Professor Tim Mowl
BEd (Bristol), MA (Birmingham), DPhil (Oxford), FSA
Professor of History of Architecture and Designed LandscapesDepartment of Archaeology and Anthropology |
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After a career as a freelance architectural historian, an Inspector of Historic Buildings for English Heritage, an architectural consultant and journalist in Bath, and lecturer and writer on architecture and planning, Timothy Mowl joined the University of Bristol after delivering the Perry Art Lectures in 1992. By then he had published books on gate lodges to country houses (1987), a study of the Druidic and Freemasonic influences on John Wood's new Georgian town for Bath (1988), eighteenth-century architects and craftsmen of Bristol, Victorian architecture in the same city and Palladian bridges. The 1990s saw the publication of revisionist biographies of the eighteenth-century aesthetes and Gothick fanciers, Horace Walpole (1996) and William Beckford (1998), and academic studies on Elizabethan and Jacobean style (1993), architecture and design in the Civil War and Commonwealth (1995) and the architecture and landscape aesthetics of the Rococo in England and Ireland (1999). His controversial polemic on twentieth-century architectural experiment, Stylistic Cold Wars: Betjeman versus Pevsner (2000), was inspired by two earlier books: The Sack of Bath - And After (1989), co-written with Adam Fergusson, and Cheltenham Betrayed (1995). These three studies all concerned the defence of historic places threatened by the pervasive British uncertainty on all matters of architectural style and urban values.
Professor Mowl is Director of the MA in Garden History, which was launched in 2000, and also Director of the Institute of Garden and Landscape History. In preparation for the MA in Garden History he published a core text - Gentlemen and Players: Gardeners of the English Landscape (2000) - which charts the influence of aristocrats and professionals on the creation of landscape parks and gardens. This led to his embarking upon a nationwide series of the historic landscapes and gardens of England: a compliment to the Pevsner guides on the nation's architecture. The first volume on Gloucestershire appeared in 2002 to be followed by Historic Gardens of Dorset in 2003 and Wiltshire in 2004. Professor Mowl then received a Leverhulme Trust Research Grant of just over £37,000 for the next three books in the series: Cornwall (2005), Worcestershire (2006), and Oxfordshire (2007). In January 2007 the Leverhulme Trust grant aided the project further by awarding Professor Mowl £314,000 to produce ten more books over the next five years. This funding has provided a Research Assistant, Dr Clare Hickman, to coordinate the project and independent consultants to carry out the research in each of the counties. Northamptonshire will appear in June 2007 and Cheshire in October 2007. Alongside this major series he has published a biography on the eighteenth-century artist, architect, furniture and landscape designer, William Kent (2006).
Professor Mowl is currently supervising fourteen MPhil and PhD students. Their topics include: the dissemination of Palladianism, the Italianate Garden, Gardens and the London Child, the gardens of the Kit Kat Club, Alpine influences and the Swiss cottage, the role of women in gardens in South Wales, the landscape history of Savernake Forest, late eighteenth-century patronage and the Society of Dilettante, the landscape of the Palace of Schonenberg and a history of The Garden Society. Professor Mowl welcomes approaches from prospective candidates with an interest in British and European Architectural and Garden History from the seventeenth century to the present day. More information on Professor Mowl's work is available online at http://www.timothymowl.co.uk/.