English Buildings

Perivalediction (1) When I visit London my route in and out of the capital city takes me past the former Hoover Factory in Perivale, and see...

From majestic cooling towers to backstreet substations, England’s electricity industry has produced many different kinds of buildings, most...

MANCHESTER VIGNETTE (2) This depiction of a building on a building is a far cry from my previous Manchester vignette. We’re now well and t...

With one city, no big towns, a small, mainly rural population, and a dearth of motorways and heavy industry, Herefordshire is one of the qu...

Whenever I drive to or from Birmingham Airport, I see this building, set back from the A435. When its west-facing façade is warmed by the l...

Broadway Tower is on top of a hill on the borders of Worcestershire and Gloucestershire on a site that had long been used for lighting beac...

This tiny structure – almost too small to be a building – is in a courtyard car park in the centre of Bishop’s Cleeve, a village that has e...

This surprise is in the Barnard’s Green area of Malvern, standing proudly at a road junction from where you take your choice of Malvern’s at...

One of the purposes of this blog is to record accidental architectural discoveries and to preserve those moments of surprise when I come ac...

This nativity image is from All Saints, Margaret Street, one of the masterpieces of the architect William Butterfield. The church is a typi...

In 1881 people could be bothered with things like this. A small shop in a side street in Worcester is topped with this grandiose collection...

Regular readers of this blog will remember the post a couple of weeks back about the parish church at Elkstone, Gloucestershire, an attracti...

Aynhoe Park is a striking country house in Northamptonshire, constructed in golden stone for several generations of the Cartwright family, ...

The word ‘eye-catcher’ was coined for this place. When I caught a glimpse of it from a side-street I had to have a closer look. What I foun...

Back in the early 1980s, I used regularly to take the short train ride from New Cross Gate to London Bridge. On this brief inner-city commu...

For decades, London took its wonderful Art Deco factories of the 1920s and 1930s for granted. Then from the 1950s to the 1970s they became ...

Almost too small to be a building, this structure is simply too special to ignore. It is a shelter containing 33 niches or boles to accommod...

While we’re on the subject of Anglo-Saxon buildings, here’s one more Saxon church, the remarkably well preserved St Laurence, Bradford-on-A...

This building began life as Oozells Street School, one of the board schools designed by J H Chamberlain, architect of Birmingham’s School of...

Schools, colleges, universities – they’re all buildings that ask for the best in design, but so often money, timing, expediency, or politic...