Jonathan Meades

— Place and places have interested me for a very long time, since childhood. The filmwas very much about the origins of that. We lived in Salisbury, and my Dad’s area for selling biscuits went from Marlborough in the north to the outskirts of Bournemouth in the south. Bournemouth is the most enormous sprawl. He didn’t do central Bournemouth but he did the edges and he’d do Blandford Forum, Shaftesbury, Sherbourne, all of the New Forest and Winchester. I used to go with him from a very tender age. He’d park the car and go off to the grocer’s before and tell me to be back there at midday, and I would go off and wander around these towns.

It was a means of alleviating boredom, but after a while I became genuinely interested in what I was looking at. All of this happened without my knowing that in the hierarchy of building types the cathedral was superior to a college, and a college was superior to a hotel, and a hotel was superior to a shop, etc. I didn’t know anything about this, I just looked at things. Some things fascinated me, other things didn’t, and that weirdly has remained. I never really set out to write about architecture.

The magazine where I cut my teeth, Books and Bookmen, was a highly eccentric magazine whose only equivalent today I suppose would be Literary Review, but even the Literary Review is much more orthodox. Books and Bookmen was very, very odd indeed. I’d been writing for it for about three years when Frank Granville Barker who edited it sent me the catalogue of what was a very important exhibition at the V&A called Marble Halls. It was the first really big popular exhibition on Victorian architecture, and Victorian architectural drawings and models and photographs. Something clicked. My journalism up to then had been literary journalism, but this was rather different because I knew an awful lot about what I was writing in literary journalism. I knew a lot about Borges or Robbe-Grillet or Kurt Vonnegut or Nabokov, but I didn’t really know a great deal about architecture save what I’d taken in.

Around then, a friend of mine inherited a house in Charmouth, near Lyme Regis. We drove there in my car with our respective partners, and when we got to Charmouth she said, ‘It normally takes two and half hours, but this has taken five hours.’ That was because I kept diverting us to go look at something, or to show them something. On that road there’s Milton Abbas, a kind of perfect, planned village of the eighteenth century, and Blandford, which is an extraordinary place. The whole town burned down in 1731 and these two brothers called the Bastards rebuilt it. They took their cue from two grand houses that had been built very recently, one by John Vanbrugh, the other by Thomas Archer. They thought, ‘That’ll be what the fancy people like up in London, and we’ll do that here!’, and they did, and it’s great. I hadn’t realised what an ingrained habit this was, just diverting all the time to look at things.

I did have some architectural books that my mother had had from the thirties, because she started to train as an architect, and then gave up, which is just as well for the fabric of Britain. She designed two houses, one for her sister and one for herself and my father.