Mark Girouard

Mark Girouard FSA
Born	(1931-10-07)7 October 1931
Died
Occupation	Architectural historian
Notable work	Elizabethan Architecture Life in the English Country House The Victorian Country House
Spouse(s)	Dorothy Girouard
Parents	Richard Girouard (father) Lady Blanche Maud Beresford (mother)

File:Hardwick Hall - geograph.org.uk - 1315964.jpg

Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire – Girouard's pioneering study its architect, Robert Smythson, established his reputation

Mark Girouard FSA (7 October 1931 – 16 August 2022) was a British architectural historian. He was an authority on the country house, and Elizabethan and Victorian architecture.

Life and career

Girouard was born on 7 October 1931. He was educated at Ampleforth College, read Classics at Christ Church, Oxford, and then worked for the magazine Country Life from about 1958 until 1967, firstly as a writer on architecture and then, from 1964, as its architectural editor. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976 and elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. Girouard was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011. He was on the board of trustees of The Architecture Foundation from 1992 to 1999 and a founder, and the first chairman, of the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust. He was the grandson of Henry Beresford, 6th Marquess of Waterford through his mother, Lady Blanche Girouard.

His Life in the English Country House won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for 1978, and the WH Smith Literary Award in 1979.

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C467/92) with Girouard in 2009 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.

Photographs by Girouard are held in the Conway Library of Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and are currently being digitised.

Personal life

Girouard was married to the artist Dorothy Girouard and they lived in Notting Hill Gate, London. They had one daughter, the writer Blanche Girouard. Girouard died on 16 August 2022, at the age of 90.

Girouard wrote of his ancestral connection to Saul Solomon, a pioneer liberal politician and businessman in Cape Colony, and his wife Georgiana Solomon, a social activist and suffragette. Girouard was descended from Saul's brother Edward, born in 1820 in Saint Helena, who spent 18 years working with the Griquas and Basutos in South Africa for the London Missionary Society.

Bibliography

• Montacute House, Somerset (1964)
• Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era (1966)
• The Victorian Country House (1971; revised & enlarged 1979)
• Victorian Pubs (1975)
• Hardwick Hall (1976)
• Sweetness and Light: The "Queen Anne" Movement, 1860–1900 (1977)
• Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (1978)
• Historic Houses of Britain (1979)
• Alfred Waterhouse and the Natural History Museum (1981), ISBN 978-0-565-00831-4
• The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (1981)
• Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (1983)
• Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History (1985)
• A Country House Companion (1987) editor
• The English Town: A History of Urban Life (1990)
• Town and Country (1992)
• Windsor: The Most Romantic Castle (1993)
• Big Jim: The Life and Work of James Stirling (1998) Chatto & Windus, ISBN 978-0-7011-6247-4.
• A Hundred Years at Waddesdon (1998), ISBN 978-0-9527809-2-2.
• Life in the French Country House (2000)
• Rushton Triangular Lodge (2004)
• Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540–1640 (2009), ISBN 978-0-300-09386-5.
• Enthusiasms (2011) Frances Lincoln, ISBN 978-071123329-4
• Friendships (2017) Wilmington Square Books, ISBN 978-190852496-6

External links

• Mark Girouard at the archINFORM database. – list of books published
• Photo and Elizabethan Architecture book profile