A Short History of British Architecture
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  • Published: 28 January 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241674956
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $59.99

A Short History of British Architecture

From Stonehenge to the Shard

Formats & editions
Hardback
28 Jan 2025
EBook
31 Oct 2024
Audiobook
31 Oct 2024
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The untold and revelatory story of why our country looks like it does, from the bestselling historian

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. A Short History of British Architecture is the gripping and untold story of why Britain looks the way it does, from prehistoric Stonehenge to the lofty towers of today.

Bestselling historian Simon Jenkins traces the relentless battles over the European traditions of classicism and gothic. He guides us from the gothic cathedrals of Lincoln, Ely and Wells to the ‘prodigy’ houses of the Tudor renaissance, and visits 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 politicised public taste, upheaved communities and sought to reconstruct entire cities. It produced Coventry Cathedral and Lloyd’s 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 its language. A Short History of British Architecture is a celebration of our national treasures, a lament of our failures – and a call to arms.
  • Published: 28 January 2025
  • ISBN: 9780241674956
  • Imprint: Viking
  • Format: Hardback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $59.99
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Praise for A Short History of British Architecture

Provocative, elegant, intriguing - Jenkins is a bold, imaginative writer, brilliant at challenging old assumptions and encouraging you to look at British architecture in a new light

Rory Stewart

A brilliant read and the perfect Christmas gift for that certain impossible-to-buy-for person

iNews

He is at heart an architectural enthusiast...extremely knowledgeable and passionate

Critic

As Simon Jenkins shows in A Short History of British Architecture, there is no neat and coherent tale to be told of a national style evolving or of the passing of a torch down the eras

Literary Review

Jenkins's book is full of interesting details and entertaining stories

Literary Review

Writing good popular history is a learned art, and Simon Jenkins has mastered it

Nicholas Boys Smith, Building Design

Jenkins’s punchy book serves as both an overview of the development of our built environment (and in too many instances its obliteration) and a plea for a more profound understanding of its importance

New Statesman

[Jenkins] is no dry, sticks-and-stones architectural theorist and his entries are always informed by a keen eye and an enthusiast’s interest in buildings as they are used, not as they appear in plan and elevation...clear and admirably concise...a brilliant, blistering polemic against the architectural depredations of the past century

Laura Freeman, The Times

A brilliant read and the perfect Christmas gift for that certain impossible-to-buy-for person

iNews
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