C O N T E X T 1 7 1 : M A R C H 2 0 2 2 9 of 1881), which the committee of the SPAB considered was too modern to be campaigned against. Venning notes that today the SPAB is sometimes mistakenly thought of as the Medieval Society. Certainly William Morris interests were centred on pre-Georgian buildings. Morris seems to have believed in the Victorian era that the SPAB would survive and take up the case of later buildings (now perhaps more the remit of others). Venning notes that in News from Nowhere (1890), Morris envisages the Houses of Parliament being saved from demolition by ‘a queer antiquarian society’ – one that was so energetic and had such good reasons, that it generally gained its point. In the novel, the parliamentary buildings acquired a new purpose, being used to store manure. Currently, some might consider this quite apt. Other articles deal the relationship of the Brunel Museum to a project at the beginning of the career of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. This was the construction of the Thames tunnel between 1825 and 1843, designed and built by his father Mark Brunel. Richard Holme of the Naval Dockyards Society explores the current threats to the nation’s Victorian dockyard heritage and offers some solutions. The Georgian One of the aspects of the work of the Georgian Group that is not perhaps as widely known as it should be is the annual Georgian Group Architectural Awards. In The Georgian (No 2, 2021) the chair, Peter Zisman, makes the point that Georgian buildings were conditioned by the social, economic and financial circumstances of that time, but today their preservation depends on ensuring that they reflect social, economic and financial circumstances in the 21st century. So while the Georgian Group continues to oppose inappropriate development, it still celebrates exemplary restoration and conservation projects, and the way in which these reflect the cause of the Georgian Group at large. Now in their 17th year, the awards demonstrate the vision, commitment and tenacity of owners. They are wide ranging in scope. The categories include the reuse of a Georgian building; the restoration of a Georgian garden or landscape; the restoration of a Georgian building in an urban setting; the restoration of Georgian structure or interior; the restoration of a Georgian country house; the restoration of a Georgian chapel or church; and construction of a new building in a Georgian context. All the winning and highly commended buildings are illustrated, and demonstrate the range of outstanding work recently completed. The winner of the new building category, Wolverton Hall Folly in Worcestershire, commissioned by Nicholas Coleridge and designed by Quinlan Terry Architects, graces the cover of the issue. By the time you read this it is to be hoped that the worst of the pandemic will have played itself out, but the problem of highly infection diseases is hardly new. Quarantine rules applying to travellers from abroad in 18th- and early 19th-century Britain required buildings necessary to deal with this. Some designers and clinicians’ life’s work was spent on controlling the spread of infectious diseases within buildings, as exemplified by a modest, nowderelict, mid-19th-century military hospital on the Isle of Sheppey on the Thames estuary. Listed by Historic England in 2016, this is a poignant symbol of the struggles of early Georgian pioneers to control the spread of diseases through architectural means. Worthy of note for those struggling to date box-sash windows is the fourth wellillustrated article in a series regarding the evolution and dating of historic joinery details. In this issue the subject is window shutters, once again drawn from the Charles Brooking’s architectural collection. The varying forms of shutter panels are illustrated, as are informative cross-sections as a basis for more accurate dating. This is a handy guide for future reference. For practicing conservation professionals, an ability to draw is an important accomplishment. A conversation between the Georgian Group director David Adshead and the classical architect George Saumarez Smith on the art of measured drawing is particularly interesting. It is illustrated with some of Saumarez Smith’s measured drawings from his new publication Sketchbooks: Collected Measured Drawings and Architectural Sketches. The Construction Historian It seems that few easily identifiable mistakes in the construction of historic buildings come to light without a bit of fortuitous forensic examination. In The Construction Historian (Issue 8, Winter 2021) Michael Heaton follows up the archaeological evidence he identified in 2011 of a mistake in the construction of the mid-18th-century Temple of Apollo at Stourhead, with further alterations more recently revealed during the restoration of its domed roof structure. The anomalous changes are well illustrated. Heaton writes that the builders had probably been given an outline of the building’s design but not its detail, and commenced with a composite purlin-andking-post roof truss incorporating
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