Sutherland Lyall samples the wares of the web and picks some sweet treats

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2004 by Sutherland Lyall

I came across it quite by accident. It is the Middlesex University's Museum of Domestic Architecture website at www.moda.mdx.ac.uk. Was this not the former, notoriously radical, Hornsey College of Art, which spent the latter bits of the 1960s in a state of wonderfully crazed revolution? It was, else I might have passed on.

But in a desultory search for evidence of that glorious past, there in the middle of the listings was the Sir J. M. Richards Library. All 1461 books were from the library of the famed and formidable AR editor who ruled between the years of 1937 and 1971. His collection sits side by side with the 4000-volume library on architecture and interior decoration which is the curiously respectable legacy of the natural collecting instincts of Hornsey College of Art's lecturers. The bulk of this university museum is given over to around 60 000 designs, samples and the like of wallpaper. The search engine is one of those doh! jobbies, that sits there and expects you to know what you are looking for, so I didn't get far.