Customer Rating: 
Summary: A coffee table book
Comment: It is big! Wonderful pictures that dominate the text far too much. It would look great in any waiting room or high class hotel. It will probably inspire you to go on a visit, but I doubt if many people would take it to the cathedral or even into the hotel bedroom.I use it as a reference as it is includes all cathedrals. My preference as a field guide is 'Walking the Cathedral Cities of England' by Rowland Mead.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Do we really need yet another book on English cathedrals?
Comment: If you're asking yourself the above question, then I'd have to say yes. Granted, 'The English Cathedral' is going to be jostling for space on what is already a very full bookshelf of publications on this subject, but Tim Tatton Brown does have something new to add.The biggest difference between this book and the vast majority of its competitors is its comprehensiveness. As well as all the great medieval cathedrals you'd expect to find within its pages, Durham, York, Lincoln, Salisbury, Exeter and the rest, the 5 so-called Henrician foundations, the Victorian and twentieth century 'parish church cathedrals' and those celebrated 'modern' edifices at Truro, Liverpool, Guildford and Coventry, many readers may be surprised to find full coverage of England's 18 Catholic cathedrals. And not just tucked away in an appendix, a few lines describing each, we are talking similar depth of coverage to the C of E buildings and similarly high quality colour photography.
Pugin's Neo-Gothic Catholic cathedrals at Birmingham, Newcastle and Nottingham may already be familiar to some readers, likewise the Byzantine splendours of Westminster and the modernist icon at Liverpool, but what about Clifton or Shrewsbury, Portsmouth or Southwark? For many, I suspect the pictures and descriptions in ‘The English Cathedral’ will be a real revelation of this largely overlooked aspect of England’s architectural heritage. Did you know, for example, that there's a late 20th century Wren-style Catholic cathedral somewhere in Essex? Buy this book and all will be revealed!
Apart from the Catholic aspect, the rest of he book may not offer anything startlingly original (although the page of maps of historic and present diocesan boundaries is a novelty) but it does make an excellent, up-to-date introduction to its subject and the photography, as already indicated, is first-class.
