Ballot Archive

03 Jul 2025

Candidate Details

Candidate Name

Duncan James

Academic degrees, honours etc.

Duncan James is an autodidact, without formal academic qualifications

Profession or occupation

Architectural historian

Grounds for election

After working as a jeweller, including also academic studies of historic bronze-casting, for the last 25 years Duncan James has researched the timber-framed buildings of the Welsh Marches. He has undertaken National-Lottery funded projects, tree-ring dating, and recording the buildings in Herefordshire villages, e.g. Pembridge and Weobley, and has contributed to VCH. His papers in Vernacular Architecture include ground-breaking studies of saw marks on medieval timbers, on carpenters marks and on counter-change ceilings. He contributed the chapter ‘Cruck Construction in the Welsh March,’ to Cruck Building: A Survey (2019). Since 2011, he has written the annual ‘Buildings’ section for the Woolhope Society. His publications are particularly notable for the outstanding quality of his perspective drawings of timber structure and details. He has also rediscovered two extraordinary 16th-century carvings of native Americans, relocated from Barnstaple to Shropshire (Hakluyt Society Journal).

Signatories

The following Fellows have signed this Blue Paper