English Buildings

Life force All Saints church, Clifton, was a Victorian building that was hit by an incendiary bomb in 1940. After World War II, a plan to re...

  Not too distant ‘Decay is a kind of progress’, says Dorothy in Alan Bennett’s hilarious and thoughtful play People . It’s a play with an o...

The eyes have it I wonder if Hook Norton, a large village in North Oxfordshire, can stand as a symbol of what I respond to in England’s...

Green men…and other colours As autumn approaches and the country houses and other attractions that many of my readers like to visit get...

God is in the textures This week I attended a fascinating day of talks by Suzanne Fagence-Cooper on British neo-Romantic art, particul...

Piper and after One of my favourite blogs is Adventures in the Print Trade , in which Neil Philip, proprietor of the online gallery Idbury P...

Another look at the lookers' huts Just over a year ago I posted about the lookers' huts of Romney Marsh in Kent, those small and si...

Colour in buildings Working on the book of the series Turn Back Time: The High Street last year focused my mind all too clearly on the pligh...

End of the trail Drawn here by a mention of the place in John Piper's Shell Guide to Oxfordshire, I wasn't disappointed. In a chu...