In 2011 the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain met in a symposium at Oxford to discuss the contribution of Howard Colvin to their subject and the extent of his influence thereafter. The title of this slim book of 118 pages is somewhat of a misnomer. It deals in detail with the life of Colvin, who is reckoned to be the greatest architectural historian of the twentieth century, on a par in the Victorian Age with the redoubtable Professor Robert Willis of Cambridge, considered by Colvin to be his ‘intellectual model whose work he considered to be almost faultless’. Much less is the emphasis of this book on what happened to the study after Colvin. Modern architecture is given short shrift.

His great achievements were in two directions – first, compiling his Dictionary of British Architects (1954) and, second, his editorship of the massive multi-volume King’s Works (1963–82). His aims in the former were to concentrate on exploiting all the major sources of architectural history and to identify as far as possible the authorship of certain categories of important building. The result, which went through four revisions in the author’s lifetime, provides an incomparable mine of accurate and well-documented information about British architects. No other country can claim such an achievement.

Inevitably, some of the authors of this book point out shortcomings in this approach, noting, for example, that Colvin lacks much interest in parks and gardens, which are seen as evolutionary and ephemeral. More significantly, he is said ‘to have lacked any interest in theory or in large scale interpretation of historical change’. Geraghty, for instance, criticises his work on the Canterbury Quad at St John’s College, Oxford, because the book focuses on the forms of the buildings and does not consider its place in the structure of Caroline England. He takes Colvin to task for being more interested in information than interpretation. Indeed a suggestion is made (p 60) that the Colvin approach is akin to trainspotting or stamp collecting. A more constructive approach is made by Andrew Saint in his chapter, entitled the ‘The Conundrum of “By”’. He points out that in buildings ‘by’ is a shorthand to assert individual ownership ‘through some sustained creative act’. He stresses that architecture in all ages is the product of client, architect and builder, all of whom may be more than one person.

The second great theme Colvin set himself was the History of the King’s Works. Here his early interest in archaeology (he dug at Clarendon in 1939) is apparent in the series of excavations he set up in Greenwich, Nonsuch, Writtle, Camber Castle and elsewhere, undertaken by the Office of Works to provide certain key information. However, his own approach was primarily that of an administrative historian, an approach he had followed in his first book, The White Canons in England (1951). Colvin was no unworldly academic. He is seen as a shrewd negotiator, pushing the reluctant Treasury to increase the pay of the contributors from £5 per thousand words to £7 10s! He was, however, a quiet, self-effacing figure, content to influence things from behind the scenes in his membership of the Historic Buildings Council, the Royal Fine Arts Commission, the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and subsequently English Heritage.

A lighter side of Colvin is seen in his entertaining book on Unbuilt Oxford (1983). Here he finally let his hair down at the tender age of sixty-four. Gilbert Scott’s New Bodleian Library is ‘like a dinner jacket made of Harris tweed’. He broadens his approach, recognising that what most interests people in buildings is not the people who created them but those that inhabited them. In Oxford he observed that the dons were ‘an architecturally retarded body too much concerned to preserve and too little to create’. Magdalen College ‘had a larger history of architectural indecision than any other Oxford college’. It had paid for designs from more than twenty architects from 1720 to 1844. None was carried out.

Finally on a personal note, I remember Howard Colvin as generous with his encouragement of younger scholars; he gave me a set of his plans of the King’s Works. I prize my copy of the White Canons inscribed with his inimitable minuscule handwriting (he never used a typewriter, much less a word processor). In 1996 I rowed him across the lake at Blenheim to investigate the interior of Vanbrugh’s bridge: he pointed out the numerous carved fragments of the royal manor house, reluctantly destroyed by the architect at the insistence of Duchess Sarah.

Howard Colvin, the product of the Manchester School of historians that included T F Tout and F M Powicke, is seen with his disciples as completing their ‘essentially Victorian, almost utopian project of global cataloguing and inventorization’. For all this, his university never really rewarded his genius. He remained a Reader and his post was abolished after his retirement. It was left to others to support the study of architectural history in the twenty-first century.