A cup of coffee, a warm tartan blanket and a run of the journal Zodchiy from 1872 all the way to 1924, obviously.

The journal is a treasure trove of references and interesting images.

It covers the 1876 World's Fair in Philadelphia and the 1878 Paris one, and shows every design variant for the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood — the ones that lost the competition. Lots of churches, old Russian ornament, and besides that, tonnes of text, formulas and so on — reading of little interest to anyone today, though the section on bricklaying was entertaining.

There are plans and elevations; some structures are broken down in detail — trusses, fixings, all with drawings.

Naturally, life demanded the mundane too: you regularly come across ads for "Portland cement" and "metal works."

On references: churches, barracks, stables, hospitals (and the manufacture of their ventilation and heating), automated laundries, ordinary townhouses, heated swimming pools, prisons, and dachas, dachas, dachas.

Suddenly, in the 1877 issue, you find a description with drawings of special cast-iron plates with glass inserts providing passive light to basement floors. With the sole caveat that the plates are described as being in "the newest buildings of New York."

A great deal of what's described has long been lost, sadly. The magnificent Lutheran Church of St Mary in St Petersburg, for instance, was broken up for firewood during the siege of Leningrad. Fragments of its foundation were only found in 2014; it had stood for about seventy years.

Or take the dacha of the beer magnate Ludwig Krohn, designed by Benois, near Peterhof — it doesn't even partly resemble the original design now. The beautiful dacha was first violated in the post-war 50s when it was converted into a "sanatorium," and finished off by a fire in 1995.

Or you leaf through 1899 and find an advertorial for the Russian Electrical Society "Union," with a founding capital of 6,000,000 roubles (insane money, if I understand correctly). The piece says the society is prepared to take on the design and execution of projects and estimates for electrical installations of every kind, for lighting and for supplying towns with electrical power.

The journal did not, alas, survive Soviet rule.