English Buildings

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

Suit you, 2 In the centre of Hull, strolling around on my visit back in the summer, I found Hepworth’s Arcade, a small shopping development ...

  Grapes and glazing I read online that in Britain the rate of pub closures continues to be high: on average one pub is closing every day. A...

Craft and harmony In the Victorian era, church restorations were regular, bread-and-butter work for many architects. The ideas of the Oxford...

Looking up in Halifax Looking up in the centre of Halifax, you quickly realise that many of the town’s shops were rebuilt, on a grand scale ...

In the sun As a sequel to my post in August about a splendid 19th-century shopfront on a Georgian building in Newport, Shropshire, here’s an...

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...

Sweet   This beautiful sign in Ledbury has a special resonance for me, because I had a much-loved relative who was a confectioner. R, a cous...

Wine, offline On one of my past visits to Leominster I noticed a glazed shop door containing a pane of glass etched with the name of the Leo...

The way to do it The Punch Bowl in Chesterfield is a pub, like the White Horse, Chichester in my last post, that uses coloured glass in its...

  Don’t look up! I’m always telling people to look up in towns – look at old facades above shopfronts, look at windows, look at old signs, l...

Incidental pleasures, 2: Old news The things we have lost. In the increasing list of things that have vanished or are vanishing as the world...

Bling and beer Grantham when I last passed through (a few years ago on a summer evening), was as closed as it must have been recently: hardl...

Adrian Barlow, Kempe: The Life, Art and Legacy of Charles Eamer Kempe Published by Lutterworth Press Most people who visit churches adm...

Retrospective (2): A handful of fragments As my next short sequence of backward-glancing links to celebrate ten years of blogging , I...

Blowing bubbles The third of my Liverpudlian trio is Oriel Chambers, an office block in Water Street that has been catching eyes since 18...

Bonne année, art nouveau! Some of my happiest half-hours have been spent in secondhand bookshops. It’s not just the possibility of pickin...

On reflection Among the rampant office blocks and stores of Victoria Street stands the Albert, a pub of 1862 built in solid yellow bric...

Emporium Look up in Evesham High Street and you see this extraordinary bit of late-19th century facade above a modern shop front. Fou...

Through the lychgate One of the rewarding aspects of maintaining a blog like this is the interesting feedback one receives. Among ...