English Buildings

  All done in brick Glancing up a York backstreet called Oglethorpe, I caught sight of this, a brick building of 1648, to which a pair of cu...

The beauties of imperfection Modern window glass is almost perfectly flat, flatter than any pancake. It also has few if any internal imperfe...

An ancient place Cotehele is one of the most romantically beautiful houses in the care of the National Trust.* It was built by three genera...

Artisans at work At the time of my visit to Hull in the summer, there was building work going at the Wilberforce House Museum, making photog...

  A web of wood Having posted about Dunster’s charming and well preserved dovecote the other week, I thought it might be interesting to tak...

  A spirit of place and time I have visited Chastleton House before, but the other week the Resident Wise Woman and I decided that it was ti...

Small mercy ‘We must be thankful for small mercies,’ my mother would say, keeping her spirits up in the face of what was sometimes a hard li...

Wolf’s Cove The other week the Resident Wise Woman and I revisited one of our local Cotswold country houses, Snowshill Manor, a place we had...

  Anyone for coffee? One last post from the fascinating Suffolk town of Hadleigh, before I move on… Having enjoyed seeing Hadleigh’s church,...

An educational legacy I’d been to Weobley, one of Herefordshire’s best ‘black and white’ villages, before, but I’d somehow managed to miss t...

Continuity and change If there’s one building in the Cotswold town of Tetbury that is impossible to miss, it’s the Market House, all seven b...

Going Dutch We didn’t get the chance to go inside Southwold Museum on our recent visit to the town. But I spent a few minutes to admire its...

I am under the weather at the moment, because the 21st-century plague has struck me at last. So here is a reprise of a post from some years ...

No gauze here One of my favourite sketches featuring the comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore takes place in an art gallery. Among the pai...

  Maritime Lynn, 2 As well as the Pilot Office for people managing the shipping in the harbour and its approaches, the other prominent archi...

  Tradition and the individual This chunky tower had me scratching my head when I first saw it standing out across the fields. The tower’s p...

TA very much  This is one of a row of four shops that make up the ground floor of a large timber-framed building in Ledbury, not far from th...

  Bricks come to Burford For me and everyone else, it has been a year in which travel has been restricted. Like the rest of the British popu...

Into the wood St Edward’s church stands in the middle of the Cotswold market town of Stow-on-the-Wold. It’s medieval and, even though it’s ...

Ionically… The variations on the classical orders of architecture – Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite, Tuscan – are legion. They’ve been t...