In current academic thinking, John Carr of York (1723–1807) does not rank as one of Britain’s “great” eighteenth-century architects. This has been the spur to Ivan Hall’s lifelong crusade: to research and celebrate Carr’s work. The newly published John Carr of York: Collected Essays builds a strong case for the restoration of Carr’s position to the top of the architectural pantheon, alongside his contemporaries Robert Adam and William Chambers.

In too many architectural histories and university syllabi, Adam and Chambers alone are presented as the bright lights between the Palladianism of William Kent and Lord Burlington and the neoclassicism of George Dance the Younger and Henry Holland. Carr is relegated to the second class and assumed to be a lagging provincial practitioner, ever rehashing the innovations of his London contemporaries for a Northern clientele. Absurdly, if he had been sent to the bottom of the rankings—or better still expelled from the pantheon altogether—there might remain the possibility of a triumphant revision and reentry, as was the case for Christopher Wren in the nineteenth century and so many of the high Victorians under John Betjeman’s banner. Unlike Wren, Carr was popular and respected until his dying breath; his legacy has never suffered the scorn of connoisseurs but neither has it ever enjoyed the triumphant restoration of revisionists. Instead, Carr’s name has slid slowly into a middling rank; the evident facts of Carr’s prolific catalogue as well as his considerable political and financial success seem almost to work against his reputation.