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Christopher Wakeling, Chapels of England: Buildings of Protestant nonconformity Published by Historic England The next of my short series of pre-Christmas reviews is of a book that plugs a major gap in English architectural history: a general account of Protestant chapels and meeting houses... The architecture of England’s Protestant churches (from Methodists to Unitarians, Baptists to Quakers) has been a difficult subject to get to grips with. There has been plenty of research (the old Royal Commission on Historic Monuments saw to that) but there is such diversity of denominations and architectural approaches that it is hard to see patterns or get a sense of overall development. In addition, nonconformist churches, unlike so many Anglican churches, are not often open, so casual visitors rarely get inside them. Christopher Wakeling’s new book does much to remedy this situation, giving a clear, wide-ranging, and nuanced account of dissenting architecture in England, from the beginnings ...

Oh, pioneers! or, Ten years a blog At the Amara Awards ceremony* last year, one of the other bloggers I was talking to asked how long I’d been blogging. ‘Over nine years now,’ I replied. ‘Nine years?’ she said. ‘Then you’re a pioneer!’  And now, in July 2017, it’s ten years. Ten years, a thousand posts, hundreds of thousands of readers. I didn’t feel quite like a pioneer when I started out. The Resident Wise Woman had just begun blogging about our parallel life in the Czech Republic . There were quite a few other blogs around too, focusing on everything from politics to recipes, but not too many design or architectural blogs, and nothing doing quite what I wanted to do. The architecture blogs, for example, were most often about new architecture, and many blogs were just unadulterated opinion, much of it highly critical of whatever the blogger was writing about. I wanted to do something different – to be more appreciative, to cover historic architecture, to highlight buildings that ...