ings bear his name, it is difficult to believe that he was really the author. Because the authorship of many Victorian buildings is unknown, particularly for minor buildings, great care is needed to distinguish between the work of local minor architects who borrowed wholesale (or imitated styles from) both the professional publications that were easily available and the work of well known architects. One other point to bear in mind is that there are often differences between the original design (with or without with the architect's name on it) and the building as it finally appears. There may be a variety of reasons for this. Financial or other reasons may mean that part of a scheme is not built and this may lead to changes by the original or another architect. A disagreement between architect and client may lead to another architect being appointed to finish a job. Perhaps less obvious are the changes that take place during the construction process. These are usually in matters of detail but are frequently no less important as far as the appearance of the end product is concerned. I have recently done some work in this field with a colleague who is doing a Masters degree on the subject of the Building as Designed and the Building as Built and the results were very illuminating. The problems of provenancing of the minor works of architects from the Victorian era and even more modern times will continue. I recently came across an example of a building that appears to have been designed by a well known firm of West Yorkshire architects from the latter part of the 19th centwy. It is in a part of the country in which there are no other examples of their work and it is not referred to in the various biographical and other obvious reference sources. The only indication that the building was designed by the firm is an obscure local press cutting of the time. Conclusions It is easy to accept that the designer of most mediaeval 16th and even some 17th century buildings is 'Anon.', like the authors of some fine hymn tunes of the period. It is equally easy to fall into the trap of believing that because of the type of records that are available from the period, it should always be possible to identify all the work of Victorian and later architects. In reality, however, there are a surprising number of buildings which will remain unprovenanced even if one accepts 'a balance of probability' rather than 'beyond reasonable doubt' test. Some Victorian buildings when thorContext59 September1998 oughly researched should have the equivalent of a government health warning that they are in the style of rather than by a particular architect or that there were significant changes during the construction processes and others should also receive some of the credit. Like all professionals, the work of even the best architects can be of varying quality for a whole variety of reasons. They all produced some buildings which even though they are provenanced may best be described as 'pot boilers'. On the other hand, there are plenty of buildings where the architect is unknown which are much better examples of their type. Does it matter therefore whether a building is actually provenanced as being designed by a particular architect? If the building which is described as being "in the style of" is firmly provenanced, does this suddenly increase its inherent merit? The intrinsic qu_alities of a building should be assessed, particularly in relation to exemplars of its type and it is surely the conclusions of this sort of comparative exercise which establish the quality of a building, not just the name of the architect. Tailpiece The computer is now greatly used in the design of modern buildings and it is in many ways the architect's pencil. In the future therefore will we see names such as AutoCAD, Unigraphics or Medusa alongside that of the architect as part of the provenancing of buildings designed in the 1990s? David Morton is Principal of the Conservation Consultancy. POSTSCRIPT David Morton raises some interesting issues in his article and it is worth amplifying some of those specifically concerning records of local architects, writes the Editor. Nationally known architects are quite well served by biographies which usually include a list of their executed work - Sir John Soane from the 18th century (by Dorothy Stroud); Richard Norman Shaw from the 19th (by Andrew Saint); or Raymond Erith from the 20th (by Lucy Archer) to name but three. What is more uncommon is to find biographies of local architects or information about all the architects to have worked in a specific geographical area. The most common local source remain the deposited building plans from the mid 19th century onward (for Boroughs) and the late 19th or early 20th century plans (for Urban and Rural District Councils). Many original drawings survive and where they do not, the drawings have often been microfilmed. Usually their archives remain with the local authority where they continue to be useful for Building Control purposes, but early plans are occasionally deposited in County Record Offices together with the finding aids (usually the original Registers or photocopies) sometimes listing the architect separately from the owner and builder. Extracting information about the original architects, though time consuming (especially when the drawings must be examined individually rather than by scanning the Register), is usually rewarding and especially valuable in support of, for example, spot-listings. Other valuable sources are deposits of records for specific building types. In Suffolk, the deposit of drawings of rural parsonages from the Archdeaconries of Sudbury and Ely and School Building Records are especially useful. These are by a variety of architects and study of them as a group shows the subtle range of architectural ideas even within a similar broad style. Generally, isolated rural buildings by lesser architects have been less well documented than in larger urban areas, and in any event comprehensive deposits of records for small market towns and large villages began much later. It is frequently frustrating to encounter large, Victorian and Edwardian houses in isolated locations, almost certainly architect designed, without deposited plans and therefore no convenient means of confirming provenance. Some local architectural practices have also persuaded Record Offices to take their complete practice drawings but this increasingly uncommon because of the storage space involved. The local interest of many practices is insufficient to justify deposit with the RIBA Drawings Collection, but they may still throw up surprises when they can be examined in a local collection. When the well known East Anglian firm of Taylor and Green deposited many of its early 20th centuty drawings in the Suffolk Record Office, they also included (perhaps unwittingly) many from 50 years earlier ofW Oldham Chambers (the practice Taylor and Green had inherited) and researchers were excited to discover unexpected fine drawings of buildings in Lowestoft for which no records were thought to exist or where no physical evidence remained after extensive WW2 bomb damage. National weekly publications prove another useful source. The Builder (from 1843), Building News (from 1855) and The Architect (from 1869-1899) 27
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