Introduction

London St Paul’s – London from Primrose Hill – The Tower and the new City – London buildings

London from the River – Clapham and Kew Gardens – Hampton Court and Western AvenueBloomsbury and Notting Hill – The Regent’s Canal

The South-East New Romney – The South-Eastern suburbs – Roadside and motorway signs and hoardings

Hastings and Rye – Tenterden and Cranbrook – Romney Marsh – Dover, Bodiam, Sissinghurst and KnoleThe Devil’s Dyke and the South Downs – Regency Brighton and the Palace Pier

The Mid-West Devizes – Windsor meadows, Greenham Common, Uffington Castle – Oxford: cars and colleges

Oxford: Gothic and Classic – Sedgemoor, Langport, Glastonbury Bath and BristolDownland white horses and Cheddar Gorge – Stonehenge, Salisbury and Swindon

Malmesbury, Donnington and Lacock – Avebury and the Wiltshire harvest fields

The South-West Granite outcrop at Roche – Cornish building – China-clay, slate and tin

Lanyon Quoit, Carn Euny, Restormel and Lanhydrock – Harbours, quaysides and jettiesDartmoor, Barnstaple and Exeter – Lulworth Cove on Bank Holiday – Hardy’s DorchesterAbbotsbury, Chesil Bank, Shaftesbury and Cerne Abbas – Isle of Wight: Ryde and Cowes

Osborne,West Wight and Carisbrooke

Wales Llanthony and Chirk – The Border Hills and Llanberis – North Welsh details

Harlech and Blaenau-Ffestiniog – Welsh castles – Stones and chapels – Partrishow and the valleysAberaeron – The Welsh coastline

The Midlands Nottinghamshire pylons and cooling towers – Cotswold stone – Gloucestershire towns and villages

Stratford-upon-Avon and Tewkesbury – Minsterley, Eardisland,Worcester and ClunThe Peak District – West Midland canals – Coalport and the Severn at Ironbridge – The M

Chatsworth, Bakewell, Cromford and Monyash – Dovedale – Lincoln: cathedral and castleSouthwell, Laxton, Sherwood and Eastwood – The Vale of Belvoir

East Anglia Standing corn at Bentwaters, Suffolk – Blythburgh, Southwold and Dunwich

Framlingham, Burgh Castle and Norwich – The Blyth valley – The impermanent oaks of SuffolkSuffolk fields in summer – Cornfields and village gardens – Harvest fields

Markets and fair at Bury St Edmunds and Halesworth – Cambridge – Ely and the fens

The North Rievaulx and Liverpool – Humber Bridge and Fylingdales – York, Middlesbrough and Whitby

Durham and Dunstanburgh – Consett – Bradford and Saltaire – Dodd Fell and SkiptonMuker and the Pennine barns – Brigflatts, Sedbergh, Dentdale and Hawes Grasmere and Rydal Water

Scotland Ring of Brodgar – Kelso, Dryburgh and Scott’s View – The Black Mount

Edinburgh: Grecian and Georgian – Glasgow – Stirling and other castles – Fife and CulrossGlenfinnan to Mallaig – Orkney: Maes Howe and Stenness

Orkney:Yesnaby, Skara Brae, Kirkwall – Glencoe

Ireland Donegal peat and Donegall Square, Belfast – Dublin – Glendalough – Coppinger’s Court, Co. CorkThe coast of West Cork – Myross, Drombeg, Skibbereen – The Rock of Cashel and Dunluce Castle

The Mourne mountains – Belfast and Derry – The coast and mountains of Donegal

Index

The London people come to look at is not the one that isnice to live in.Anyone surfacing in Piccadilly Circus,Leicester Square or Oxford Circus will sense this instantly.London does not put its best face forward: its appeal lies notso much in its rather unspectacular set-pieces as inunsuspected delights like the riverside with its dockyardremnants, or the village streets of Hampstead, or the vitalityand colour of the street markets.There are many sights tosurprise one: the southern facade of the British Museum;Kenwood; the city churches and the West End pubs;Whitehall from across the lake in St James’ Park. Nowhereelse is an earlier age of elegance so well preserved as inBelgravia or in parts of Holland Park, or so poignantly as incorners of Bloomsbury and Kensington.Yet the Londonpeople mostly live in is absolutely different: a quitedistinctive place of Georgian and Victorian terraces andtheir more aspiring yet less elegant successor the suburbansemi, interspersed in recent times with new housing areasmost conspicuous for their tall blocks.

The characteristic London building materials are yellowstock brick blackened with age and shiny cream plaster.These are the materials of Kensington, Belgravia,Bloomsbury and Camden: they make a perfect backgroundto the fresh yellow-green of planes and limes bursting intoleaf in April and May.Another familiar material is blackenedPortland stone; but the intense textured contrasts of black

and white acquired in sootier times are being cleaned off,to no benefit pictorially. Brilliant baroque contrast givesway to raw greyish white.

Everywhere, hotels, conference centres and specialprovisions aimed at visitors are replacing the interestingthings they come for. In the ten years since the marketclosed, Covent Garden has changed from a fascinatingworking area into a splendid kind of stage set. In the sameperiod, Soho – always ripe – has gone off.The City hasturned upside down: the Wren churches keep their headsdown in the new City much as the old palaces upstreamnow lie in the shadow of new commercial ones.

My studio window overlooks a scene whose very jumbleis unique to London: glimpses of Parliament Hill Fields,the Caledonian market, St Pancras and the Barbican; earlyVictorian chimney pots and TV aerials; an ugly butanimated council depot; a great red-brick doss-house andthe cliff-like walls of a big bingo cinema. I can see the stallsof a street market that still fills a genuine local need andnot merely a taste for wandering about; and look up to asky where there are herons and kestrels as well as jumbo-jets. It is a laborious city to get in and out of, itsunderground under-financed and its buses slow andclogged by traffic, and it is very expensive for anyoneactually to live in it; yet it is still the only city where Iwould want to spend my life.

