London’s Periodical Architecture: Digital Humanities and the Built Environment, 1700–1750

Research Lunch – Matthew Lloyd Roberts

In recent years, large-scale digitisation of early modern periodicals has revolutionised the searchability of collections of ephemeral print culture. Enabled by optical character recognition technology, this shift has transformed the way scholars use databases of primary material, introducing new quantitative approaches to these vast collections. However, this shift also poses epistemological questions within new digital humanities frameworks.

The paper will explore this shift by presenting material newly discovered by these methods relating to church building in London in the first half of the eighteenth century. Firstly, looking at the way that the work of the New Churches Commission was represented and debated by the politically factional newspaper culture in the first years of Hanoverian rule, and then recognising the effect this discourse may have had in shaping the way that people experienced the city. By incorporating periodical culture as an important context of the work of the Commission, for the first time this study proposes a substantive media and reception history of these iconic buildings of the English Baroque.

Furthermore, this paper will consider the explosion of architectural publishing in the periodical press of the mid-1730s, in the context of James Ralph’s Critical Review, examining the way that architectural practitioners such as John James were increasingly forced to foray into periodical culture to defend their expertise and reputations. These events will be read towards the political and social meanings of church building and church restoration, and the growing anxiety about the need to disambiguate the meanings of the built environment to the urban public in an age of print culture.

Matthew Lloyd Roberts is a history of art PhD candidate at Downing College, Cambridge and member of the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture. His PhD research is concerned with the cultural reception of the changing built environment of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He studied ancient and modern history at Keble College, Oxford and has an MA in architectural history from the Bartlett, UCL. Complementing his academic work, he is also interested in disseminating academic research to broader audiences and produces and hosts two podcasts concerned with architectural history and culture, the independent About Buildings and Cities and the official podcast of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. His architectural criticism has also appeared in Tribune (magazine), New Statesman and the Critic and he leads architectural walking tours for a variety of organisations including Open City.

Image credit: Thomas Archer, St John Smith Square. © Photo: Matthew Lloyd Roberts