Dr William Aslet

William is an architectural historian who specialises on the early eighteenth century in Britain and Europe. His PhD was on the architecture of James Gibbs, the architect of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, St Martin’s-in-the-Fields in London, and a number of other important buildings in Britain. He was also the author of an extremely influential publication, A Book of Architecture of 1728. Gibbs was the first British architect to train in Rome, and it is on his training there under the leading architect Carlo Fontana that William’s research currently focuses. William studied for an undergraduate degree in History at Somerville College, Oxford, and he took both of his postgraduate degrees at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His favourite place in Worcester is the Lower Library, whose collection of British architectural drawings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is second to none.