Toward the end of the excellent conference Vanbrugh from Stage to Stone organised by the Georgian Group and Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture, Dr. Matthew Walker, an authority on the period, raised the question as to why the tercentenary of Vanbrugh is attracting more publicity than the tercentenary of Wren in 2023.  The implication was that the British were responding with great enthusiasm to the adventurous and unconventional aspects of Vanbrugh’s architecture in a way that they had not to the more serious and historically more significant architecture of Wren. 

My immediate answer to the question was that it was thanks to the involvement of the National Lottery Heritage Fund that the celebrations of Vanbrugh’s tercentenary have a broader base of popular and public support because a requirement of the funding is that it is used for public and educational programmes.   

All the major Vanbrugh houses have responded with enthusiasm to the tercentenary.  Blenheim, which has traditionally concentrated on its associations with Sir Winston Churchill and has been inclined to take Sarah Churchill’s side in her battle with Vanbrugh, has chosen to devote much of the house this year to an inventive exhibition focussed on the construction of Blenheim.  Castle Howard has devoted three rooms in the burnt-out west front to an exhibition exploring Vanbrugh’s life and his contribution to the landscape of Castle Howard.  Seaton Delaval has, from the beginning, embraced the opportunity to attract visitors through a range of Vanbrugh-related events and public programmes. So have Grimsthorpe, Kimbolton and Stowe.  

So, you could argue that it is just an issue of public funding that Vanbrugh is attracting so much attention.  But there is more to it than just money.  It feels as if the Vanbrugh celebrations have caught the public mood in a way that Wren300 didn’t.   

One reason could be that, for much of the period since the Second World War, Vanbrugh has been treated as dependent on Hawksmoor for the detailed drawings of both Castle Howard and Blenheim.  Hawksmoor has been admired more than Vanbrugh for the depth of his knowledge of antique architecture and because there was a feeling that his contribution had been overlooked.  Vanbrugh suffered by comparison.  But it is now recognised that architecture is about more than just drawing.  It involves winning contracts and persuading clients of the quality of your ideas.  Vanbrugh was brilliant at this.  He, not Hawksmoor, was almost certainly responsible for the heroic scale, the siting, and the imaginative conception of Castle Howard and Blenheim, as well as the early outline drawings, even if he left much of the detail to Hawksmoor. 

The other thing which is so appealing about Vanbrugh is that his life was as interesting as his architecture.  He belonged to a period in British history which included a revolution in government, the political ideas of John Locke and the scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton.  It is not a period which is much studied in schools and universities, nor by professional historians.  But it can attract the public imagination, as demonstrated by the film The Favourite and by Richard Chartres, the former Bishop of London, in the sermon he preached in the tercentenary service of commemoration in which he described ‘the rise of Great Britain from a second-rate, peripheral, European power to an intercontinental hegemon’. 

Charles Saumarez Smith, former Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts, is the author of John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture and co-curator of the exhibition of Vanbrugh’s architectural drawings at Sir John Soane’s Museum.