Pillar to Post

"He does a sort of equivalent thing but in pictures. He’s got a brilliant thing in that he knows inside out your buttresses from your perpendicular churches but the drawings he does are very simple and beautiful and funny. It’s very hard to be funny about architecture, but he’s good at doing funny drawings of whatever it might be – a Norman church or a Roman temple with a slightly hungover legionary in front of it. He mostly does British stuff but he spent a lot of time travelling. He’ll do a picture of an English Renaissance church and outside it a crane about to knock it down and 30 workmen. Or he’ll do a picture of an Oxford college and have two stuffy dons walking by. He’ll always make it human and not dry and the actual building will be done in a cartoony way but with all the details done perfectly. So it’s easy to look at but you can’t fault him. When I teach, I show the details from this book because he’s fantastic at illustrating the individual details of the British buildings he draws. He died in 1986 and he was a friend of Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh and all that lot and was most famous as the pocket cartoonist at the Daily Express, and he was very funny as a cartoonist, but his other love was buildings."