 Yes, I can still see that people are joining us. The numbers are creeping up. Got more than 230 people with us tonight, which is great. But I think, yes, that's right. But I think we'll, I think we'll start now because we've got a lot to pack in over the next hour and a half. So good evening, everyone. I'm Mark Hallett, director of studies at the Paul Mellon Centre. And I'm delighted to welcome you, all of you to this evening's book launch Wiltshire, the latest addition to the Buildings of England series, otherwise known known to many simply as the Buildings of England series in recognition of its creator and founder, author Sir Nicholas Pedsner. Buildings of England series was inaugurated in 1951 and published initially by Penguin books. So if you'll have those older Penguin editions. The research and titles were supported laterally by the Pedsner Books Trust. Since 2012, the series has been supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and published with great distinction by Yale University Press. So this evening's speakers, I'd like to say a word or two about the Paul Mellon Centre for those of you who may not know us. The Paul Mellon Centre, or the PMC as we call it, is an educational charity that champions new ways of understanding British art history and culture. We publish and teach and carry out research, both at the physical centre in London where I'm sitting tonight, located at 1516 Bedford Square, just off Tottenham Court Road, and through our online platforms. Our archives, library and library events programme are open to researchers, students and the public. And while much of our activity at the moment takes place online, for obvious reasons, I'm really pleased to say that our beautiful book filled public study rooms currently open to researchers three days a week. Our grants and fellowships programme meanwhile supports institutions and individuals with the research projects, publications, exhibitions and events. In other areas of our work, we promote activities that enhance and expand knowledge about all aspects and periods of British art and architecture. The centre itself which is part of Yale University was founded just over 50 years ago by the art collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon. Do come and visit us in person in future if you can, and please continue participating in our many online events. It's lovely to have you so many of you with us. Tonight, it's my pleasure to introduce Julian Orback, author of the revised 2021 Pesner Wiltshire volume in the Buildings of England series, and Charles O'Brien joint editor of the Pesner architectural guides will introduce us to the challenges and the pleasures of producing this newly updated account of Wiltshire's architectural riches. The Pesner Wiltshire volume builds upon and adds to two earlier editions of the Pesner Wiltshire, the first of which was written by Pesner himself and published in 1963, and the second of which extensively revised by Bridget Cherry was published in 1975. The Pesner Wiltshire freshly revised volumes in the Pesner series. This new edition of Wiltshire is us a palimpsest, carrying within its pages the voices, the thoughts, and the knowledge of three successive scholars, interleaved together in a subtle and apparently part of the great pleasure of reading such a work is a sense of historical depth and richness generated by what can be seen as an especially generous, evolving kind of intergenerational collaboration in which writers such as Julian, reach back and celebrate and share the scholarship of their predecessors, while simultaneously adding new information insights, all of their very own. So no wonder perhaps the Pesner volumes have been celebrated as quote the greatest treasury of English architecture ever compiled. And tonight, furthermore, we will have the added treat of hearing about the stunning photographs taken for this new edition of Wiltshire, which were taken by the renowned architectural photographer James Davis James to will be joining us, following the conversation between Julian and Charles. Now, before I hand over to Charles and Julian, one more or in fact two more things. Now look, this is a launch event. And so you maybe expect me to say this but I'm going to say it anyway. If you're thinking of treating yourself or a friend to a wonderful summertime present Yale University Press is delighted to offer attendees of this evening's virtual launch, special discount price for the new Pesner guide to Wiltshire. You can order your copy or if you order your copy of either Yale University Press website and enter the code, why 2169 I'll say that again, why 2169. You can get the book which is sells normally for 45 pounds. The discounted price of 35 pounds. This offer is valid right through to next Tuesday, the 22nd of June. And if you order from the UK, you'll get free postage and packing to so that's an offer that I don't think anyone can really refuse. The next thing I want to do before I turn over to Charles and Julian is to quickly run through our housekeeping notes. So this is them, and just, just to say that you're automatically muted when you join the webinar, and you can only communicate verbally if the host of we unmute you which can happen during the Q&A session which we'll be having at the end, towards the end of this event. And as I said the talk, the conversation between Charles and Julian and Julian and James will be followed by a good chunk of time for questions and answers. We really invite you to think of questions even as you're listening to their conversation and put them into the chat and the Q&A box. So, as it says here how to ask questions well you can use a virtual raise hand button. If you have a question or coming you'd like to make verbally, but many others like to ask their questions through the Q&A box. So if you just write your question into the Q&A box, I'll then at the end of the conversations, pass those on or share them and ask them of our participants. Use the chat box if you'd like to make comments or if you'd like to let us know if you're experiencing any technical difficulties. The Q&A session will be recorded, but please don't take any photographs of the event. And as with all of our events, any offensive behaviour by any audience member will not be tolerated. Attendees can be removed from the webinar, but the Pesner guides and all those who consume them are incredibly civilised, so I don't expect anything of that kind whatsoever. That's a nice note. I'll pass over to you, Charles, and to James and we will look forward to hearing your thoughts about the new wheelchair. Thank you. Thank you, Mark. Yeah, thank you for that very warm introduction. And yeah, welcome everyone to what's only really the second of our virtual launches. For understandable reasons, we did vaguely hope that the wheelchair might just be spared and we'd have a traditional live launch, but on the other hand, it's also a tremendous opportunity to be able to talk in a little more detail. For those of you who follow us and buy our books and show great enthusiasm for everything we do to be able to talk a bit more of how everything comes about. So this evening, as Mark said, Julian and I are going to be in conversation as editor and author. And so really, the way the first thing is to is looking back to 1963 and the first paperback edition of Wiltshire here in the familiar penguin cover design. Running them to 578 pages now running to over 900 and much larger format which gives you an idea of how much has been expanded on the accounts of the county's buildings. And we recall that it was also the volume that have dedicated to the county of the cottage, referring to the home that he and his wife Lola had near Broadtown from just after the Second World War. And so, and also where near to Cliff Piper where ultimately both of them were to be buried. So, Wiltshire was a county obviously that perhaps the new, at first hand, as a resident. And that's not always the case for revising authors for the series, especially those of us who undertake this work in house. But clearly being intimately acquainted being resident can be an enormous plus and many of our authors over the years have started from the point that they were living in the county and wish nothing more than to be able to take on the revision of their volume. And that does apply to Julian, though he has been there and away and come back, because I think I'm right to say you were there from the mid 1970s through to the 80s. The late 80s, yes. And during that time you helped undertake the relisting survey for for the county. But then went west to Wales where he took up responsibilities for contributing to three of the buildings of Wales volumes and helping to complete that series. And then came back via Somerset and the revision of one of the two volumes originally for that county. And finally, back to Wiltshire and living in Bradford on Avon. So I suppose the first thing I really wanted to ask, Julian is knowing that person had been resident, though he didn't come to write the book