English Buildings

The ‘Theophrastus effect’ It happens every now and then: you’re walking round a town or district that’s unfamiliar to you, and you notice so...

Alas: Smith and Jones… In Chester in June last year I was trying to do what I do in a city I don’t know well: drifting around taking things ...

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

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...

The angular meander Is there a pattern that says ‘Greece’ louder and more clearly than the ‘Greek key’? This motif takes the form of a conti...

Tea in the park Visiting Leamington Spa recently, I was particularly struck by the decorative ironwork on many of the buildings. Much of th...

Mighty delicate If you think of Swindon as a railway town, which, as the location of the GWR locomotive works it certainly became in the 19...

  Summer days, 3 On one of many recent days stuck in doors, the Resident Wise Woman reflected that it was fortunate at least that we’d manag...

Summer days, 1  As the sleet came down in late December, I found myself looking through my files of photographs and came across a number tak...

Lionwork In the list of things I’ve meant to post, for ages, but not got round to, the south doorway of Saint Saviour’s church, Dartmouth,...

‘I try the door of where I used to live’ For me, that’s one of the most haunting lines in ‘Dockery and Son’, a poem by Philip Larkin, in ...

The heart and the honeysuckle, revisited Walking around Cheltenham this afternoon I was reminded that I was going to post an example o...

The heart and the honeysuckle Growing up in Cheltenham, I was fascinated early on by the variety of the ornamental ironwork patterns in t...

Swans, up I know I’ve gone on about swans on this blog before. About their seductive combination of strength and softness, their place in En...

Quite a lot of Malvern is built in local reddish stone laid in a ‘rock-faced’ fashion. If this rather rustic finish seems a trifle wild and...