Olivia Horsfall Turner is an architectural historian and Senior Curator of Designs at the Victoria and Albert Museum

Frank Dowling

Pub culture – maritime masterpieces at the Trafalgar Tavern

Pub landlord Frank Dowling has built a collection of museum-quality masterpieces and curios that testify to his love of London’s maritime history

‘Mexican taste’, plate 35 from Presentation and History of the Taste of the Leading Nations (1796–99) by Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz.

World views – revisiting an 18th-century survey of global style

Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz’s four-volume treatise, newly translated and edited, deserves to be more widely read

Design by Owen Jones, based on a ceramic dish, an alternative design for Plate 7 in ‘Examples of Chinese Ornament selected from objects in the South Kensington museum and other collections’ (1867)

A set of original drawings by Owen Jones have returned to the museum that inspired them

The designer’s interpretations of Chinese decorative art can now be found in the V&A

The Erechtheion caryatid, purchased from the British Museum and displayed in the 12th-century gallery of the Trocadéro, adjacent to the smiling angel from Reims Cathedral. From P. F. J. Marcou, Album du Musée de Sculpture Comparée, vol. 2 (Paris, 1897), courtesy Princeton University Press

Are copies coming in from the cold?

Plaster casts of monuments have long been an unfashionable feature in museums – but the art of copying may be coming into its own again

The Queen’s House, Greenwich, designed by Inigo Jones in 1616 and completed in 1635. Royal Museums Greenwich

The first classical building in Britain gets the modern treatment it deserves

The Queen’s House in Greenwich is steeped in so much history that curators have struggled to decide what to highlight. But now the problem seems to have been solved

George Gilbert Scott – not such a ‘dead dog’ after all

John Betjeman called him ‘dull’ and William Morris dismissed his work, but Scott’s reputation is bouncing back