until he was 20 had been working on the series for the best part of 15 years. Do you sort of detect in his writing. The engagement of somebody who he knew faces at first hand. It's odd really it's always odd with personal because there are these sudden moments where you feel he's, he's right there, and then quite often he passes through a place, and you think, that's not a lot. He's a bit of a bidderstone very pretty village. He says it's got a green and a pond, which is, it's kind of typical and that that sort of line of need not detain us long does happen quite a lot so in a sense there's always first is personal, the architectural kind of thing to describe a and it's, it's hard to see him saying, stepping out of line or stepping out of his, his, his chosen line I suppose that's the way, and you go to the village where he lived. He was born in this small town and you had a Victorian church, and you go to the village where he's buried, which is the parish abroad time and clip by part. And there's a serious and enthusiastic description of the church he loved one of the monuments in there. And actually that monument has that's one of the moments when he does get he gets momentarily really excited, and it's about this thing where the tools of the trade are displayed at the foot of the monument to a carpenter who made a fortune. And there is a slight sense that that he looked at that several times and of course now he's just outside the church in the church. So yeah, I suppose one always has a feeling that by the 60s because he was so busy that there was a sort of hurry and that he had to cover the ground and that the methodology was well established so some of those sort of personal touches had to take second place in a way. But of course I mean which is is a is a big and it's not by me it's the biggest county in England but it is large, and it's very packed. And so it's perhaps understandable that there isn't time for for your sort of eulogizing. But I mean how would you come into it now. I mean how do you characterize the county. It's always I mean everybody has always been struck by that kind of rolling landscape that which is essentially the landscape of the chalk, which I mean it's it is unforgettable, but of course it's also the landscape of Sussex and other chalk counties. But the nice thing about Wiltshire is has always been that it's the county of chalk and cheese the two contrasts and the flat veils and the rolling down and the typical qualities that that that everybody, everybody comes back with. I find it's a county of hidden spaces to I mean one can get on the top of the downs and think nothing is hidden the landscape rolls on to the sky, and then you find that there's a dry valley that drops in front of you. If it's more growing the area around that it's full of the gray weathers that the sleeping stones the sarsens just lying there, completely magical, and often miles away from anywhere, anywhere, which is an unexpected characteristic of the county, because it's relatively underpopulated for its for its size. And of course it has a distinct effect, I mean the geology of the county has a distinct effect on the, the building stones and materials that are used. Yes I came. I've always loved building stones and and and Wiltshire is very rich and one has to say from the beginning that there's, there's a wonderful amount of brick and timber framing in the areas where there isn't rich building stone. So in the Northwest you've got what is known as as bathstone but the eolithic limestone from quarries and mines outside bath which basically supplied the bathstone, going right down to the the wonderful sort of creamy green of the Tisbury stone of the south now known widely as Chilmark, actually if we go back one down in the south you get this, this thing which is really very special which is the contrast of the Tisbury which is the white or the creamy color here, and the green sand which is the checker here is the doorway at Dermford, where probably for the first time in British history the shuttlecock of badminton is displayed in architecture waiting probably another eight centuries for someone to invent the bat to hit it with. And then you get very odd inliers or almost people put things coming in from the edges so that Wiltshire actually has a tiny bit of the new forest next. And on the church tower at downtown there's this strange chocolatey stone, which is known down there as heathstone, probably has a better geological name, in fact it's in the geological introduction which as I'll get is did really really succinctly and nicely contrasts, but that that strange brown means that you can walk into a church, and you'll get the brown contrasted with the Tisbury cream. You can go outside or even on the one you're looking at and you'll see the flints contrasted with the brown, and so on and right right across the county you'll find interesting contrasts of building stones. So in the case that you don't still need things identified, not everyone has has actually managed to identify all the stones I mean ages ago that even working on things now. Yes, I mean the Momsbury Abbey is wonderful because I had the, I had the assistance, and he died in 1999 but the book is dedicated to him and to others I'll mention in a moment. The son of a wonderful geologist studied the greater light, and the interior of Momsbury Abbey which appears to be of that, that type is is kind of interestingly whitish, compared to say the, the more golden colors that we sort of associate with Bathstone, and it was Desmond who who identified the Momsbury quarry as being just outside Sherston, and you know he found it as he always found things by diligent footwork and pushing aside brambles, but I don't think anybody had actually had actually identified it before him. If we've talked about some landscape, then there's obviously the thing that probably is most people's abiding impression of Wiltshire we touched on this earlier and here is the cover star of the new volume. And in fact Stonehenge is oddly enough, one of the cover stars that has come back more than once because it was the dust jacket of the first hardback edition of the first edition. It's not displayed by the stones at the certainly important Avery stone circle. But I mean, I think that's probably partly because of the way people are introduced to Wiltshire as a visit to stone and that the presence of antiquity is incredibly important in its in the county. It's something that grows on you in Wiltshire and I was lucky that I did the volume a long time ago for Pembrokeshire, which has the same feeling that stone grows out of the landscape and of course everybody and I knows that there's a fairly blue stone within the circle of Stonehenge so the two are intimately linked, but it's that that thing of finding something of incredible antiquity and incredible mystery in an open landscape. I mean, the way that the downland is just stayed so open and I mean luckily we've closed one of the roads next to Stonehenge and I know that Avery has a road right the way through it. But nonetheless you can walk you can stand in the middle of these things and just feel that you're you are way way out of time. Well, Tim Tapp and Brian said to me that the one of the things that is very rarely said about Stonehenge and I unfortunately didn't say it in the book because he said to me too late is that that it's probably the first piece of architecture in maybe not only Britain and Europe in the sense that unlike Avery and unlike the Pembrokeshire stones, each one of these stones is shaped to be to be a fitting part of a single of a single ring and people who know them well will know that there's also mortis and well the equivalent of mortis and tenon joints up there they're all kinds of wonderful things going on that but it's the shaping of that that makes Stonehenge quite quite outstanding. Next. James the only in a moment took the photographs and you can see from this which is the selection that he presented to us of Silbury Hill, which I mean anybody who's driven down the A4 just I don't think one cannot drive past Silbury without a sort of lump in the throat at the kind of moment of how on earth did this come and and how how old is this what is it. And James's photographs. I mean, well they're all to an exhibition of them of the just the previous prehistoric ones for their, their kind of quality of bringing up the extraordinary mystery of the things and I mean that kind of sums up in a way the feeling that that I get from the antiquity of the wheelchair landscape, as best as anything. And the other, the other thing that one feels is that these things that don't change the going coming sort of much more into the present time the other thing that Dorsey's strikingly unchanged about wheelchair are the small towns, and the person noticed how much it was a county of small towns, and that that doesn't seem to be any different now really. No, I mean it is. It's a county with one medium sized town, Salisbury, which is still only 45 odd thousand one large town which