About Timothy Mowl

Timothy Mowl's career has included work as a freelance Architectural Historian, an Inspector of Historic Buildings for English Heritage, an Architectural Consultant and Journalist in Bath, and Lecturer and Writer on architecture, conservation, historic landscapes and gardens. He joined the University of Bristol after delivering the Perry Art Lectures in 1992, where he taught until taking early retirement in 2011. During his Bristol career he was Professor of History of Architecture and Designed Landscapes, Director of the MA in Garden History and also Director of the Institute for Landscape and Garden History. He is now an Emeritus Professor at Bristol. Tim was appointed Professorial Research Fellow in the Institute of Humanities at the University of Buckingham in 2012, where he taught a research-based version of his MA in Garden History. Tim has now left Buckingham to concentrate on mentoring former students and other researchers, enabling them to get their research published.  

 

In preparation for his Bristol MA Garden History course, Tim published Gentlemen and Players: Gardeners of the English Landscape (2000), which charts the influence of aristocrats and professionals on the creation of landscape parks and gardens. Thereafter, with major funding from the Leverhulme Trust, he began researching and writing a nationwide series – The Historic Gardens of England. This produced 14 books, with Hampshire the last to be published in May 2016.

 

In adddition to this country-wide project, Tim has continued to write on architecture, both that of his home city – Bristol – City on the Edge (2006) and Bristol Explored - Twelve Architectural Walks (2015) – and on national subjects. His last architectural biography was of the eighteenth-century artist, architect, furniture and landscape designer, William Kent. This revisionist study was published in May 2006 by Jonathan Cape, and appeared as a Pimlico paperback in April 2007. After a brief flirtation with Humphry Repton, Jane Austen and Regency Gardens in advance of the two hundredth anniversaries of the death of Austen in 2017 and of Repton in 2018, which has resulted in several lectures, Tim is now working on a biographical study of the Great God Pan.