A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to The Shard
Simon Jenkins (Penguin Viking, £26.99)
IT WAS ONLY WHEN I READ THE ACKNOWLedgements of Simon Jenkins’s A Short History of British Architecture that I realised why he has devoted so much of his life to writing about architecture alongside his better known work as a commentator, journalist and, although relatively briefly, editor of the Evening Standard in the mid-1970s and of The Times in the early 1990s.
When he left Oxford in 1965, his first job as a young tyro was working for Country Life. Then, after a short spell at the Times Educational Supplement, he wrote about planning for the Evening Standard and, encouraged by John Betjeman, developed a detestation of what was happening to English towns and…
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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2024