You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones, and I'm joined today by Rosemary Hill, a contributing editor at

the paper, whose books include a biography of Pugin, a history of Stonehenge, and most recently

Times Witness history in the age of romanticism. In the last issue of the LRB, she reviewed

architecture in Britain and Ireland 1530 to 1830 by Stephen Brindle, and that's what we're going to be talking about today.

Hello Rosemary and thank you very much for joining me again.

Hello.

So to begin at the beginning, as it were, why is 1530 a starting date for a history of architecture

in Britain and Ireland?

Well, it's the moment just as it were on the brink of the Reformation,

on the edge of the point at which Britain's landscape is going to change hugely. There's

going to be the biggest redistribution of land since the Norman conquest. But at the same time,

you've got this rather sort of prelapsarian world of medieval towns,

apart from London, which was already kind of very higgledy-piggledy,

most medieval towns had retained their ground plan.

So we've got a population which is recovering from the Black Death,

but it's still relatively small.

And there's also been this thing that historians rather sweetly call the Great Rebuilding

going on, which meant that houses were being reconstructed using more brick, more tile.

So people's houses were basically just getting comfier. They were

less draughty. They were more waterproof. You had a lot of medieval towns were on a grid plan,

but not all of them were. And you had a sort of triangle in the middle with a market cross

and a marketplace and probably a big house somewhere on the road nearby.

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