Unlike almost any other European country, these elites had overlapped for centuries through intermarriage and increasingly through education. The son of a Lord Mayor of the City of London (almost certainly a merchant and often given the lowest hereditary title of baronet) could mix fairly freely, possibly as members of the House of Commons, with the younger son of an earl. Their siblings might even marry, almost unheard of on the continent where noble families had strict rules about who they could wed.

This looser social structure paved the way for a new elite to emerge, though there were other reasons such as expanding scientific knowledge and academic horizons, plus a gradually developing sense that noble ancestry was not a guarantee of good politics. It is hardly surprising that a new class arose to take on newly emerging challenges and opportunities. Through a complicated series of beliefs and events, the contemporary architectural profession and its context emerged from this nexus. In unpicking how this shaped the architectural profession, one needs to focus on this elite in general.

The elite was termed ‘intellectual’ in a famous essay by Noel Annan: ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’. (He was successively Provost of King’s College Cambridge and University College London.) Its origins go back a long way – at least to the scientific revolution inaugurated by Francis Bacon in the early 17th century and intensified by the Royal Society, founded in 1662, whose early members included Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke and John Locke.

But its real ascent to power and influence dates from a century later, typified by the emergence of the Lunar Society, a group of intellectuals in the English midlands who met on the night of the full moon to facilitate returning home. At their dinners, they debated wide-ranging but often practical issues they encountered in their business and professional lives. This is best shown in their membership. It included chemist (and Unitarian minister) Joseph Priestley, potter Josiah Wedgwood, pioneer of steam power James Watt, William Withering, who discovered the medical application of digitalis through scientific research, and his medical colleague Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles).

All were struggling to address new challenges which were emerging through changing social and economic conditions – and to a great extent succeeded. Watt was one of the godfathers of the industrial revolution, Wedgwood transitioned from an artisanal background into a wealthy industrialist, not just through his diligence in exploiting the chemistry behind pottery, but also in flair for design, for marketing and for solving the logistical problems of transporting fragile China from his works to clients across the world. He and Darwin were early supporters of the canal network, which massively reduced the risk of transport compared to packhorses clambering over the hills of central England.

Membership of the Lunar Society depended on intellectual curiosity and aptitude, far more than social background. Darwin came from a family of minor gentry who tended to make a living in the professions, while Wedgwood, as mentioned above, came from a line of artisans. Their descendants inter-married on multiple occasions (Charles Darwin’s mother and wife were Wedgwoods), forming one of the cruxes of Annan’s intellectual elite. Annan also mentions the Stephens (Leslie founded the Dictionary of National Biography, whose daughters were Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell), who supplied classical scholars and colonial administrators; the Huxley family of scientists overlapped with the Hodgkin family of Nobel Prize winners as well as the painter Howard, the Keynes who also intermarried with Wedgwoods and Barlows. The serial inter-relationships of these families, including their professional, educational and academic lives made them almost as tightly knitted as the old Whig oligarchy of Cavendishes, Cecils, Russells, Herberts and Howards.

Academic achievement was central to the identity of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’. Its first stirrings, such as the Lunar Society, were largely free of existing academic institutions; some of its member (like Darwin) had been to university but most, often due to poverty or religion, had not. As the 19th century progressed, universities themselves began to change: the foundation of UCL in 1826 opened the door to students who were not members of the Anglican church to higher education. Even Oxford started to change, introducing science to its curriculum from the 1850s, largely through the work of Ruskin’s friend Thomas Acland who became Regius Professor of Medicine.

These changes were part of both a production line of academe and a source of its consumption: the rise of ‘public schools’ in the 19th century (Thomas Arnold, perhaps the most famous and reform-minded headmaster of the period was another key member of the intellectual aristocracy), and the expansion of the home and colonial civil service. These provided career opportunities and accolades for otherwise unemployable classics graduates. After the Northcote Trevelyan Reforms of the 1850s, these jobs increasingly depended on success in competitive exams, meritocracy rather than the nepotism satirised by Dickens in the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit (1855). He had already satirised architectural training in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844). This new elite was educated in a small number of schools and an even smaller number of universities – more often Cambridge than not, where many joined the legendary ‘Apostles’secret society which bound them even more tightly together . The Apostles might be seen as an academic equivalent to the Lunar Society, in that its members ranged freely across subjects that interested them.

