The Pattern of English Building

"Now that one is a bit drier, but it’s fantastic for anyone interested in buildings. You realise that, until about 100 years ago, every single building was built out of the stuff that was in the ground beneath it. And he’s brilliant at saying what all the bits of stone are that are under the ground across Britain. So, for example, there’s a big, big broad sash of limestone that comes all the way down from Yorkshire and through the Midlands and down into Dorset and all along there you get that fantastic creamy building stone, so you’re able to build huge stone buildings, much taller church spires and as soon as you go off that stone sash you’ve got to turn to brick or mud or whatever else there is beneath the ground. “The planners after the Second World War got rid of quite a lot of what remained of 17th-century pre-Fire London. But there is still that pleasure of winding streets on a medieval pattern.” He brilliantly describes every part of England and the different building stone there and the different brick you get from the earth. If you’ve got lots of iron in your earth you’re going to get much, much redder bricks and once you take this in you start to see that England is built out of what’s underneath and in bits of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire you can see where this band of stone runs out. You see dry stone walls and then it suddenly runs out and you get hedges. It’s a brilliant view of England from underneath. The best picture in it – and who’d have thought geology was so interesting? – is a picture of England but with all the geological bits underneath and then what the buildings on top look like. Once you think of it like that you can never think of it in any other way."