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. 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 a list of Patrons.

Why your support matters:

The days of mainstream sales for serious books in our subject are sadly long gone and writers of architectural history are finding it increasingly difficult to finance both the research and the money required for publications of all types. Academic publishing operates in a pressured economic environment in which costs, particularly those for illustrations and permissions, are passed on to authors. Open Access publications, which help liberate knowledge by making it freely available on the internet, still often come at a price to the author for hosting the material online, particularly in the case of journal articles.

Thanks to the immense generosity of the Arnold Stevenson Fund we are able to allocate considerable revenues to support postgraduate students. However, we have nothing comparable for those at later stages of their career apart from a small budget for illustration costs. The new Girouard Fund is envisaged as a complement to our existing student grants which will continue to be maintained at their present level of financing. The Girouard Fund will be for all those engaged in architectural historical research including academics, heritage professionals and freelancers. It will support research for a wide range of publications including books, journal articles, websites, bibliographies and digital formats, as well as other outputs which take architectural history to a broad audience. In so doing the Girouard Fund will enable the SAHGB to extend substantial grant provision for the first time right across the architectural history community.