John Woody Papworth

He is chiefly remembered for "Papworth's Ordinary" (1874), a reference guide to British and Irish coats of arms arranged systematically according to their design.

G. D. Squibb commented in 1961 that "his memory rests more securely upon his Ordinary of British Armorials than upon any building for which he was responsible, though it is but fair to add that his professional achievements were not lightly regarded by his contemporaries".

[4] Papworth also designed the monument to the radical political reformer Thomas Hardy in Bunhill Fields burial ground.

One of the book's idiosyncrasies is that (partly because of Papworth's decision to classify all animal charges under the primary heading "Beast", and all birds under "Bird") the alphabetical distribution of entries is highly unbalanced: the headings A–F account for roughly 80% of the book, a point on which Papworth had to reassure anxious subscribers while the work was still in progress.

He contributed articles to the works of the Architectural Publication Society, founded in 1848, on subjects including Balthazar Gerbier, Frederic Louis Norden, Mathes Roriczer and Aqueducts.

[4] With Wyatt, and with plates engraved by the authors, Papworth published Specimens of Decoration in the Italian Style selected from the Designs of Raffaello in the Vatican (1844), and Museums, Libraries, and Picture Galleries, Public and Private, their Establishment, Formation, Arrangement, and Architectural Construction, to which is appended the Public Libraries Act, 1850, and Remarks on its adoption by Mechanics and other Scientific Institutions, with Illustrations (1853).

In 1926 Lt Col George Babington Croft Lyons left a substantial bequest to the Society of Antiquaries to prepare a new edition of Papworth's Ordinary.

After many delays, and a decision to restrict the work's scope to England and to the period before 1530, the first volume of what was now entitled the Dictionary of British Arms appeared in 1992.