Review: If Walls Could Talk

by Lucy Worsley, Faber and Faber Buildings are about more than the materials they’re made of and the architectural styles they embrace, they’re about the people that live in them and the way they use them. This is something Lucy Worsley understands and, in her book If Walls Could Talk, An Intimate History of the…

Read More

Renovation tale – Part 9

This is the tale of my first major renovation project some years ago… The reassuring purr of the mixer has been playing a background tune all morning. True it’s been interrupted by hammering, the metallic whiz of the circular saw and the screech of the drill but, by and large, the hours have passed with…

Read More

Old houses and The Green Deal

Good to see a letter in The Times yesterday on The Green Deal, albeit under the slightly misleading headline ‘Insulation is bad for old buildings’. Signed by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, Kevin McCloud, The National Trust, Loyd Grossman, Chair Churches Conservation Trust and many other organisations and individuals from the conservation…

Read More