Hello and welcome to the first episode of the Lives of Stonehenge, a new short podcast series from the London Review of Books with me, Rosemary Hill.

Over the next four episodes, we're going to be looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge

over the past hundred years or so, what it is, what it means, why it matters, and indeed how

it's come to matter so much in the story of Britain. I want to ask you, as listeners, is just if you can imagine,

you don't know anything about Stonehenge, which won't be difficult because nobody really

does know very much about Stonehenge, or at least they know very little that is uncontested.

We know where it is. We know that it stands nowadays on a triangle of land about 46.9 acres.

And I want you to imagine approaching it across Salisbury Plain,

maybe on a sunny day about 400 years ago, so there are no cars,

and you're wondering what to make of this vast, peculiar structure.

You can obviously go right up to it.

You can touch it, you can climb over it, whatever you like.

There's no rope keeping you away, and there's no ticket booth.

And this will help you to get into the frame of mind for our first episode,

in which we're looking at what two of our greatest architects,

Inigo Jones and John Wood, thought about Stone Stonehenge and how those thoughts in turn were

reflected back onto the British landscape and onto our towns and cities. If there's one thing we can

say for certain about Stonehenge, it is that it's a piece of architecture. John Somerson, the great

architectural historian, in fact called it the soul of architecture

laid bare.

And what I mean by that is that it's a building aesthetically conceived.

Whatever it is, and nobody knows quite what it is, it's not just functional.

...