British universities, Cambridge primarily, but also Oxford, UCL and the new universities in industrial towns in the emergence of the intellectual aristocracy, supplemented the autodidactism of bodies like the Lunar Society. There is perhaps a distant analogy with German universities, with which English ones were often unfavourably compared for their narrower demographic and curriculum as well as higher costs, especially the depiction of German universities in Norbert Elias The Civilising Process, though there are notable differences. Germany until 1870 was a patchwork of relatively small principalities, each with its own court and many with their own university. These two institutions, Elias argued, with their own distinct character: the courts represented civilisation, derived from French courtly etiquette, while universities were bound up with kultur, from which a genuinely German sensibility might evolve.

Apart from Alfred Waterhouse showing up as an outlier on the Hodgkin family tree, this may seem to have little to do with architecture. But it is the underlying trends that formed and were then promulgated by this elite that shaped the architectural profession as it exists today. The rise of the intellectual aristocracy closely parallels the rise of other professions across the 19th century. Of course some, for example those involving the church, the clergy and the law, had provided an elite for centuries. But the growing social and economic challenges of the industrial revolution, as well as rapid scientific advance, propelled professions like engineering, medicine and even architecture into the front rank, massively expanding their scope and bringing financial rewards, social status, reputation and honours on a similar basis to the longer established ones.

The overlap of the intellectual aristocracy with the rise of the professions gave architecture collectively an entrée into intellectual, political and social life which had previously only been achieved by a few individuals (for example Wren or Soane). Not surprisingly, it was associated with the rise of institutions. Particularly significant for architecture were the Royal Academy of Arts (founded 1769), which embedded architecture within it from the start and provided the only formal instruction in the subject in the UK until University College London offered a course in 1841, and the Royal Institute of British Architects (founded 1834) which is much more open in membership and came to be seen as the collective voice of the profession. So architecture became part of an interlocked series of professions, each addressing different challenges of the professional world, and as a set of homogenous skills.

Institutions and education worked in parallel to develop knowledge, expertise and competence. All of these could be said to have given architecture social purpose, especially against the background of need for new building types from railway stations to social housing, and how to organise these in relation to each other, which eventually became known as town planning. There were fierce debates in the 1890s about whether architecture should become a legally defined profession, strongly backed by the RIBA acting supposedly in collective interest and promoting technical expertise, but opposed by the small elite of architects who achieved membership of the Royal Academy. Two of the latter, Norman Shaw and T G Jackson, edited a book called Architecture: Profession or Art, whose contributors included W R Lethaby, Reginald Blomfield and Ernest Newton, all names still known, while against them stood the justly forgotten J MacVicar Anderson.

Essentially elite architects argued their recognition came from design skill, while the plebeian party thought technical competence was a sounder platform. Both arguments, despite their not wholly compatible origins, informed the rise of, and acceptance of architecture into the intellectual aristocracy.

That process can be charted in several ways, at least in the UK. First was the emergence of architects with specialisms in particular fields, from the mid 19th century. Henry Roberts pioneered social housing, E R Robson school buildings, E T Hall in hospitals. Each accumulated a certain amount of specific expertise which increased their value to clients in their areas of expertise. Raymond Unwin, designer of garden cities and suburbs, was not just an expert in low-cost housing (though much of this work fell to his partner Barry Parker), but also also promoter of town planning on a ‘scientific’ basis, a characteristic that later allowed it to merge gradually into and eventually be smothered by local government.

