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UK Travel - England's Thousand Best Houses
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List Price: £18.99
Our Price: £13.29
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Manufacturer: Penguin
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 728
EAN: 9780141006253
ISBN: 0141006250
Label: Penguin
Manufacturer: Penguin
Number Of Pages: 992
Publication Date: 2004-10-28
Publisher: Penguin
Studio: Penguin
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Editorial Reviews:
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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
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A beatifully designed compendium of England's 1000 best houses
Comment: This is a beatifully illustrated and brilliantly-written guide to England's best houses. Navigation is made easy through the useful organisation of the entries by county, and the excellent index and contents pages. Another nice feature is the ratings, where houses are given stars out of five, as if they were films, albums or books. These critical reviews are unfailingly objective and reliable, too.
The book doesn't just cover houses open to the general public (for example, Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire) and also covers such things as the occasional ruined castle (for example, Brougham Castle in Cumbria). In fact, what it does and doesn't cover is probably the only weakness of the book, becasue it seems a little random at times.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Quite good
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: More description less polemic
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Recommended with one reservation.
Comment: I bought this book as a present and it certainly looks like a nice gift. However, I was disappointed that this book only lists houses that are open to the public. Therefore, if you are looking for the houses of the rich, famous and well-heeled you are probably going to be disappointed. Otherwise, recommended.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Simon Jenkins does it again
Comment: 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.
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