Bath and Bristol

Bath seems elegant and historic, and if it is a bit complacent, it is for excellent reasons.Nowhere in England are there such amplybillowing stone curves, such rich black-and-ochre textures, such a wonderful spread oflawns and terraces, grand pillared crescents andexquisitely detailed individual houses.Thegrand manner embraces not just the greatsweep of a curving facade but the iron railings,

the paving-stones and the stone setts in thestreet. Royal Crescent is the most spectacularexample among many. But Bath has sufferedbadly during redevelopment; indeed there issomething of the theatrical, or at worst thefilm set, about the way the Georgian splendourcan give way round a corner to rebuildingboth over-cautious and third rate: no amountof Bath stone can redeem the mediocrity ofsome of this crummy rubbish.

In Bristol one can find the same swirling

lines. Clifton shares many of Bath’sarchitectural components – terraces, crescents,cast iron and warm stone – but it has a steeperhillside and a quite different style, moreindividual and more down to earth.

Here the mews are at the front, a floordown, giving the impression that the terracemight be standing on a quayside.The Bathcrescents put their best face forward: theirmews are hidden decorously out of sightbehind them, in places altogether more

higgledy-piggledy than the grand facadeswould suggest.

Bath’s railway and canal make a minor butsignificant contribution to the city’s elegance.Their passage through Sidney gardens isenhanced by fine bridges, tunnels and walls. InBristol the railway traveller arrives, not as inBath through a park, but as if through a castiron Gothic cathedral, Brunel’s Temple Meadsstation.

Iron Bridge and steel landscape

Seen from close by, the Iron Bridge looks lesslike architecture, more like lumbering ancientmachinery that has seized up.Yet the railingscombine protection and delicate decoration,giving one something one’s own scale to enjoyas one crosses.All still looks as well as it didwhen it was newly cast, and the landscape isthe prettier for it.

Each journey up the M seems more like anightmare.The grubby Birmingham landscapeseems ever more densely-enmeshed inconcrete, wire and girders; the traffic all roundone thickens more and more into a sort ofhigh-speed clot of vehicles from which nonecan escape without being crushed. Ugly andgraceless gantries bark out vital instructions sotersely and bleakly that one has barely time tomeekly take them in; the ugly crumbling road,the battered barrier fencing, the steel fly-oversand the light plastic cones that protect onefrom oncoming traffic are all clad already inblack greasy grime; one senses with a sort ofdespairing amusement the wasted energies ofall the other people also negotiating this drearyyet demanding obstacle-course.What could beuglier and more graceless? And where do wego next?

A vanishing landscape

Suffolk cornfields like these near Blyford, theirreceding hedges strung with splendid lines oftrees, seem as reassuringly timeless as aconstable landscape. But they are surprisinglyvulnerable to progress, and bit by bit they aredisappearing. Small fields hinder big farmmachines, so the hedges go, and few farmerscan afford to plough, sow and harvest roundthe remaining isolated trees.

The Western Dales

The north Yorkshire fells meet the Cumbrianin moorland waste that yet contains severalbeautiful dales – Widdale, Dentdale, Garsdale –with interesting little towns and villages. Dentis remarkable for its exquisite scale and itswall-to-wall cobbles, Sedbergh for the curiousshut-off privacy of the several distinctivecourtyards hidden off the main street.

At Brigflatts near Sedbergh is the firstQuaker meeting house built in the North. Itwas begun in by friends who each gave,not money, but materials or their own labour.Previously they had met in each other’s housesor in the open, and simple shelter was theirfirst need; amenities came later, like the oakgallery added in . It is a nice building,modest and purposeful.

In the valley of the Dee and in Barbondaleand Dentdale are many fine farmhouses, oftenwhite-painted as in Lakeland. On the higherground are others more isolated, crumblingand abandoned as small outlying farms havebecome absorbed in bigger ones. Sometimesthese remains have been deserted for muchlonger, and one can step over the lowremaining walls into rooms that are barelymore than a stony ground-plan; it is hard totell if they date from the eighteenth century orhave survived from some more distantsettlement.

Many fell landscapes are enhanced by thefirm and graceful viaducts of the London toCarlisle railway: there are magnificentexamples at Ribbleshead and at nearbyDenthead. Here the great railway arches, atonce rough-hewn and precise, tower overanother earlier arch, of the grass-coveredpackhorse bridge on the drovers’ track fromDent to the market town of Hawes.Thisbeautiful structure is easily missed it standshidden amid mossy boulders and trees behindthe great viaduct.

The road to Hawes passes the village ofGayle standing at the edge of a remarkableseries of waterfalls down stepped limestoneterraces. Hawes itself is a lively town at thehead of Wensleydale packed with farmers’landrovers. Its sheep market is an unforgettable scene.

The west coast

The west coast of Scotland is cut into fromnorth and south by long fingers of sea; the seais filled with broken-off chunks of land, somemere rock fragments, some as big as counties.Its roads are tortuous and slow; places arefurther apart in time than they look on the map. Much of it is trackless moorland,but two railway lines get through: the wild and marvellous line to the Kyle of Lochalsh,through lovely bog and mountain scenery,and the more intimate and elegant WestHighland line to Mallaig, the more southerlyport for Skye, which offers a glimpse of rockylochs and islets, alpine slopes and white sandybeach, and here and there the distant prospectsof Rhum, Eigg and Muck. Road and railwayfollow the same route, dotted with manyreminders of the Young Pretender and ofHenry Ford.