Simon Jenkins has, over the years, assembled a winsome array of higher coffee-table books about the kind of building which welcomes National Trust mobility scooters and the beige brethren aboard them. This is a man who knows the cardigan market. And he knows his stuff, mostly. He subscribes to a version of the Great Man school of history, which casts the great man as an exigent client who believes himself the maker or author. But, sadly, the grim-faced Bess of Hardwick did not install the glazing herself. And another promoter ever anxious for an attribution, God Almighty, did not personally carve his supplicants’ chantries. It might be his house, but he delegated the design.
Such an exclusive approach to the buildings passed down to us is self-evidently devoted to the history of the atypical, of the exceptional, of archetypes which sowed ‘influence’ and were blithely ripped off, leaving a swathe of approximate ectypes in their wake.
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