Melissa Woolford is on the phone, having an animated conversation about powdered sugar. ‘We need it today,’ she implores. She is the founder of the Museum of Architecture and The Gingerbread City, a sugary masterpiece that has been created at Coal Drops Yard in London’s King’s Cross. It has been a big undertaking, although one … Read more
At the beginning of the 20th Century, Kelvedon Hall’s future looked less than rosy and it was staring down the barrel of some all-too-familiar decline and destruction. The red brick Georgian home was built in Essex in 1742 by John Wright, and completed internally by his descendants around 1780. And it had a lot to … Read more
On May 9, 2013, Warwick Rodwell and his wife, Diane Gibbs, visited Northwold Manor house. It was then a derelict wreck in the process of compulsory purchase by King’s Lynn and West Norfolk Borough Council; the building had last been occupied in 1955. ‘No sunlight penetrated its interior,’ Prof Warwick recalls, ‘and we groped our … Read more
Listeners to radio stations in the 1980s will remember the endless reports of traffic delays at various city-centre ‘gyratories’. These were the post-war one-way inner ring-roads and roundabouts that were carved out of old towns, supposedly to ease traffic flow, but which often caused even greater congestion. One such roundabout ‘gyratory’ was created immediately to … Read more
The Country Life archives are mostly dedicated to the architecture and gardens of the great houses of the United Kingdom and Ireland, it also holds some unusual, but delightful, collections from overseas. One such, and somewhat surprising, set of negatives and prints are those commissioned in the early 20th Century from the world renowned architectural … Read more