Why am I passionate about this?

Since childhood I have wanted to know why things look as they do. Every object expresses what was once an idea in someone’s mind. Looking from things to the people who made them and back again, we understand both better. This single question has led me through a lifetime of writing about material culture, architecture, applied art and craft. I have written books about Stonehenge, the Gothic Revival and antiquarianism in the Romantic age. I also hosted a podcast series, for the London Review of Books


I wrote

God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain

By Rosemary Hill,

Book cover of God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain

What is my book about?

Without Augustus Pugin, Britain (and parts of the U.S. and Australia) would look different today. Born in 1812 he wrote…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste

Rosemary Hill Why did I love this book?

This was the first book about architecture I read and it remains one of my favourites. Clark wrote it in 1928, long before ‘Civilisation’ made him a television star and it has the freshness of a young man trying out ideas and working to understand something he doesn’t like. He was writing about Gothic architecture at a time when it was completely out of fashion. Clark’s subtitle ‘an essay in the history of taste’ is tongue in cheek because Gothic for his generation meant bad taste. Tracing its roots back into the eighteenth century Clark shows how it developed to embody the ideals of the Victorian age. 

By Kenneth Clark,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Gothic Revival as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

First published in 1928, this informative study offers an introduction to the most influential and widespread artistic movement that England ever produced - the Gothic revival. It shows how buildings once neglected and laughed at could latterly be seen as having grace and artistic merit.


Book cover of The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme

Rosemary Hill Why did I love this book?

This is my most personal choice. The architectural historian and critic Gavin Stamp, who died in 2017, was my husband. This was one of his best and most deeply felt books. It tells the story of the memorial arch at Thiepval in Belgium designed by Edwin Lutyens, which bears the names of 73,000 men whose bodies were never found after the catastrophic Battle of the Somme in July 1916. It shows how architecture can bestow dignity on loss, how it can both embody grief and to some extent relieve it. Gavin’s book looks beyond the monument itself to meditate on the greater tragedy of the First World War. 

By Gavin Stamp,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Edwin Lutyens' Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in Northern France, visited annually by tens of thousands of tourists, is arguably the finest structure erected by any British architect in the twentieth century. It is the principal, tangible expression of the defining event in Britain's experience and memory of the Great War, the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, and it bears the names of 73,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found at the end of that bloody and futile campaign.

This brilliant study by an acclaimed architectural historian tells the…


Book cover of Drayneflete Revealed

Rosemary Hill Why did I love this book?

Architectural history can be fun -or at least it can be funny. Lancaster, who invented the term ‘Stockbroker Tudor’ tells the story of the imaginary town of Drayneflete as it supposedly evolved from the days when ‘sabre-toothed tigers prowled though the tropical undergrowth where now stands Marks and Spencers’. This typical British town has its grand family, the Earls of Littlehampton, its notables the Parsley-ffidgets and a proud if not always very accurate sense of its history. Writing in 1949 Lancaster’s brilliantly witty drawings show the same spot over the centuries from Romans in togas dodging chariots outside the senate to women with pushchairs dodging cars outside the cinema.  

By Osbert Lancaster,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Drayneflete Revealed as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Drayneflete Revealed


Book cover of Boom Cities: Architect Planners and the Politics of Radical Urban Renewal in 1960s Britain

Rosemary Hill Why did I love this book?

The 1960s saw Britain destroy more of its own built environment than all the bombing of the second world war. The car was king, the high rise and the shopping precinct transformed city centres. In many cases this is now seen as a disaster. Otto Saumarez Smith, one of the brightest of the rising generation of architectural writers, tells us how and why it happened, why it stopped and why he has come to love some of it. 

By Otto Saumarez Smith,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Boom Cities as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Boom Cities is the first published history of the profound transformations of British city centres in the 1960s.

It has often been said that urban planners did more damage to Britain's cities than even the Luftwaffe had managed, and this study details the rise and fall of modernist urban planning, revealing its origins and the dissolution of the cross-party consensus, before the ideological smearing that has ever since characterized the high-rise towers, dizzying ring roads, and concrete precincts that were left behind.

The rebuilding of British city centres during the 1960s drastically affected the built form of urban Britain, including…


Book cover of Leadville: A Biography of the A40

Rosemary Hill Why did I love this book?

Platt calls this ‘a biography of the A40’ and it is about the road that most people coming and going between London and Oxfordshire drive along without looking. The suburban houses that line it, many scheduled for demolition, some empty and some squatted, intrigued Platt and he began visiting them, talking to the inhabitants and finding out how they became stranded in this hinterland. Their accounts are funny, poignant and sometimes astonishing.  The A40 tells a story about the history of London and the visions and failures of urban planning in the 20th century.

By Edward Platt,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Leadville as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"One afternoon in January 1995, as I drove along Western Avenue, I did what I had never done before: i parked the car in a side-street and walked on to the road..."

In Leadville, Ed Platt tells the story of Western Avenue from the optimism of its construction in the 1920s to its partial demolition seventy years later. It is a tale of the city and the traffic, of suburbia and the dreams of its inhabitants, and of our senseless and all-consuming love affair with the motor car.

'Platt has created a drama that is not only Orwellian in its…


Explore my book 😀

God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain

By Rosemary Hill,

Book cover of God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain

What is my book about?

Without Augustus Pugin, Britain (and parts of the U.S. and Australia) would look different today. Born in 1812 he wrote the first architectural manifesto, transformed the Gothic Revival, invented the modern family house, and built some of the great landmarks of Scotland and London, most famously the Elizabeth Tower (Big Ben). Pugin lived a dramatic and tragic life, often crossed in love and short of money. He died disillusioned and insane at the age of forty. This is his story. 

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By Elana Gomel,

Book cover of Girl of Light

Elana Gomel Author Of Nine Levels

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author

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What is my book about?

A girl of Light in a world of darkness.

In Svetlana's country, it’s a felony to break a mirror. Mirrors are conduits of the Voice, the deity worshiped by all who follow Light. The Voice protects humans of MotherLand from the dangers that beset them on all sides: an invading army of wolf-headed men on their borders and the infectious, ever-evolving, zombie-like Enemy that plagues them at home. When Svetlana meets Andrei, a traumatized and amnesiac soldier from another war, she embarks on a harrowing journey of adventure and self-discovery that leads her to question everything she was taught to…

Girl of Light

By Elana Gomel,

What is this book about?

A voice through Svetlana's mirror guides her beloved MotherLand from behind its' electric tower. The war with Wulfstan is not going as well as Sveta and her parents hope, but Sveta trusts the Voice. When her best friend Tattie goes missing, and Sveta saves Andrei, a soldier in summer uniform in the dead of winter, it takes Sveta through a crucible of Light, doubt, and back to the altar of true belief. Girl of Light unravels Sveta's beloved MotherLand in a war-torn adventure through monsters, missing eyes and broken mirrors.

Girl of Light is a dark fantasy with a Slavic…


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