A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 07 November 2024
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Jenkins is a bold, imaginative writer who challenges old assumptions and encourages us to look at British architecture in a new light. Rory Stewart's "A Short History of British Architecture" is a brilliant, blistering polemic against the architectural depredations of the past century. The architecture of Britain is an art gallery all around us, from our streets to squares, through our cities, suburbs, and villages, we are surrounded by magnificent buildings of eclectic styles. Simon Jenkins traces the relentless battles over the European traditions of classicism and gothic, guiding us from the gothic cathedrals of Lincoln, Ely, and Wells to the "prodigy houses of the Tudor renaissance" and visiting the great estates of Georgian London, the docks of Liverpool, the mills of Yorkshire, and the chapels of south Wales. The arrival of modernism in the twentieth century politicized public taste, upheaved communities, and sought to reconstruct entire cities. It produced Coventry Cathedral and Lloyds of London, but also the brutalist monoliths of Sheffield's Park Hill, Glasgow's Cumbernauld, and London's South Bank. Only in the 1970s did the public at last give voice to what became the conservation revolution, a movement in which Jenkins played a leading role, both as deputy chairman of English Heritage and chairman of the National Trust, and in the saving of iconic buildings such as St Pancras International and Covent Garden. Jenkins shows that everyone is a consumer of architecture and makes the case for the importance of everyone learning to speak.

Weight: 596g
Dimension: 241 x 165 x 33 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780241674956