Alexandra Wedgwood
English architectural historian and author

Alexandra Mary, Lady Wedgwood, (née Gordon Clark; 30 July 1938 – 17 December 2025) was an English architectural historian and expert on the work of Augustus Pugin. Also known as Sandra Wedgwood, she was the patron of the Pugin Society and the former architectural archivist of the House of Lords.
Early life and family
Alexandra Mary Gordon Clark was born on 30 July 1938 to the judge and crime writer Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, who wrote under the pseudonym Cyril Hare, and Mary Barbara Lawrence (the daughter of Sir William Lawrence, 3rd Baronet). She has a brother, the clergyman Charles Philip Gordon Clark, and a sister Cecilia Mary Gordon Clark (a wife of Roderick Snell). She was educated at Guildford High School and received her advanced education at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
In 1963, she married Sir Hugo Martin Wedgwood, 3rd Baronet (1933–2010), the stockbroker and linguist. They had one son, Sir Ralph Wedgwood, 4th Baronet (born 1964) and two daughters, Julia and Frances.
Career
In 1966, Wedgwood was named as joint author with Nikolaus Pevsner of the Warwickshire volume in his The Buildings of England series after Pevsner began to use collaborators to speed the completion of the series. Wedgwood did the initial research for the volume, and then completed significant parts of the work, including the whole of the section on Birmingham.
In January 1980, she was appointed architectural archivist to the House of Lords on the recommendation of Sir Robert Cooke, member of Parliament and adviser to the Secretary of State, who wished to ensure the historically accurate restoration of the Palace of Westminster.
The public source identifies “Alexandra Wedgwood” as english architectural historian and author. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Alexandra, Wedgwood and English.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28113162. VIAF identifies the subject as 54276494. The Library of Congress control number is n85078522. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938, 2025, 1963 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alexandra Wedgwood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.