The Pevsner Guide to London 4

"The Pevsner Guide to North London. He’s exactly the opposite to Betjeman in a way because he went round every county in Britain doing these guides and so they are quite dry, but they are absolutely fantastic for the facts and the dates and who built what when. It’s not only brilliant about famous British buildings like Kenwood, but it will also tell you something about places like my street, Caversham Road – it will tell you exactly when it was built and there’s a church next to my house and he tells me who built it and when. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Yes. It would be fantastic, wouldn’t it? And how incredibly stupid and nice of Lord Iveagh to give it away. Cycling back from parties I regularly put my bike over the railings and cycle through and there’s never anyone there and you can think: this is as good as mine. Robert Adam built it in the late 18th century and I’ve always loved that sham bridge and have always been amazed it’s not a real bridge. It was built for Lord Mansfield, the Lord Chief Justice, and it was a private estate and then it was given to the country in the 1920s. Who’d want to live in the countryside if you could live there? It’s called A Lust for Window Sills and it’s a guide to British buildings from the Normans to the Second World War. There’s a strange thing in Britain: we love buildings and the National Trust is the biggest membership society in the world, but the moment you say to someone ‘Ionic’ or anything like that their eyes glaze over and they think it’s so impenetrable. But actually there aren’t that many words like that and if you introduce them gently they will stick in the mind. We also suffer from a slight cultural cringe and we think that Tuscany must be much more beautiful because that’s where all the best stuff comes from. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t fantastic stuff here and some very original new things. In fact, the British terraced house is based on Palladio, you know, Palladian palaces, and once you know a thing like that you start seeing little things all over the place. We do ourselves down when it comes to buildings."