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Adventurous Vents
  • Published: 2 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781802064087
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

Adventurous Vents

A Journey through the Ventilation Shafts of Britain

Formats & editions
Hardback
2 Nov 2025
EBook
2 Oct 2025
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A spectacularly beautiful gazetteer to some of the UK's strangest, most charismatic and most useful structures

At the heart of the modern world lie ventilation shafts. We may not notice them, but wherever there are tunnels, sewers, mines, car parks and energy stations under our feet, vents will be doing vital work keeping them cool and fume-free.

Vents come in a wonderful and inventive variety of forms. This book celebrates them both in their own right as intriguing individual structures, and as an innovative way to tell the story of Britain's subterranean industrial development from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Here are one hundred of the most interesting ventilation shafts, dotted around Britain, sometimes in the most surprising places. You'll find them masquerading as sculptures and small buildings, adorned with fine details or displaying their purpose with confidence.

Whether you're inspired to take off in search of them, or just to admire them from your armchair, vents are fabulous objects. By putting them – perhaps for the very first time – centre-stage, Adventurous Vents celebrates a highly unusual but exciting architectural form.
  • Published: 2 October 2025
  • ISBN: 9781802064087
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 160
Categories:

Praise for Adventurous Vents

I’ve been wondering whether this book is for existing lovers of ventilation shafts or is more like proshaft propaganda for the indifferent/ignorant. But these huge, polished-steel vents in brooding oranges and blues would surely appeal to both

Seb Emina, Fantastic Man Magazine

Richly textured and revealing... The examples gathered in Adventurous Vents are astoundingly varied in appearance and attitude to function... a book that is widely sourced, well curated and full of interest

Will Wiles, Literary Review

Adventurous Vents revels in an obscure design typology, revealing the marginal as central. This celebration of vents and their awkward disguises and blunt exposures is also a celebration of architecture’s double life, its ever-unresolved tension between the profane and the transcendent

Sam Jacob, ArtReview

Allow me to vent my enthusiasm for the oddest book of the year... I never thought anyone would compile a book of ventilation shafts but I’m very glad that they have. A lot of other British vent fans must share my delight

Christopher Howse, The Telegraph