In 1826 the great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel made a tour of France, England, Scotland and Wales. It was a technical mission, undertaken on behalf of the Prussian State, with the purpose of seeing the factories, bridges, warehouses and museums that were under construction at the time. He kept a journal in which he recorded the new buildings he saw in Paris as well as his busy social life there; he mused about Britain, its inhabitants and its architecture, and sketched the workshops and machinery that interested him. This book contains the first complete translation into English of Schinkel's journal, as well as the drawings he made while he was travelling.
The journal marks a crucial point in Schinkel's career, for it represents the beginning of his serious involvement with the new technologies that he later employed in the buildings he designed on his return to Berlin. At the same time the journal gives a unique impression of Regency Britain as seen by a foreign architect. Sites that no longer exist in London, Oxford and Edinburgh, as well as the potteries, the Menai straits and the industrial towns and factories of northern Britain are recreated here through Schinkel's discussions and drawings, among the very few surviving records of the face of Britain at the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Part travelogue and part cultural critique, the book will appeal to students of the architect himself it will also be invaluable for all those interested in early nineteenth-century Britain. The text, which is augmented by Schinkel's long descriptive letters to his wife, is accompanied by numerous illustrations of drawings and pages from the journal, and contemporary engravings of the places mentioned, as well as a full introduction and explanatory notes.