Archives & Library

Library Collections

The library collections cover British painting, sculpture, drawing, prints, decorative arts, architecture and garden history from the medieval period to the present day. The collections on British artists and architects, the British and Irish country house and the eighteenth-century Grand Tour are particularly strong.

Paul R. Joyce

Approximately 100 books. This material has been fully catalogued on the Library and Photographic Archive catalogue.

Part of this collection is kept in the Library Special Collections under the classmark ‘RARE’.

The collection consists of books on the architecture of the Victorian church architect George Edmund Street (1824–81) from the library of the late Paul R. Joyce. There are books on, and by, Street and a collection of guides to churches built or altered by Street.

The collection was donated to the Paul Mellon Centre in 2016.

The Centre also holds Joyce’s archive.

Selection of books with illustrations of churches on the covers

Church guidebooks from the Paul Joyce donation, 2016

Paul R. Joyce (1934–2014) was an architectural draughtsman who worked for the architect Roderick Gradidge in the 1970s. Joyce had a strong interest in conservation and although he published little of his own research, he was the acknowledged authority on George Edmund Street for over forty years.