Remembering Mark Girouard

The Society is very proud to announce the establishment of a new fund for publications, in memory of Mark Girouard (1931-2022). Mark was known above all as a writer firstly at Country Life (1958-66) and then in the magnificent series of books that he published with Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre over his long 60-year career. A list of his publications is available here. He became the only person to have won the SAHGB’s Alice Davis Hitchcock prize three times in 1967, 1973 and 2010 as well as the Colvin prize posthumously in 2022 for his Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture 1540-1640. To reflect Mark’s career and legacy as a writer the fund will be used to promote and aid publications in architectural history. The Fund has been set up in consultation with Mark’s daughter, Blanche, who has given it her wholehearted support.

The scale and range of Girouard’s scholarship was quite breathtaking beginning in the Tudor period with Robert Smythson (1966). This was an era to which he repeatedly returned with great perspicacity, as Maurice Howard noted in his obituary for the SAHGB Magazine, testing and extending his key themes and precepts in later works such as Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540-1640 (2009). Mark was also part of the pioneering re- evaluation of the Victorians in the 1970s as a founder member of the Victorian Society and in books starting with The Victorian Country House (1971). As a Londoner he also engaged with the urban environment in books such as The English Town (1990) and as an active participant in the burgeoning conservation movement. He was the founding Chairman in 1976 of the Spitalfields Trust which was instrumental in saving its Georgian townscape, as chronicled in The Saving of Spitalfields (1989). He also explored broader cultural movements writing a pioneering account of the Queen Anne Movement in Sweetness and Light (1977) and the Chivalric Revival from the Victorian and Edwardian periods in The Return to Camelot (1981). His most famous and influential work Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (1978) galvanized the area of country house studies besides introducing a greater awareness of the relationship of socio-economic to architectural history in Britain. The book remarkably also brought architectural history to a mainstream audience and remains to this day Yale University Press’s all-time best seller.

We have a target for the fund of £100,000 which will come from a range of sources: crowd-funded donations from members and other people; larger individual donors; and grants and trusts. We welcome all donations however great or small and those of £1,000 or over will be acknowledged in our list of Patrons. You can now donate through Stripe (below), with an option to make a Gift Aid declaration if you are a UK tax payer, or through the crowdfunding platform Just Giving.