is very special and quite different from the rest of the county much much larger Swindon. And then otherwise, we're a whole series of small towns, each of which characterized in some way or other by a marketplace, or a widened high street a sense of, of locus of place, and and some of them very very pretty indeed and this is devices and and if you go up to Cricklade, you can find the, the outlines of an anglo-saxon town a rectangular plan that anglo-saxon town, when you're in devices marketplace and in center of Trowbridge, you'll find a town that grew around a Norman castle. In Mulbury you have this dead straight, wide street, which is on a sort of platform above the river Kemet, dropping down below it's I mean from the bottom you see this really strange kind of geographical levelling out to make, make this high street which does link from left to right but it's not apparent in this photograph. No, no. And I mean I've mentioned towns, when one thinks about how the volumes do expand from the original text, towns presumably account for quite a lot of that expansion but I mean what generally where does all the sort of time and effort go? Well, I mean the expansion happens because there's too much stuff you know rather like the great Norbachevsky we have to get our, our plagiarism in from wherever we can and for me the historic building's lists that come in after Bridget had worked and then after that came the Victoria County history had been going steadily from the, from after the war but really picks up speed from the 1970s. So there's volume after volume of the Victoria County history establishing the baselines parish by parish across the plains. Then the Royal Commission turned out with an office in Salisbury and did a lot of work in Southeast Wiltshire sadly stopped when the office, when the office moved away. But the interesting point I mean by having these two pictures of towns up, the interesting point is that, that when the first buildings lists were issued. For instance was full of Georgian buildings, so two devices, so to almost any Wiltshire town and it's all, we now know it's all re-fronting changing status going on and on up into the Victorian period. And so when you start to look backwards and say well what is this building and you walk in and you're finding timber frames and things going way way back. The picture changed intensely, in fact even the listing which I was involved in back in the early 80s, an awful lot was missed because we didn't have the time or the instructions to go inside every building we looked at. And what's changed things an awful lot more than we than I could ever have imagined is now the business of having proper dating through tree ring dating, and the Wiltshire buildings record in the County Record Office has kind of been the center for a long, long program of tree ring dating that's changed the way we've looked at buildings radically. I mean, to take an early one, we looked, well, we've always thought that the Great Barn at Bradford-on-Avon called the Tithe Barn is somewhere around the middle of the 14th. There's sort of problem in the sense that the middle of the 14th is the period of the Black Death. And tree ring dating was rather irritatingly for this one came out at 1334 to 1379, which leaves the Black Death in the late 1340s right in the middle of it. So we still don't know entirely. But what was really radically, I mean, it wasn't surprising in the end, but tree ring dating tells you things you might sort of have half known but not really put in the forefront so that the equivalent Great Barn also the Abbey of Shaftesbury at Tisbury. But personal had in it, had in the book as being 15th century, because that's what the external stonework looked like. And he wasn't a great man for timber frame. And so he just said it had color trusses inside. In fact, they are enormous crux, not quite as enormous as these ones at Bradford, but still pretty impressive. But what tree ring dating did which was, which was really special is it got 1289 to 1314. So earlier than the Bradford Barn. And what it means which may have happened at Bradford that we still don't know. What it means is that probably there was an enormous timber frame barn, for which all the timber walls were taken down and replaced in stone which is what gives the Tisbury Barn its 15th century look. And of course I mean that that was a shortcoming in in the volumes. Generally in the first editions was this considerable lack of knowledge about traditional buildings that has you say been so transformed. So in a way that's obviously an area where we can do a lot more now and use a revising author can can put these things into the volume and expand people's knowledge about them. What about the set pieces the things which many might think are the sort of unassailable accounts by personal, such as the great churches. Yeah, and Salisbury Cathedral is, you know, it's one of it is one of the great set pieces in the way that person's cathedral descriptions kind of make a series of an unparalleled series. So I had to say and in fact discovered with other people that actually it was really difficult to walk around Salisbury Cathedral with personal in hand without basically becoming exhausted, because person went around it four times once for the exterior, once for the interior, once for the fittings that sustain glass and bits, and then once for the monuments. Well, I sort of reduced it to three by putting the fittings on the monuments together. And then I started to engage with person as criticisms of Salisbury Cathedral. The main ones being that he found the West front which is here in this photograph of 1860, very incoherent in the sense that when you start to try and line up the lines of it. It's horizontalities become odd when you see where they're going across, but the, the, the sense of a great piece of designed architecture isn't really there. I mean, I mean, I kind of agreed with him that that there's a funny kind of what people call a sort of horror of actually a horror of emptiness, so that, for instance, on the left hand side of the big central window. He fills the architect has filled in a little half arch going up and left and right both sides of it, as if something needed to be done to fill that part and if you look over the side that happens elsewhere and there are places where where there's just confusion comes in. There's two towers, they go up, and then they narrow slightly just just inward in order to make them square to make the make the towers work their little things like that. So, in a sense I'm making I had to make it have a discussion with personal take it on take it back and try and try and present that. And with the interior. I mean it's it. I kept on that sense which doesn't does have the kind of wonder of that. That three color contrast, which is always seen as as Tisbury stone and perfect marble, but it's also the fact that those those great drain pipe shafts are black against the unpolished perfect of the main column so you've got that the paler gray and the dark gray. This is wonderful photograph for those of you who don't know souls were cathedral is taken through the well with the added added vantage point of the the 21st century font by William pie, which then gives this extraordinary reflection of the roof which I like very much, and the other thing that he's caught, which is very quite difficult is the late 20th century stained glass at the very far end of the building by Gabrielle law from shot, putting in the prison of conscience window, which you kind of have to wait for the right moment for the glow to come through it often it's too dark to look at. And I mean that's, I mean, the things you've just drawn attention to obviously a sort of typical things that that as a revise you're adding things that have been installed in these churches since the the first, or even the second edition. I mean, perhaps it makes a sort of statement about souls with certainly strikes me as odd, which is to say that it's rich in monuments, but it's not in outstanding monuments and do you feel that that view can really hold in a new edition. I don't I mean I don't think so I think there are some some clearly outstanding ones like it's some of the medieval ones like William Longstay with this absolute beauty of the, the detail of the night stone night on the wooden tomb chest and use 1226 next. And that one, the, you have to just keep looking at the Bishop, that's just a bridgeport died in the 1260s, and there's so much detail it's such a it's a glorious monument. And it's, it also brings I mean historically it's interesting because it brings into souls with cathedral directly the new style of Westminster Abbey, the tracery the detail it just speaks of Westminster and the close connections between between the great churches of that day. And to go on one more. I mean, it's a triumph of Jones is actually to be able to get this whole thing lit. There's most of the time to try and photograph it. The thing is, is, is the tomb of Edward Seymour the Earl of Hartford