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Six of the best: Old iron Since my last two posts – one on a house clad in corrugated iron in Mordiford, Herefordshire, one featuring pages from a catalogue of Edwardian corrugated-iron buildings, I thought I do one of my very occasional ‘round-up’ posts, offering links to ‘six of the best’ of my corrugated iron posts. These are just some of my personal favourites among the various buildings I’ve shared that make use of the wriggly tin in some way. I hope they combine variety and local colour in a way that pleases my readers. Here are the links: A colourful small railway building A plotland house near the Severn A favourite garage on a bendy road near the Welsh border A rusty barn roof A bizarrely curving ‘hot tin roof’ A charming rural church The church, at Rodley in Gloucestershire, is a personal favourite. It’s shown in my photograph above, which I took when I returned to find the laburnum in flower, which it was not when I first discovered the building.

Reminder Last weekend I was due to drive down to Somerset to teach a course on Tudor and Stuart architecture. Somerset was one of the parts of Britain to receive the rare ‘red weather warning’, so the course was cancelled and none of us got stuck in the snow. One of the things I was going to talk about was the impact of the Great Fire of London and the fact that very few timber-framed buildings have been constructed in the capital since 1666. Here is one exception, the hut in the middle of Soho Square. It might look like a survivor from the pre-fire era, but in fact it was built in 1925. Its original purpose was to disguise the entrance of an underground electricity substation, built for the Charing Cross Electricity Company. The substation is no longer active and the subterranean space was used as an air-raid shelter during World War II. Now the building is a gardeners’ hut, full of spades and the like. I’m not sure how the upper floor is used. This little building feels visually gene...