Item condition

Ships from

GBR View shipping times

• £16.14
• 

An affectionate and unabashed celebration of englishness from one of the nation's most popular poets (Hardback)

Item condition

Ships from

GBR View shipping times

• £16.32
• 

This mint, First Edition, HARDBACK, John Murray, London, 2009, has a mint, unclipped dust jacket that is now protected in a clear acid-free slipcover. The cover is scarlet boards with silver lettering to the spine. The book size is 5.5” w x 9” h with a map, a chronology, an index and 304 pristine pages on good quality paper. ISBN 1848540914. You can hear Betjeman's voice when reading the book! “ Bath is, I suppose, the only town in Britain whose fame, prosperity and beauty depend entirely or almost entirely, on Georgian architecture. And the story of how that came about I'm going to tell you. But before I do so, I must tell you that whenever I look at an old building in England (and Bath's full of beautiful old buildings), when I see a particularly beautiful one, a sort of evil voice comes into my ear of a developer coming down from London who says, 'Um, ah well, Mr Benjamin, it's all very well for you to speak about old buildings: you don't have to live in them, do you? ' And then he'll put forward falsely humanitarian views, you know, he'll say, Well, that's absurd, having a room of that capacity, cubic capacity, today: far too big, ' meaning he wants to take it down and build a lot of square boxes and cells for us to live in, so as to get a fat rent out of the site. But oddly enough, in Bath, in an age of real civilisation, it was a developer who started the story I'm going to tell you; and the only portrait of that developer is here in Bath or at least it's a copy of it, of John Wood of Bath. And there he is, in a public house in Bath, on the corner of Quiet Street, where I'm standing. John Wood arrived in Bath from London in 1727. He found a Somerset cloth town on the banks of the Avon. He was in the building trade but he'd heard there was money in the place. There was a fellow called Ralph Allen running a post office and making £12, 000 a year. The Avon was to be made navigable and Bath to be turned into a port, and indeed in 1800 it was. And Bristol was linked through Bath to London by water through the Kennet and Avon Canal and it starts here in Bath. But what John Wood saw he didn't much like: just a typical country town clustered round an abbey. Old roofs and narrow alleys. And a voice inside me hears someone saying, 'Most unhygienic. ' Yes: but wait and see what Wood dreamed he would make of Bath. Though he was a speculative builder, he was a romantic and an architect. People came to Bath to take the water. The baths were Roman in origin and Wood decided to build a new Rome here in Britain. The Abbey there seemed dull and new; he'd design a Roman palace, such as he'd seen in Grosvenor Square. There's his design for Queen Square, Bath. It looks like a huge country house but when you come to look closely you see a whole row of front doors along the ground-floor storey. Queen Square, Bath, must be the first terrace in the world built to look like a single house. And this is Wood's South Parade, Bath. It was meant to look out on a Roman forum. Wood had never been to Rome but he'd seen old prints of it and he wanted to build a forum in Bath, but this dream was never realised. The houses he designed now look instead on to a car park and empty space. But another dream was realised. Up the hill from Queen Square, John Wood was going to have a Roman colosseum from which the invalids who came to Bath would be able to watch performing animals, but when he came to build it, it was much smaller than the original one in Rome … ” ( pg. 230 )

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £18.01
• 

NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Brand new item.

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £19.42
• 

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £20.30
• 

For more than half a century, Betjeman's writings have awakened readers to the intimacy of English places--from the smell of gaslight in suburban churches, to the hissing of backwash on a shingle beach. Betjeman is England's greatest typologist: whet...

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £21.12
• 

Brand new book.

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £21.39
• 

Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark. -Great Buy! -100% Satisfaction Guarantee.

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £21.40
• 

An affectionate and unabashed celebration of Englishness from one of the nation's most popular poets.

Item condition

Ships from

GBR View shipping times

• £21.68
• 

Please note that deliveries to addresses in the UK and Europe will be in 4-14 business days. Other countries should refer to Alibris standard times. ISBN10: 1848540914.

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £22.78
• 

DISPATCHED FROM UNITED KINGDOM. NO EXPEDITED SHIPPING! Please note orders are confirmed immediately and may take 2-3 business days to ship. This processing time is in addition to the shipping time. Please allow 10-14 days for delivery. Brand new item. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: G20091122101337D.

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £22.85
• 

Item condition

Ships from

USA View shipping times

• £23.64
• 

Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 320 p.