died in 1621, it's 36 feet high which is as high as the biggest and most grand it's it's the whole period of the Elizabethan Jacobian hubris, the idea that nothing could stop you celebrating who you were who you had been and where you came from. With a tiny nod to religion is not not an awful lot of it on this one it's mostly about about family and of course like all these monuments, it's crowned by the colossal heraldry on top. And when clearly it's a monument of the up there of the quality of the ones in Westminster Abbey and indeed attributed to William Wright is a sculptor who works on several of the Westminster Abbey monuments. And then there's, there's, there's gorgeous Thomas gorgeous. He is the builder of Longford Castle which is a strange triangular building of which, to which everybody has tried to put arcane and our cult and all sorts of of meaning into it and he has this marriage to the very enigmatic Swedish Countess Helena Ulster Snuckenborg, Marchioness of Northampton, well she's the one who is the most interesting we know least about, but she outlives her husband by 25 years. And so this monument is put up when she dies and long 25 years after he did. And on top of it, and this is the extraordinary thing about it is that something is going on to do with polyhedra, as you see sitting on all over them. They, they, each of them have meaning and each one of them needs to be understood as actually having a meaning in within the platonic system of geometry. And at the very, very top of it, we know that's going on because at the very top of it is a dodecahedron, which is the symbol for ether, which is the material of what the heavens are built of in in sort of platonic cosmology. And so it's ether because on that great big sort of globe thing just supporting it is the inscription of Orno from the tomb add ether to the ether. So something really something really really interesting is going on there and also these twisted columns that 1635 I mean that's. It's just after Bernini completes the the great bar the keynote St. Peter's it's just before the porch at St. Mary Oxford. Pretty columns have a meaning to do with Solomon's temple. Solomonic columns as they were known. There's all sorts of things going on there and I haven't even begun to go into the carvings inside the roof. And then I mean no funny ones. The one on the left which is is in Salisbury Cathedral one on the right is not. Person said, well, that it's got a seat seated female figure holding a lot, holding a staff and a liar on the left a bigger and on the left of this on the ground, a curious square slab with the arms of George II in a style consciously antiquated, but I have circa 1700, what's actually going on is the weeping ladies hibernia island, you can tell that because he's holding a heart. And the curious square slab which looked to me like a cast down far back rather oddly rendered in marble is actually tough, even more curious it's tough to work rendered in marble. It's the purse for the great seal of Ireland, because Lord Wyndham was Lord Chancellor of Ireland and I think rather like the American president and his nuclear codes. And I think the purse follows the Lord Chancellor around on his journey should he decide to to seal a great document of state. And I know about it because more of it partly because Catherine used to say, we've been writing about respect, help me on it, but also because exactly the same purse turned up in one of Charles's sorry, buildings, this is, this is the monument to Lord King at Ockham, isn't it. That's right. And you'll see it Lord King's feet is the same dinky handbag. And that's the one that carried the great seal of England and it's the same sculptor and sort of same idea in fact, looking at the two one can understand probably the sorry example is outstanding. And the silver example is, is good. But it's a very good. Yes, and I mean sorry so it has the benefit of being in a sort of setting, especially designed for it as well. Then. There's a moment in sculpture in monumental sculpture where a sculpture for some reason catches personality, and, and they are special and very often they're associated with things like the new sculpture, new sculpture movement at the end of the 19th century. This is the 19th century one and it's the, it's the monument to the scholar Richard Colt Hall, and I think it's outstanding by RC Lucas I don't really very much about. But Colt Hall is seen as it were working over the volumes of his ancient and modern Wiltshire, dressed in a scholar's dressing gown and slippers with a page loosely dropped to the ground, but because his story is one of excavating finding the history of the county, the chair that he's sitting on is a strange thing intended to sort of be reminiscent of Anglo Saxon thrones antiquity. It's, there's a whole. I mean I think it is an outstanding monument, even if Lucas is not, is not, is not kind of known as one of the great sculptors. He was a, he was a sort of curious figure in that he cropped up in the bit of Hampshire, Southern Hampshire that I was working on previously, lived at Chilworth just on the northern edge of South Hampton was clearly exceedingly eccentric and was said to ride around in his later years ride in a Roman chariot. And, but it has a small body of work, but despite the small size reserve is what he did was very good, but he built himself a sort of army house that sadly long since demolished. So, I mean actually in a way that's one of the nice things of the series is being able to, you know, give a profile to these people. Yes. Well I walked into Salzburg Cathedral and I found this which I, I love, this is the monument to the Boer War, or to the Wiltshire man who died in the Boer War and it's one of those pieces of arts and crafts work, where the combination of materials. There's somehow seriousness without, without being mortgaged and without being triumphalist it's that there's something about that that piece of sculpture which is obviously the bullets, it's through death immortal fame so I guess it's the dead soldier, presenting himself to fame but but that's a guess it has that kind of oddly indistinctive arts and crafts movement, but it's made by somebody I knew nothing about it's made by Alexander Fisher, who interestingly wrote the book, he taught at the Slade, and he wrote the book on enamelling and you can see that absolutely beautiful blue enamel that's behind the inscription. And, you know, one would, one would like to know, to know more about him, but I think it's, it's an outstanding and unknown piece. The, the, the other thing that seems important that the books have done since Pebs's days to establish particular themes within a within a county. And one of the themes that Pebs was obviously interested in was the impact of the Renaissance in Wiltshire but with with a lot more work having been done in that area since his day. Is there more to say in that the new themes emerge as you've gone along. Yes, I mean the central thing of the three Brutes who turn up in Wiltshire in in the dissolution of the monestrating and collect their spoil. So William Herbert at Wilton, and so William Sherrington at Lakoff, who are all men in in the orbit of Henry VIII for last years they kind of collecting riches. They're doing stuff sometimes quite brutal in the case of Herbert on the Welsh marches, thin fighting and on the Battle of Pinky, Sherrington doing some very desperately dishonest things with the Bristol Mint. But between them they bring to Wiltshire, straight from London and the Somerset House, the House of Protector Somerset, a kind of Renaissance ethos, and they bring it as rich men always did and these are oligarchs really they bring the stuff by bringing the London craftsman down and then the craftsman also from the continent. And the interesting thing that that that emerged very very strongly was this character John Chapman who comes down from London, just around 1550. And it's clear from letters that he worked at all three. This is the two extraordinary tables that he did at at Lakoff in in William Sherrington's tower so this is his studio in on the first floor of the tower. And we've noticed or I'd noticed that one of Chapman's signatures with the funny little brackets that are going around the cornice that which appear on his windows and all over the place. And when we got to Holbein's porch, which was the porch that was once inside the courtyard at Wiltsham House, but was removed and re erected as a garden on the same brackets, pulled up the roof inside inside this porch, and his own work at Longleet has disappeared because there was a great fire in 1567 and Longleet is rebuilt after it by Robert Smithson, great figure of Elizabethan architecture. And the interesting thing is that you get a wave of connections going on so you get French artists coming to work at Longleet Alan Maynard and John Gaunt Maynard sculptor Gaunter carpenter. So when we got Smithson coming Smithson designed these these window base that was a feature of Longleet for a very, very few years they were just