Simon Bradley is the editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides. St Pancras Station is published by Profile.
Moulded in terracotta relief above the door of an austere building in Shoreditch, on the northern fringes of the City of London, is an arresting motto: E Pulvere Lux Et Vis. The ‘light’ and ‘power’ were electrical; the ‘dust’ that was burned to generate them was the refuse from the surrounding streets. Twenty thousand tons of this fuel, most of it horse...
The railways may, as Simon Bradley writes, be ‘a uniquely discrete system: a physically separate domain ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws’, but you seldom hear ‘I love the railways,’...
The first three volumes of The Buildings of England appeared in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain. The last, Staffordshire, was published in 1974, on the eve of the miners’ strike...
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