A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to The Shard
British architecture has always been a battle of styles. For a thousand years it has been Romanesque versus gothic, gothic versus renaissance, classical versus gothic revival. The greatest battle came in the 1960s, when modernists took control of British planning and plotted the demolition of large swathes of the centres of Britain’s cities. Yet by 1974 almost all these plans had been abandoned. How did it happen? Sir Simon Jenkins tells the turbulent history of Britain’s built environment. He shows how the battles of the past live on today, in arguments over what should be preserved and what form new buildings should take. He feels that such debates are undemocratic when people cannot ‘speak the language of architecture.’ Simon’s new book is history told with a purpose.