like on Smithson's drawing, and they were topped by gables just as a caution court, the mansion on the right. So John Finn changed his mind and just said I want the base to go up a story higher, Longleet to be a flat roof, and the whole thing to be much, much grander in a way, thin and Smithson together make the leap from the gabled house of the Tudor Elizabethan period to a kind of Renaissance palace. This is quite extraordinary but it's so clear in Wiltshire because of the drawings and the connections between Longleet and Caution. So if you look from the photograph of Longleet on the left, to the photograph of the hall in Bradford on Avon on the right, you'll see the old triple gabled Wiltshire house is there, filled with ornament that sort of starts at Longleet, and if you look at the roundels under the windows, they're just the same one to the other, and the cresting above those bays she can't see so well on is just the same as the cresting attributed to the Frenchman Alan Menard at Longleet. And that kind of connection goes on and on and on because clearly the hall is the work of William Arnold who designed Montecute and those of you who know Montecute in Somerset will recognise there's half pipe curves are on the end walls on the windows at the end of the great hall. And the fireplace inside the hall here in Bradford on Avon is replicated in Montecute and in Stockton House in Wiltshire. And so Arnold then becomes a character who goes on and ends up building modern college in Oxford it's a sort of sequence going on. And one of the last things I just mentioned in this kind of way that things are connected as I walked into little cut house right out by by hunger for the extreme eastern end of Wiltshire and suddenly I was looking at plaster work, which was the plaster work of Somerset it was the character of Montecute and of metalcomb court. And I realised that what had happened was that the character from Somerset called Robert Eaton as Stegersie had actually been taken to the far side of Wiltshire, because the patron little coat was the lawyer Sir John Poppin which I tried the gunpowder people. And, and use them. And of course they weren't that many people who could do things you have one at this point when I was looking at houses of this extreme sophistication. The pool of people that you could use was relatively small so one, one, one shouldn't be surprised finding these residents. And I mean it's sort of remarkable that William Arnold, who you connect with all these words, not even a name that even features in the first or second edition is someone who has emerged. There's a merchant he's all over the doorstep volume. And yes it's a completely new new name, I mean, not to note architect of historians but he's come up recently isn't it. And of course the other great thing that Wiltshire really is a key locus is Anglo-Palladianism. And where does that begin or it begins here really doesn't. It begins at Wiltshire. I mean the interesting thing about Anglo-Palladianism or the adoption of palladianism as 18th century style is that what Wiltshire proves, suggests proves probably is that what's actually going on is that the palladium comes into England with Inigo Jones in the 1620s. Inigo Jones builds Wilton house here in the 1630s and it's from this particular house that so much follows. And so that in a sense Anglo-Palladianism could just as well be described as revived Inigo Jones. The connection goes that Wilson burns down Jones' assistant John Webb rebuilds it. John Webb then goes on in just after the protectorate in 1660 to build Amesbury Abbey and Amesbury Abbey has changed but that's what it looked like. And so Chuckle William Benson who's the surveyor general with a very bad reputation who took Ren's job after him in London, Ren's Amesbury Abbey in 1708 and designs for himself a house just not that nearby but also Wiltshire called Wilbury House in 1710. The theory about Benson is that he had a deputy surveyor called Colin Campbell who was probably more than capable of designing everything that Benson ever said that he designed. We don't know but the Rudwell suggested to me that if Colin Campbell could well have had a hand in Wilbury House, I don't know, but what's definite is that when you get to Stourhead, this is Colin Campbell in 1719 just a few years later, a very serious classical house and it's designed for Benson's brother-in-law Henry Hor and allegedly at least according to Benson, well it does, it's almost generally with Benson leaning over the shoulder and giving unsolicited advice so that the connection goes through to Colin Campbell in the beginning of the Palladians. And then when Lord Burlington takes over the leadership of the Palladians, he turns up in Wiltshire with his first major house at Tottenham House now completely enveloped in an enormous mansion of the 1820s, which produces that towered profile which we've already seen at Wilton, so the references back to Jones are there and it's not so much Palladios, it's as much Jones. Then you get John Wood in Bath, he's making Queen Square in the late 1720s, a Bradford-on-Avian clothia says I'd like to enlarge my house and so the left-hand side of this is a pure classical scene through the lens of Palladio by John Wood in 1734. And then the great thing is that it goes around in a full circle, exactly 100 years after Inigo Jones and Wilton, Roger Morris who's worked at Wilton with the Earl of Pembroke building that lovely Palladian bridge fire, turns up at Lydia Park and the details, he's re-facing an older house, but if you look at the details of the towers, the cornerstones and particularly the sweeping out of the windows at the bottom, it's pure Wilton and it's been reused and Morris becomes and isn't it already by then an important figure in English Palladianism. But of course, meanwhile, slightly older traditions were still very much in fashion with a certain class of Wiltshire client. Yes, well, and the thing is that the Baroque, which if you like, is the style of Hawksmore and Vambra, is there and certain people liked it. One of the great generals of the War of the Spanish Succession, the French Wars, had fought at Blenheim and was wounded at Mark, like a general, John Richmond Webb, had this house built in 1711 to 12, he may have designed it himself. He certainly put the bell of Lille in that turret there, he'd captured Lille in 1708 and was inaudibly pleased with the bell that he bought back, so that's why it's there. But it has nothing to do with those experiments in classicism that whether interpreted through Jones or Palladio, it's a kind of thing to do with curves and there's kind of baroque forms. And this one, which could well be a house of someone in the Hawksmore Circle, possibly John James 1716, that the way that curves go into the pediment, especially on the right hand one, Clarendon's heart built for a London merchant 1716. And then this wildly Baroque one 1728 built for an MP. And then you get the clothears of the very, very wealthy clothears, this is Trowbridge in 1730, where that kind of syncopation of the way that the decoration between windows changes from one way to another. An interesting rhythm is taken from the front of Durham Park, which is a house of 1700 and re-used in 1730 by someone who wanted to make a statement on the main street of Trowbridge and a statement that no one would forget. And that's, that's, again, the same time that Palladionism in the sense of John Wood's house at Rafferdon Avon is creeping in, but Thomas Cooper here wanted none of it. And I mean that actually links those sorts of people who were actively building in the towns to something which probably people don't really think about in Wiltshire in their general picture is actually the importance of industry to making the county wealthy. Yes, I mean Pebson's Wiltshire is very good on industry. And that's for one reason really, which is that Ken Rogers, who was the county archives at the time, guided him through it and Ken wrote the book about the Wiltshire Willam terms. And Ken has his distinction of being thanked as acknowledged in 1963, 1975, and also in 2021. He took me around Trowbridge in his old age, but very, very dedicatedly. And so that in a sense I didn't really do a lot to the to the Willamton Times story of Wiltshire that was already there. I felt I needed to celebrate more the great triumphs of transport that in the sense that Kenneth and Avon Canal has these two aqueducts, Avon Cliff and this one here at Limpley Stoke, that are just, they are the great monuments of the canal system of the 1790s. And John Rennie's construction, but the way that they take the canal over the river is just so superbly strong. You won't consider it obviously in Wales would be just as good at a different time. And Pebson oddly said that this is what's tunnel, of course, and it was the greatest tunnel ever made, whether it was the longest tunnel ever made, it was a superb feat of engineering. But the Great Western Railway rather played it down and said that it was a considerable achievement of Brunel