William Whyte
The Battle of Big Ben
Mr Barry’s War: Rebuilding the Houses of Parliament After the Great Fire of 1834
By Caroline Shenton
Oxford University Press 288pp £25 order from our bookshop
Architects rarely live in houses they have designed themselves. The avant-garde modernist Berthold Lubetkin, for instance, planned the pioneering new town of Peterlee from an old farm in rural Gloucestershire. George Gilbert Scott, that eminent Victorian campaigner for Gothic architecture, designed many of his neo-medieval buildings while living in a well-appointed Georgian terrace. And small wonder, for architects know far better than anyone else just how awful the process of building actually is.
@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Last Tweets