Sir Howard Colvin was the last survivor of a triumvirate who dominated English architectural history during the second half of the twentieth century. Together with Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Sir John Summerson, he rescued the subject from amateurs and dilettantes, gave it academic respectability and established a sound body of reliable scholarship on which all later efforts have been built.

Like many architectural historians, Colvin discovered the allure of old buildings as a teenager. Preferring churches to cricket, his curiosity developed while taking cycling trips from his Nottinghamshire boarding school; his first article, on Dale Abbey, Derbyshire, grew out of such ...