or something like that. But the Great Western Railway transforms Wiltshire in all sorts of ways, although it only passes through the north end. I mean Swindon is the railway town and the railway village at Swindon is something that makes the Great Western Railway really quite special that it's very early concern for the housing of its workers. The Great Western Railway, it's from 1953 to 1954 Brunel designing it, and it's absolutely complete. And the great thing about Swindon also is that its origins are greatly respected and this is a very early piece of timescape preservation. Probably in the 60s or 70s, these things were restored when all over the country, these industrial villages were being demolished. The Great Western Railway had this extraordinarily wide ranging medical fund. They had by the 1920s what is supposedly the largest workforce in Europe, 14,000 employed in Swindon. And through it, the medical fund produced a building in the 1890s that had everything from swimming pools to bath to doctors or on shiropodists, dentists, Turkish bath, all of the rest of it put together and as you can see from this is the large swimming bath. It's still in use, but it's a kind of tribute both to the Great Western Railway and to that idea of all around provision that some of the great enterprises could do. And Swindon said that this is one of the inspirations for the National Health Service in 1947. So mentioning Swindon, of course, raises the issue that's common to the volumes, which is that a lot can happen between the first and the third edition in transforming a particular place's importance in the architectural story. So, I mean, very quickly, I mean, Swindon is a wonderfully fascinating place because everything happens so fast. Things that were admired by personal like the Power Moira, Great Hospital, gone completely. Things that were put in by Bridget Cherry, like Norman Foster and Richard Rogers and their wives that did the team four, did team four as they were called then, did the Reliant Controls Building in 1966 gone, gone completely. There's also the kind of extraordinary thing that it's a new town built on an old town, the railway goes, there's the collapse. Swindon sort of reinvents itself as a new town but municipally organized. And this great tower in the middle, the David Murray John Tower, the 1960s sits over a shopping precinct entirely developed by the corporation. I think that's one of the best housing, best towers, tower blocks of its period, but also, I mean, interesting in the sense that the very lowest floors were offices, rest of it was council housing. And I mean, Swindon was superb in that way, it was naughty, it was quite interesting. It's the one place where they, they named the council offices, after what Tyler the leader of the presence revolt in 1381, just at the time when Margaret Thatcher was trying to reestablish the poll tax to be the cause of the initial peasant, peasant revolt. It's a fascinating place. And of course it, it all sorts of things go through that so that there are factories. And then there's the development of what we might call the business part little offices scattered around in a green landscape. And then coming from up from America, even as early as the 70s you get the office campus which was that previous one, which is the huge nationwide thing that's sort of like a small university. And then you get the era of the big shed, which is warehousing. And then once in a while, somebody does something that is just so totally not the big shed, although its purpose is the same. This is Norman Foster's Renault building. And it's a distribution center, so basically as a shed. And it's one of the most remarkable chefs in Britain. And just to finish up with that story of why things fail. I'm not fail they change so fast in Swindon. There's no longer anything to do with Renault in that in the foster building. It's because the children's playground a lot of secondhand ties. And, similarly, the great building, the great factory for Motorola, you remember Motorola, the car radio people. It stands on the top of Swindon and that huge pipe for the services over the top of the building. Absolute landmark on hopes that will never go, but it's not NHS offices and I mean Motorola have just gone. And that kind of speed of change is just, it's just astonishing. I mean, basically that's the interest. I mean, my, my volume for Swindon will be being probably being rewritten even now as things that I've praised will be going. Yeah, it is incredibly, incredibly quick turnover for buildings that generation makes so vulnerable. And I'm going to make an unfair comparison between this photo, Julia, which is yours. And the previous one of the radio centre which is James Davies' photo. So that's the point at which we're going to introduce James to the conversation for the last 10 minutes. And to say that James has been a photographer for now several and I can't actually say how many volumes he has shot the colour photos for. But he went into colour in 2002. And over time they got better and better and that's partly because well it's all to do with the photographers that we've engaged. And James has really, as, as Julian said, it deserves an exhibition in his own right for the number of wonderful shots that he's taken for us. Of course, it's not an entirely straightforward business. James has the benefit of living in box in Wiltshire, so he is closer to hand. But we thought it would be nice way to finish just actually learn a little bit more about how he makes these buildings look so wonderful for us. So, so I'm going to handle the photos. Julian is going to ask James about them. Yes, so the first interesting question is, is how do you decide which particular view is going to work in the books? Those of you who've got the book will realise that this isn't, for instance, the photograph that's been chosen. Well, it all starts, doesn't it, with the defining view, you know. I don't have that wonderful luxury of being able to build up a series of images to help understand the building. You know, I've got one shot. So where you stand becomes absolutely pivotal in defining what you want to say. Added to which you've then got to consider the light, you've got to consider trees and their foliage, the absence of cars, the absence of people. You know, these volumes have got longevity and we don't want to date them. And then there's garden furniture I might have to move. The signage I've got to think about, I mean, the list is endless. So I'm constantly trying to reduce and reduce. So to keep distractions at an absolute minimum. I mean, the great American photographer Arnold Newman had that lovely phrase that photography is 1% inspiration and 99% moving the furniture. So it's also, it's also that tricky dilemma in wanting to achieve both the objective, but also the aesthetic, you know, the understanding and the pleasure. I should add that, you know, I fail all the time. It's not uncommon with the best planning in the world to make a five, six, seven hour trip and not take a single photograph. Failure is a huge part of the process. This is Mulberry College. This is science building 1933 by WG Newton. And it's the straight on view. I'm kind of versed in Walker Evans. So I like the straight on view. But in fact, that is a rare view because I'm standing inside a bank. Right down I'm on a very tall ladder, very tall tripod, and I've got a rare view, but it's not giving us all the information. So Charles, have we got another picture there? Exactly. So here straight away we can see it's got radiating wings. And we can see the lantern on top, all which were hidden in the previous picture. So it's all about that defining view. And then I mean when you set out to take these photographs, I mean, how much in order to actually get there on the day at the time you wanted them and how is that the pre planning must be must be considerable complicated. Yeah, yeah, it is it's it's maps and weather, you know, I'm constantly thinking about light constantly thinking about which way the elevation faces and where I need to be in order to respond to that. We've already seen this I must have made five or six separate trips to get this shot. It's taken at a very specific time of day to get the relief, but also specifically shot in winter to reduce tree foliage. So if I shot that in summer, the tree on the riverbank would completely swamp and conceal information. I think photographing for these volumes is about two main things it's about perseverance, and it's about problem solving. Charles have we got another next slide please. It's coming back to that defining view isn't it you know, I'm standing in a position that emphasizes and includes that great strapping great Doric Cornis. Now, I never know Julia what you're going to write. I've never mentioned before this, but by emphasizing it in the photograph, and you now describing it in the revised edition. I think there's a very lovely unconscious dovetailing of image and text. There's another photograph coming which is, this is the