin town house (2010).

We extend our sincere condolences to Christine’s family, colleagues, students and friends and we will greatly miss her enormous contribution to studies of architectural history. by @thesahgb

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The third episode of our podcast series on 'The Public Architect' is out now. In this episode, we explore how the professional identity of architects has reflected changing gender, class and race.

We spoke to architect Kate Macintosh about her career and the fight for equal pay for women architects. We were then joined by architectural historians Karen Burns and Elizabeth Darling to trace the longer history of women entering the profession through public institutions, from interwar progressives at the AA to postwar civil servants navigating quiet discrimination. Finally, we spoke to Yemi Aladerun (Ealing Council) and Sarah Allan (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government) about how moving between private practice and public service reshaped their sense of authorship, leadership and care.

Listen via the link in our bio.

Image caption: Rosemary Stjernstedt with Michael Powell, Colin Lucas and HG Hillett – architects in the London County Council Housing Division, 1950. Rosemary Stjernstedt with Michael Powell, Colin Lucas and HG Hillett – architects in the London County Council Housing Division, 1950. by @thesahgb

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2 months ago

In another audio clip from episode 1 of our new Public Architect podcast series, we begin to discuss the different ways the public sector and private sector can work together to strengthen each other today. The video clip is a short snippet from The Proud City: A Plan for London (1946), showing the London County Council Architect’s Department. The full video is available freely online.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. Tell us what you think below.

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The Public Architect is a five-part podcast series bringing together historians, policy experts and practitioners to consider how the architectural profession has understood and related to the public sector from the post-war period to today. by @thesahgb

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3 months ago