Product Description

‘A hymn to good architecture, an ode to authentic domestic interiors … buy, beg, borrow or steal a copy to keep in the car. No other book (apart from his 1,000 Churches) will prompt so many joyous detours’ Christopher Hudson, Daily Mail England’s houses are a treasure trove of riches and a unique, living record of the nation’s history. Simon Jenkins’s magnificent guide selects the finest palaces, mansions, halls, castles and cottages throughout the land, from the stately to the humble, in a glorious celebration of English life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36071 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1088 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Simon Jenkins's England's Thousand Best Houses is a sumptuous, encyclopaedic treasure trove of a book--an indispensable guide for anyone who has ever enjoyed nosing around any of England's great abbeys, halls, castles and homes. Retaining the winning, easy-to-use, format of the wonderful bestselling England's Thousand Best Churches Jenkins has sought out, county by county, the most beautiful, arresting and historically important "houses" (anywhere that anyone has ever laid their head) that we have to offer. From firm family favourites such as Windsor Castle, founded by William the Conqueror; the stunning grandeur of Elizabethan mansion Speke Hall; the triumphal Baroque of Blenheim Palace through and onto smaller, more intimate discoveries such as West Yorkshire's Red House (built for a Georgian cloth merchant and home of Charlotte Bronte's best pal Mary Taylor); and the fine Restoration plasterwork in Hereford's Holme Lacy House.

Jenkins continues a project that Nicolas Pevsner so successfully initiated in his ranging architectural classics. Each entry has a pithily sketched history and is marked out of five and the book is replete with Quintin Wright's excellent photographs: a copy for the home and another for the car would not be outlandish. Inevitably, lovers of England's architectural heritage will have wished Jenkins had included--or written more fulsomely on--their own particular favourite but disagreeing with Jenkins never takes away from the pleasure of this lovely, informative brick of a book. If you are going to give this as a gift, make sure you ask for a copy in return. --Mark Thwaite

Review
'This wonderful book makes me want to take a year off ! and plunge off into what Jenkins has memorably described as "the theatre of our shared memory' - Adam Nicolson, Evening Standard 'This is the perfect book to have beside your bed or on the back seat of your car ! Jenkins's zeal is infectious. He quite rightly sees England's greatest houses as collectively nothing less than a wonder of the world' - Geordie Greig, Literary Review

About the Author
Simon Jenkins is chairman of the National Trust and one of Britain's most prominent journalists. He currently writes for the Sunday Times and the Guardian and has edited both the Evening Standard and The Times. He is the author of many books on politics, history and architecture, including most recently Thatcher and Sons. He was knighted in 2004 and made chairman of the National Trust in July 2008.

Customer Reviews

Simon Jenkins does it again
Another wonderful book from Simon Jenkins to follow up the excellent Thousand Best Churches. Sumptuously illustrated with colour photographs, it gives you succinct but informative reviews of each of the properties covered, from the humblest of dwellings to the grandest in the land. Broken down by counties, with a top 100 and a star rating system, this is an indispensable travelling companion. Sensibly he does not include opening times etc - these are easily found from the National Trust, English Heritage etc. You may not agree entirely with his selection - although I could not detect the omission of any personal favourites - but if you want discover and explore our rich heritage this bedside book is for you.

More description less polemic
While Mr. Jenkins taste is impeccable in terms of selection, his latest book dangerously overstates his personal preferences for restoration over conservation. This was an implicit problem with his “Thousand best Churches” where he willy nilly suggested the replacement of statuary to niches and the re-application of missing heads to civil war defaced church ornaments. In “England’s Thousand Best Houses” Mr. Jenkins begins to suggest restoration policies for whole houses (e.g. Sutton Scarsdale, Derbyshire). Whether his view of the way in which our heritage should be preserved is right or wrong, it should not be allowed to bleed into his descriptions, which it does; all too often. His opinions regarding the houses themselves are both trenchant and entertaining in the best tradition of Pevsner and it is this which recommends the book highly.

Quite good
I think the book is good, but perhaps a little over-ambitious in its scope. Unfortunately, houses do not lend themselves to such a neat compendium in the way that churches did in his previous book. Nonetheless it is a useful reference for knowing more about some of the more hidden gems. Disagree over Oxbridge colleges, insofar as they are essentially secular residences - I think the book would probably be incomplete without them.