Main entry:

Mount, Harry, 1971-

Title & Author:

A lust for window sills : a lover's guide to British buildings from portcullis to pebble-dash / Harry Mount.

Publication:

London : Little, Brown, 2008.

Description:

374 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Notes:
Includes index.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Introduction. or How I Fell in Love with Window Sills on the Way to School -- 1. The Philip Larkin Guide to Churches -- 2. Through the Portcullis: Confessions of a Castle Creeper -- 3. Norman Wisdom: William the Conqueror and the Round Arch -- 4. Britain Gets the Point: Twelfth-Century Goths -- 5. The First Snobs: To the Manor House Drawn in the Thirteenth Century -- 6. Byron's Mouldering Abbey: Merrie England Gets Decorated -- 7. Myrna Loy's Favourite Style: Perpendicular Gothic -- 8. From Hovel to Bolthole -- A Brief History of Cottaging from the Fourteenth Century Onwards -- 9. A Very Big House in the Country: The Birth of the Country House in the Sixteenth Century -- 10. Material Considerations: What Are All These Places Made Of? -- 11. Inigo Jones the Doric, Jones the Ionic and Jones the Corinthian -- 12. 1666 and All That: Professor Dr Sir Christopher Wren Arrives -- 13. Know Your Mullions: Casement Gives Way to Sash -- 14. The Brideshead Revisited School of Baroque Architecture -- 15. Mr Darcy's Palladian House: or the BBC Location Manager's Guide to the Eighteenth Century -- 16. On the Georgian Terraces, 1700-1830: The Most Popular Building in Britain -- 17. Change and Decay in All Around I See: Eighteenth-Century Ruins and the Picturesque -- 18. Strawberry Hill For Ever: An Eiqhteenth-Century Gothick Romance -- 19. Neo-classicism: Anthony Blunt, MI5 Vandals and the Two Courtauld Institutes -- 20. The Empire Style Strikes Back: India Comes to Gloucestershire -- 21. It's All Greek to Me in 1803 -- 22. Sven-Goran Eriksson and the Birth of the Urban Villa -- 23. Please, Sir, Can I Have Some More Prisons: The Nineteenth-Century Hunger for Porridge -- 24. The Victorians Get Medieval on Your Apse: The Gothic Revival -- 25. Elementary Schools, My Dear Watson: Sherlock Holmes's Favourite Style -- 26. Den and Ange Victorian, and Other Pub Styles -- 27. Ginger Rogers Goes to Arsenal: Art Deco, the Architecture of Entertainment -- 28. A Thousand Years in an Hour: A Stroll throuqh the Architectural History of London -- 29. Last Exit to Pont Abraham: The M4 Tour of British Buildings -- 30. Princess Diana's Walking Guide to Classicism -- 31. Railway to Heaven: The View from the Buffet Car on the Edinburgh Train -- Conclusion: Let the Scales Fall from Our Eyes.

Summary:

Ever wondered why the floors in our terraced houses are different heights? Or what the landscape round where you live looked like before it was built on? And did you know you can date a building by its window sills? A LUST FOR WINDOW SILLS tells us why and how. Harry Mount takes us on an engrossing tour of the nation's architecture, exploring the quirks, foibles and tiny details that make our buildings unique, and revealing the fascinating stories and anecdotes behind them along the way. We see every historic building style in Britain in one hour's walk across London, from the Norman apse of St Bartholomew's in Smithfield to the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing, via Gothic in Holborn, Sir Christopher Wren in the City and the Knights Templar at Temple. A trip up the M4 reveals some of our greatest country houses, while a visit to Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill is a journey back to the Bronze Age. This book is a lively, entertaining and affectionate portrait of our history and the Britain we live in today.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents only

ISBN:

9781408700907 (hbk.)
1408700905 (hbk.)

Subject:

Architecture Great Britain History.
Architecture Grande-Bretagne Histoire.
Architecture
Buildings
Architecture and Planning.
Great Britain Buildings, structures, etc. History.
Great Britain

Form/genre:

History

Holdings:

Location: Library main 269000
Call No.: BIB 200973
Status: Available