All of this happened prior to World War I, which shattered many of the delusions under which architects and architecture had laboured. But one strand that it brought to the fore was technical expertise. As political intention strove to go beyond Bentham’s ‘greatest good for the greatest number’, positively promoting the interests of the poor, people who knew how to design low-cost housing, hospitals and schools were more popular than those who knew how to plan large if agreeable country houses. Research-backed expertise came to be seen as the key to such knowledge. All of this was grist to the Modernist mill, though the enthusiastic young members of the MARS Group – the British branch of CIAM – found in the 1930s. Their self-set task of solving London’s problems proved to be impossible, partly because of the unmanageable quantity of research required. Even when they cut the area of study to Bethnal Green (one of London’s poorest neighbourhoods) they still floundered. More successful Modernist urban visions in the 1930s came from Marcel Breuer’s and FRS Yorke’s ‘Garden City of the Future’, and especially Tecton’s plan for the Borough of Finsbury.

Even this fairly thin gruel was enough for architects to be accorded work during World War II as experts, in areas such as munitions workers’ housing and factories, which later morphed into proposals for post-war housing.

But after World War II, when the resources of the state were mobilised to create the Welfare State with the new housing, hospitals and schools needed to support it, the position changed. The London County Council’s architects’ department grew to be the largest architectural office in the world, and research entered the curriculum of architectural courses.

A key figure here is Richard, Lord Llewelyn-Davies. He became professor of architecture at the Bartlett, UCL in 1960 and transformed it into a research-rich school that was completely unlike any other in the UK. Previously he had worked for the Nuffield Foundation where he pioneered new directions in hospital design, which formed a major strand of the work of his private practice, Llewelyn-Davies Weeks Forestier-Walker and Bor. Another strand was town planning, notably the new city of Milton Keynes, which also benefited from research-led expertise.

In 1987 Noel Annan gave a paper at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study on ‘Richard Llewelyn-Davies and the Architect’s Dilemma’. They had been colleagues at UCL. The dilemma was the unoriginal one of reconciling art and science, but far more interesting is Annan’s depiction of Llewelyn-Davies’ background and intellectual formation. Annan roots him firmly in the ‘intellectual aristocracy, as grandson of an evangelical clergyman, son and nephew of two fellows of Trinity College Cambridge of which he was himself a graduate, and as an Apostle’. His family connections ranged across the intellectual aristocracy, including Beatrice Webb, and Stafford Cripps. His first wife was a grand-daughter of Leslie Stephen, mentioned above. His professional and social connections were even broader, notably including Victor (later the 3rd Baron) Rothschild, who eschewed a career in the family bank for one on the interstices of military intelligence, government service and academe (eventually running prime minister Edward Heath’s think tank), very similar to Annan and not far from Llewelyn-Davies. ‘Both Llewelyn-Davies and Rothschild’, writes Annan, ‘were to represent something not all that common in British public life. They are technocrats’.

Annan was clearly in awe of the research Llewelyn-Davies conducted, notably giving different coloured cotton to nurses so he could track their movements. Other studies included the benefits and drawbacks of daylight in hospitals.

Llewelyn-Davies may have been an extreme example, but his career shows how architecture enhanced its respectability and perceived social use through scientific research. In his case it was marked by being made a peer, but this was an important part of the ethos of the profession as it emerged from World War II, flushed with wartime success (and formidable contacts into government and administration that some architects made) while the urge from the incoming Labour government to create a Welfare State was an open goal for technocratic architects. The LCC and many others walked through it.

With the benefit of hindsight, Annan identified a weakness. Thinking ‘buildings ought to be designed, and towns planned to make [people’s] lives easier and more agreeable’, Llewelyn-Davies ‘distrusted those like Abercrombie and Gibberd who tried to make a pleasing visual effect’. This had an effect on the Bartlett, which, argues Annan, ‘was not as strong on design as it should have been’. Unfortunately, that flaw was replicated so often in public sector architecture of the post-war period that it is almost a cliché to state it. This indicates the folly of being seduced into seeing architecture in primarily technocratic terms, but firmly highlights Annan’s starting point: the architect’s dilemma, perhaps as strong now as ever.