Chinese temple of 1746 to eight in the grounds of Amesbury Abbey and again, it comes down to repeated visits. The lovely owner told me he was going to be taking down a tree that had come down come to the end of its life. And that was certainly going to improve the view. So, I waited another year, waited till the following spring before the woodland canopy really got going. And I had all that lovely silvery light on the water that lovely silvery light on the branches, which I needed to counter on the temple itself. Looking through the camera, a lot of that information failed to register. It just went into deep shadow. So, I've had to light the upper portion of Flint work to balance with the Flint work below. And then I've lit the two walkways, either side with flash, so they become readable to the viewer. And ultimately, I'm always trying to maximize the information, make the building as legible as possible. And I mean that that lighting the question of hidden lighting I mean the one I said we would never have guessed that there was so much hidden lighting in that, in that shop which just looks like a building, just loving its own setting loving its own light, and the other part of the light is yours, which I think is wonderful. And the lighting of Bishop Bridport, I think also had that interesting problems. Yeah, it does. And, you know, I love to use natural light as much as I can. To render the detail, it nearly always results in lighting them. So, actually, very often, it's a combination of daylight and flash. So, we've already met the Bishop of Bridport. The first thing I've done here is to turn off all the cathedral lights. So, I'm just working with daylight. I'm not working with tungsten or sodium or any mixture. And then I've lit the front elevation with lights to either side to bring out that wonderful carving. But the real problem here is how you like the effigy itself. I've got two small lights hidden in the canopy. They're directing light downwards to give the effigy relief and depth. Can we see that, Charles? Have we got the next picture? There you are. Exactly. So, just to add to that, actually, that in the volume, this image probably goes no larger than three by three inches. You can always try and photograph to a standard way you could print it to the size of a double deck of bus. You know, I want that level of clarity. You know, with the image being reproduced relatively small, each square inch really has to learn its crust, you know. One of the things people will notice when they get to the photographs is that James always arrives at a modern building after dark. And the quality of light within the building and evening light outside is extraordinary. But what makes a good photograph of a modern building? How do you decide when to go? Gosh, well, with such heavily glazed buildings, I just think it's really important to show that transparency. You know, if I shot that in daylight, you just wouldn't be able to record that. I mean, you'd almost get reflection. This is Winterbrook House. This is Ken Shuffleworth for himself, 1996 to seven. And it's interesting you bring up the timing Julian, you know, I've actually arrived two hours before Twilight here to set up to set up lights and be in a position where I want to be shooting west where Twilight is going to be at its most vivid. And is there another picture, Charles? I've had to expose for free elements here. I've been exposed to the four meter high concave glazed wall. I've then had to light the two presents with the help of Ken himself. And then I've had to balance those two exposures with the Twilight. And I think there's another example of that coming up. Yeah, good. This is the pavilion at all house 2000 to 2004, but the Chinese American architect IM pay, probably best known for the Louvre pyramid in Paris. Now, I shot this on Midsummer's Eve, and I photographed it with the setting sun. But what I really wanted was the Twilight shot to accentuate the lantern effect. So we could have the next slide. So outside lights were all turned off furniture rearranged. Then I waited and waited and waited for that magical 15 minutes and it is only 15 minutes when the sky reaches that wonderful crepuscular color. And I can balance the exposure of the sky against the warm interior. Take out the North Star picture. Quarter to 11. I think that's a good end for me. It was Paul Mellon. Paul Mellon Center, of course, hosting this evening, who was such a great supporter of IM pay. He commissioned the East building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. It's fitting to have that lovely connection for Wiltshire, with its very own glass pagoda. Charles, is there one more picture? There is, most important. Yeah, here is Persons Grave at Cliff Pie Park by Will Carter, the typographer and lecturer. So yeah, it's a, in fact, it's poignant to note that Lola died the year that Wiltshire was published. And Nicolaus still had many years ahead of him. And what I always feel what a huge, huge debt we all owe to him. So that's where we're going to close. Thank you all very much. Thank you James for talking us through the photos. Thank you Julian for telling us about your work. And Mark, I'm going to hand back to you and you've kindly said you'll handle the questions. Yes, thanks very much indeed. And thanks to all three of you for such interesting conversation and such illuminating reflections and commentary on the buildings and the photographs of the buildings that feature in this amazing volume. We've got a lot of questions to get through we've only got quarter an hour until we end. So I'm going to try and be quite and maybe you could be quite quick on your answers. I've already got 10 questions that are many of very interesting ones. So one question that that John Perverly is asked is about choosing the buildings to illustrate in the new Wiltshire volume. What are the special buildings or monuments, Julian, that had to be left out of the list of 118 photographs that were selected. Dozens I started with I had a list of about 180. And the odd thing actually slightly humbling is that I ended up with an awful lot of buildings that had already been chosen by personal in 1963, you know that were unavoidable, you know they just had to be in. So, yes, it was it was appalling. The whole decision, quite appalling. Another question that's very interesting from Cameron you have. This is really for you James it's it's this issue it says a camera rights is interesting that the photographs are now made timeless. I wonder why this decision was made in the latest volumes I find the pictures in the very old volumes to be fascinating because of the indicators of the years they were taken. Interesting. Yeah, my life would be so much easier if I could include cars and people. There was a picture Julian showed of devices and the market square. I moved. I had four cars removed from that picture. Yeah, it is it's it's the actual edit came down from personal themselves you know. These have got a long life these pictures. So, yes, cars and people aren't desirable. I actually think that the motor car industry is going to change so much in the next 1015 years. Actually the inclusion of cars is really interesting. Here's a note and not a complaint but of a kind of question but with a raised eyebrow in the question I think from Peter Variety, a wonderful work. Why did Yale decide that unlike Somerset Gloucester Oxfordshire, Wilshire did not deserve two volumes. There you go Charles Charles. Yeah, very difficult decision and I won't say that Julian didn't lobby hard for for it to beat two volumes. But I thought we well we felt we could just about get away with it that we could expand to the sort of limit. I think I think you Julian had had this feeling that it was a sort of difficult county to divide in a sort of obvious, obvious way whereas some of the other counties had had offered a solution but it did very difficult. I think we'd always like if it's possible to keep, you know, big county in one even if it is quite hefty but yeah we did struggle over it for some time. At least that's right. Our question I can know that you thought about this quite seriously. Sebastian Warmel has written a question asking, Julian you didn't mention the Gothic revival. Are there any outstanding examples in Wilshire? There are one or two things that really, it's a funny county actually because the Victorian stuff is occasionally very surprising. I mean like Brittleton House which is totally out of the sort of Gothic it's a kind of melons of every possible Victorian style put together over 30 years. But then there's also the Pearson Church at Sutton Vimy which is almost in my mind as perfect a Victorian church that one could find anywhere in the country. There's a church at Marston Macy which is really small but there's some kind of perfectness in its proportion that means that, I mean, in Marston Macy is the almost the remotest village in Wilshire right up by the Thames and definitely worth the effort to go up there. Yeah it's missing on those, you know, those