Architect, surveyor, latterly drainage engineer, even auctioneer, with no evidence of any official training in any of these, between about 1878 and 1893 Thomas Micklam built an astonishing number and range of buildings in Winchester, most of which survive, yet he remains almost entirely unknown.

His contemporary, Thomas Stopher, a much better known architect and public figure, left diaries, a portrait in the Winchester City Council’s topographical collection, and a good number of flamboyant buildings. Micklam left an enormous inheritance of low-key but nicely detailed ‘mechanics’’ houses across the whole of the city, as well as several small-scale industrial buildings, a handful of villas and a few extensions to earlier gentry houses. He left no diaries, no accounts, no portraits, or at least none that have survived in the public domain. Happily Hampshire Record Office has the best part of a hundred of his building plans and that is where this investigation began.