By Simon Jenkins

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 untold story of why Britain looks the way it does, from prehistoric Stonehenge to the lofty towers of today. 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 20th c. politicised public taste, upheaved communities and sought to reconstruct entire cities. It produced Coventry Cathedral and Lloyd’s of London, and also the brutalist monoliths of Sheffield’s Park Hill, Glasgow’s Cumbernauld and London’s South Bank. Only in the 1970s did the public 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.