Sir John Newenham Summerson (25 November 1904 – 10 November 1992) was one of the leading British architectural historians of the 20th century. Early life John Summerson was born at Barnstead, Coniscliffe Road, Darlington. His grandfather worked for the Darlington and Stockton Railway and founded the family foundry of Thomas Summerson and Sons in Darlington in 1869. After the premature death of his father, Samuel James Summerson, in 1907, Summerson travelled extensively in England and Europe with his mother Dorothea and then attended a prep school at Riber Castle in Derbyshire before going to Harrow (1918-1922) and the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London, where he gained a bachelor's degree. Career After graduation Summerson worked in several junior roles, most notably in the office of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, but architectural practice was not for him and he became a tutor at the Edinburgh College of Art, School of Architecture in 1929. Hired by the Modern Architectural Research Group (MARS), a think tank founded by a group of modernist architects, he settled back in London, moving on to a job as an assistant editor for the magazine Architect and Building News in 1934. Following the unsuccessful attempts to become a practising architect, and greater success as an architectural journalist, Summerson embarked on his first book, a biography of the architect John Nash (1752–1835). Published in 1935, it was "outstandingly successful". He continued to write mainly about British architecture, especially that of the Georgian era. His Architecture in Britain: 1530–1830 (1st edition 1953; many subsequent editions) remained a standard work on the subject for students and general readers after his death. The Classical Language of Architecture (1963) is an introduction to the stylistic elements of classical architecture and traces their use and variation in different eras. He also wrote many more specialised works, including books about Inigo Jones and Georgian London (1945) illustrated by Alison Sleigh, as well as The Architecture of the Eighteenth Century (1986), in which he describes Boullée in a distinct positive manner, stating that Boullée was clearly the point of departure for one of the boldest innovators of the century, Claude Nicolas Ledoux. His 1945 book Georgian London was called "a masterpiece of British art history" by Simon Jenkins in a Sunday Times review of the 1988 edition. One of the founders of the National Buildings Record (NBR) in 1941, Summerson served as its deputy