English Buildings

Warm and cool, rough and smooth There’s something very satisfying about the warm colour of Georgian brickwork bathed in sunlight, and if the...

Light industry By the River Deben and at the foot of Wickham Market’s High Street lies this cluster of buildings: ‘An attractive group,’ say...

Tower of strength In the Napoleonic era, Britain feared a French invasion and between 1796 and 1815, a string of 103 towers were built along...

Almost perfect… It’s almost a perfect Georgian town house, the sort of residence that a prominent citizen of a provincial town might build....

  Local speciality Stoke pots, Nottingham lace, Luton hats. In years gone by, many English towns became specialist centres of manufacturing....

  Street-facing When you turn into the Oxfordshire town of Burford from the A40, you descend the High Street, the first part of which is cal...

Townhouse Doric Chichester has a variety of 18th-century houses with admirable doorways designed using the classical orders. Many have Ionic...

Another way I’d seen and admired and scratched my head at Chichester’s Council House on several occasions before my recent visit the other w...

Theme and variations I was reminded the other day of how I first found out about a late-17th century house in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestersh...

Gilded glamour The time-honoured advice to ‘look up’ when walking down a street in a town or city seems spot-on for the centre of Newport, S...

Polite but pragmatic The buildings that attract me are sometimes the ones that don’t quite obey all the rules. Here, for example, is an exam...

The attractions of Gothic Again and again I feel drawn to houses with Gothic elements in their design – pointed windows, filigree tracery, b...

Continuity and change ‘How old is that building?’ people ask. And the answer is often: ‘Various ages.’ Most buildings get altered over the y...

Sign of the times It’s 1839 and you are building a new house (or perhaps refronting an old one) in the middle of Boxford, Suffolk. Queen Vic...

Earthy Looking through my pictures the other day for something else, I found this picture that I took years ago and probably meant to blog. ...

Worse things than serpents, or, Odd things in churches (17) Finding this drum in a corner of St John’s church, Chaceley, made me wonder: was...

A glance into the past Early on in the history of this blog, I did a couple of posts about Croome Court, the 18th-century house of the earls...

The great indoors, 2 The other day I did a Google image search of ’Stourhead’ and eight of the first ten pictures it produced featured the P...

Light thrown on the familiar A brief stop in Taunton on my way deeper into southern Somerset a while ago saw the south facade of the castle...

  Organic architecture Driving down a quiet lane in search of yet another interesting old church, we came across this, one more delightful u...