CONTEXT 186 : DECEMBER 2025 49 tell a rich and interesting story, gripping for any who know the city. There is valuable reference material for conservation professionals, precedents, familiar scenarios, lessons learnt and overcome. As a chronological account, the chapters detail the association’s evolution through colourful landmark cases that shaped the city, detailing how and why across 15 decades it retains its distinguished character. The early introduction to Lord Henry Cockburn (1779–1854), the association’s eponymous inspiration, an exemplary campaigner, sets the scene. Cockburn was an observant guardian of amenity, superbly informed through his Scotlandwide circuits as a judge. Adherence to his creed that beautiful places command a duty of protection is evident. He was a pioneer, aware of the role of town-planning long before its birth as a discipline. He navigated with initiative and engagement such town-changing turning points as the arrival of the railways and efforts to improve sanitary conditions. Championing the importance of green spaces, reasoning logically and persuasively, he established a modus operandi for the future association. As the city grew, the protection of historic buildings and places became increasingly urgent, and the association’s collaborative input was key. Holyrood Park and Moubray House, for example, would not exist today save for its concerted effort. Then as now, conservation clashed with politics and economics, while the association’s successful outcomes inspired and ‘Gradually, there was a recognition that Edinburgh was vulnerable and irreplaceable.’ Causes célèbres are described throughout: from development on The Mound, to shaping the Scottish War Memorial, resisting undue clearances, promoting rehabilitation and defending the green belt to master-planning Granton’s waterfront. We learn how, mobilising swiftly, the Cockburn Association matured quickly to influence issues at the highest level. Not all battles were won. The redevelopment of the St James Quarter (the subject of Peter Davey’s chapter in the 1976 book The Unmaking of Edinburgh, edited by Helen Peacock) would recur, the latest debacle finding the city’s fragile skyline pierced by an alien ‘cupcake’ and its flourish. The accounts are educational and engaging and, true to the authors’ intent, motivational. Even inscription of the city’s Old and New Towns as a world heritage site in 1995, we learn, did not prevent major threats continuing – from a proposed retail gallery under Princes Street to outsized extensions to the landmark Royal High School that would have redefined the scenic beauty of Calton Hill. The story is a human one. Key individuals who drove and contributed to the association and the conservation cause are given potted biographies. Partnership with other amenity bodies is celebrated throughout. The book is superbly illustrated with informative captions, its drawings, photos and tables engaging in themselves. Equipped with a select bibliography and an index, the volume is navigable as a reference tool and with sources for further research. Just as Lord Cockburn enquired in 1849 of the city’s likely appearance in 1949, the chapters lead contemporaries to ask the same question for 2049. They will be assured in this of the continuing need for a respected, established and informed civic advocate – that is the Cockburn Association. Deborah Mays, director of the Lutyens Trust and a heritage consultant Sixty years in practice The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his times Nicholas Olsberg, Lund Humphries, 2024, 432 pages, 312 numbered plates comprising colour and black and white illustrations, and numerous additional photographs at start of each section, hardback, ISBN 978 1 848223 71 4, £60 This handsomely illustrated book is, despite the high quality of its images (the superb contemporary colour photos were taken in 2017–2023 by the architectural photographer James Morris), far more than a picture book. It is an excellent account of the work of William Butterfield, who the author states ‘was the most daring, rigorous and brilliant architect of his age, whose 60-year practice spanned the entire Victorian era’. Its author is a former director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and founding head of special collections at the Getty Research Institute. Nicholas Olsberg was educated at Rugby School, at which he arrived in 1956 (a time when Butterfield’s reputation as an architect was only just recovering from its nadir in the 1920s through to the 1940s). He begins his account of Butterfield’s rich and varied architecture by recalling in the prologue how he warmed (slowly at first) to an appreciation of the chapel, classrooms, cloisters, gym and library, all of which were designed by the great man: ‘I came secretly (for it would have been shameful to confess) to love them all; would arrive early for Sunday evensong to watch the light come through the claws of the chapel apse; and spared no chance to wander the Temple Reading Room alone and sit with a book beside its great marble heart as the western light faded through the leaded windows.’ This is just a glimpse of Olsberg’s
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