great Gothic houses that are all over Hampshire and into Kent and Sussex. Yes, it's not, it's not, it's variable on its Victorian things. I mean I could find you many a minor masterpiece, cottages that just do it, you know, that's the set piece things not so much. Thanks, Julian. Another question for you. There's a question from Christopher Marston, who asks, Wilch has exams of early mass concrete buildings of the 1860s and 70s. Does the volume include any of these or are they thought to be below the salt? No, I mean I, I have a terrible feeling that I didn't always catch them. But there's the extraordinary story of the Bering family and all cannings, where they decided to experiment with concrete to find out whether it was cheaper. than conventional buildings. And they find out that it was more expensive but went on and built a big farmhouse and two or three cottages there in the 60s. And then there's Malbra College with it's funny with its, when it got with George Edmund Street, that two of their boarding houses are built of concrete. There's, there's, there's a degree of, of interest in it but I have a horrible feeling that, that more will, more will turn up, because well the concrete houses can look like houses that have just been cement renders so that and unless the information is there one can one can so easily miss them. Thank you from question from fact our first question of the evening, what long ago 634 from Colin South Colin is asking this is a question for you James actually it's about Colin would like to know more about the type and amount of post processing that you apply to your photographs. Also asked whether you have a website so you can promote yourself as well but it'd be interesting to he's asking about this issue about the post processing very quickly no website. It's really important post processing. Spend almost as much time in post processing as I do, taking the images. Not unlike working in a dark room with paper and an enlarger. So I try and keep all those rules of printing analog, but in a digital environment. Yeah, you can just be more accurate. Did you quickly than you could in a dark room where you used to burn and dodge, but I would spend hours in a dark room perfecting a print hours so similarly here. Thank you. Thanks very much James. I'm Elizabeth Dobson she asks, I'd like to ask you about coverage of war memorials does I delighted to see the Alexander Fisher tablet. Generally this kind of informational coverage is scanty even conspicuous monuments of little detail on designers and especially makers and this was wondering why this is the case. I mean the thing that's happened of course is that all memorials suddenly there's much more information and people are looking. And I think one of the things that happened with me is I realized that I was looking in the wrong places that very often the plan to positive plans in county record offices didn't include the war memorials, but if you went into the parish council deliberations there's wonderful ding dongs, the glorious one in one of the world to villages, where they debated for reasons completely unknown, whether or not they could exclude the son of one of the larger houses of the neighborhood from the list of names on the war memorial. And, and of course inside that came these are quite really quite well known names, particularly the post first full period like like the Charles Nicholson at Perkin or Ernest Richmond is an architect in Palestine but turns up designing one in Potter, the people did turn up but it took quite a lot of quarrying to find the names and I suspect that often it's disappointing what actually happens is you find that they went to an architect had a lot and a lot of discussion and then discovered that they could get a really quite, quite decently cheap one from monumental Mason, based on the design that had been published by the local government, whatever. So, yes, but I did try. There are more war memorials than certainly than they were before. And I think it's, this is a way that actually the resources that are available on the internet have really changed the whole research series, even in the last 10 years, that ever since things like the British newspaper archive puts these huge collections and local papers on, it is far easier to find out this sort of information than ever before and the fact that there are many different faculties and, you know, being much better cataloged and indexed for for memorials in churches. I mean, I think there's still a gap in the first world war memorials in churches to individual often of a simple but very sort of good quality. And I find, as a rule you can never find who designed those but they're often very well lectured, and you feel there's a sort of hidden story still to be researched then. Can I just, we have someone who would like to, who's raised their hand to ask a question in person. So, Danny or Shawna, it's William Newsom. I wonder if we can get William to ask the question in person. Hi, William. Can you hear us, William? You can, I think you're now able to ask a question. You unmute yourself. We're not going anything. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you now. Julian, do I assume that behind you is a photograph of Nicholas Pevsner? Yes, character, a place there, seemingly just, but actually it's strategically placed by my editor. And Julian, I believe you actually worked with him. So my question is, what was he really like? And how did he manage to fit so many books into this series? Well, the sort of thing I think is, especially when one looks into the biography is the astonishing speed that he did it. And one has to say that we would all bury ourselves sooner than do a job like that. I took seven years to revise a book that appears to have taken two academic summer holidays to do. I mean, it is amazing, but by the time I worked for him, he was charming. He was solicitous. I was the junior, you know, I'd just been employed by the Victorian Society just after university. He was near enough to retirement. I used to go there and talk to him. I was working for the Victorian Society, and he would go over the cases that we were going to discuss that evening and show me curious things like the unexpected collection of beer mats he had in his desk drawer. And my grandfather was German. And to the end of his life, he had a very distinct German accent as of course Pevsner did. He was delightful. I mean, careful. The Victorian Society committee, if anybody remembers some of the characters involved in the 70s, was full of conflict and interesting always, but argumentative. And Pevsner had asked me quietly before we started who was likely to to slash up who over a particular particular issue. And but when the when the conflicts happened, he was, he was emollient and quite often he was in the middle of it because if he said that the Victorian building was horrible, which he often did in the early volumes. And then it came up for demolition. Of course, the prime thing on the agenda was what do we do about the bit in the buildings of England that says terrible. And he was very concerned about that and constantly explaining that, that he now saw that that everything you said had a consequences far along the line from where you've been before. Julian bearing in mind that he worked in such a hurry and some of his, his words were very brief, how much of the wording that of his remains. And did you write the whole of the 900 pages. Well, I sort of did. I mean, the way you do these things, if you're trying to play to write someone else's book and use it is that you set out with with the text in front of you, and then you add the new bits that you want to add and you take away the bits that have changed. And then the whole thing looks like a mess. And then you start to subtly add clauses and link bits and it's kind of a yes it's a sort of a painting operation, where in the end, you've repainted the fourth bridge. Julian, sorry, William, I have to draw this to a close now. I'm sorry, William, we'll have to close that. There's so many other great questions that have come in. Rich Richard Anthony Deans asked about the impact of the cathedral on the on the architecture of the Paris churches. Peter asked Peter Hart for asking whether the Italian church was just too eccentric. We could talk for hours, no doubt. Could I could I take sort of privilege and just answer the one from Elliot Turner since it concerns me is when oh when can we hope for a full sorry revision. Just say I am working on it and I have committed to getting it finished for the later part of this year. Great news. But look on that positive celebratory optimistic note. I think that's a very good way to end. Huge thanks to you Charles. Huge thanks to you Julian and to James for a really wonderful presentation. And thanks for all of you for attending all more than 200 of you I hope you've enjoyed the event. And I really urge you to attend further events in our program over the coming months and we look forward to seeing you all again. Thanks very much indeed.