I am delighted to present for your amusement some engravings by George Glover from William Stokes’s book ‘The vaulting master or the art of vaulting’ in the hope that they will amaze and entertain you as much as they have me.
When Richard Rawlinson died in April 1755, he left instructions in his will that his heart ‘be taken out, enclosed in a silver cup with spirits and put into a black marble urn’.
I am staring at a vast map on the wall of the cavernous Blackwell Hall in the Weston Library, a stone’s throw from the centre of Oxford. How I could have missed this huge hanging in the hundreds of times I have walked in this space I have no idea. But today as if by some magic here I am, standing in front of it, taking it all in.
Transfixed.
It’s the tale of John Towle, the Victorian mill owner turned architect who created this unconventional dwelling – a house of cards I suppose one might say, for it is constructed almost entirely from paper. Not the ‘huff and puff and blow your house down’ kind of paper production of ‘The Three Little Pigs’. But a residence that stood strong and upright from when it went up in 1844 until it was finally demolished in 1996. That’s an amazing lifespan for any building. Never mind one made of paper.