The mosque lies at the heart of any Islamic city – a place for group prayer, serenity and spiritual connection. Its exterior serves as a symbol of faith, a landmark and a point of gathering. Since the first mosque was built by the Prophet Mohammad in Medina in 622, mosques have been spaces where worship and social life flourish side by side.

In this book, Marwa Al-Sabouni – architect, Muslim, Syrian, woman – interweaves her personal experiences and reflections to bring the reader inside the mosque to understand its spiritual meaning, social significance and enduring cultural value. Though some 3.6 million mosques exist around the world, varying enormously in shape, size and design, we are reminded that thoughtfully designed mosques – like any communal space – can still feel intimate and personal. With the ability to foster community and connection, they take on particular significance in times of division and fragmentation – a fact felt keenly by Al-Sabouni, whose home country witnessed decades of war before entering a new period of hope, however fragile.

The Building of England puts into context the significance of a country’s architectural history and unearths how it is inextricably linked to the cultural past – and present.

From humble Saxon huts, to soaring gothic cathedrals, through feats of Victorian engineering to the homes we live in today, Simon Thurley tells the story of England through the places and people that built it.

The Building of England challenges us to think differently about English history. Through the lens of architecture Thurley shows how a thousand years of economic, social and cultural change made England the place it is today. People built for defence, power, profit, farming, manufacture, travel, religion and entertainment. The story of England is embedded in all our buildings. This book brings the buildings, their designers, builders, owners and users vividly to life to show that they are a profound reflection of our history.

In this fully updated and expanded edtion of his 2013 classic, The Building of England brings the story completely up to date: now ending in 2020. It places English architecture full square in its historical context.

Antoni Gaudì's architecture is among the world's most instantly recognisable sights. His still unfinished basilica, La Sagrada Famìlia welcomes five million visitors annually. Yet in this the centenary year of his death, knocked down in the street by a tram, mistaken for a tramp and spending his last hours in a paupers' hospital, much about this unworldly genius remains a mystery, not least the source of inspiration to create extraordinary buildings that stand in a place of honour of their own in the canon of architecture. His explanation – that the fount of his imagination was God – sits uncomfortably alongside his modern-day fame in a secular world that nonetheless celebrates him.

In reconnecting Gaudì's peerless architecture with the highs and lows of his faith, Peter Stanford walks in his footsteps through Barcelona, retracing his life through the buildings, parks and landscapes he admired and those that he created. Join him on Gaudì's journey from the Catalan countryside, where his love affair with nature began, to becoming a celebrated figure in the booming industrial city of Barcelona, with its extremes of rich and poor – and its undercurrent of violence and anti-clericalism that almost left La Sagrada Famìlia an unfinished folly. Tragedy, loss and depression stalked his life, but reinforced his belief that his work was a religious vocation, prompting contemporary moves by the Vatican towards declaring him a saint.

'A wonderful read' DOUGALD O'REILLY

Discover ancient stone wonders and architectural preservation secrets in the hands of one of the world’s greatest stonemasons.

Across the world and across time, the buildings of the gods and royalty have mostly been made of stone, towering over the homes of us lesser beings who have had to make do with mud, wood or brick. When civilisations wish to create beauty to last – for veneration of the gods or mortal men – it is to stone they turn. Crossing oceans and hauling blocks across thousands of kilometres, to quarry and sometimes plunder pillars and statues to stand sentinel for glory.

As one of the world’s most pre-eminent stonemasons and conservators Simon Warrack has worked in more than thirty different countries and with all major religions. In this book, Simon explores ten different places where he has learnt and plied his trade. From the Trevi Fountain to Angkor Wat, via Great Zimbabwe, Canterbury Cathedral and many more, he takes us to some of the greatest buildings and monuments in the world. Everywhere he goes, despite vast cultural diversity, he finds a communality through stone – a shared desire to conserve and maintain heritage that has spanned continents, cultures and millennia.

The story he tells is of the beauty of stone, restored and accompanied by the sound of chisels. He captures both the joys, skills and the challenges of conservation, as well as how easily restoration can damage the values and traditions it seeks to preserve if conducted with insensitivity. Underlying all his work is his passionate belief that stonemasons and conservators must be guided by the spirit with which people built, carved and cared for their monuments. Without this, monuments may have form and beauty, but they lose the essence and spirit of everything that caused them to be created.

Building Britannia is a chronicle of social, political and economic change seen through the prism of the country's built environment, but also a sequence of closely observed studies of a series of intrinsically remarkable structures: some of them beautiful or otherwise imposing; some of them more coldly functional; all of them with richly fascinating stories to tell.

Steven Parissien tells both a national story, tracing how a growing sense of British nationhood was expressed through the country's architecture, and also examines how these structures were used by later generations to signpost, mythologise or remake British history.

Rubbing shoulders with some 'expected' building choices – the Roman baths at Aquae Sulis, the early Gothic splendour of Lincoln Cathedral and the Tudor jewel that is Little Moreton Hall – are some striking inclusions that promise to open doors into what will be, for many readers, less familiar areas of social history: these include The Briton’s Protection, a Regency pub close in Manchester city centre and the Edwardian Baroque Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, one of the country's oldest working cinemas. Thus as well as identifying the relevance of certain iconic structures to the unfolding of the national story, Building Britannia finds fascination and meaning in the everyday and the disregarded.

'Diverting and illuminating' Guardian

'Cruickshank’s enthusiasm for England’s vernacular architecture shines through every infectious sentence of this glorious book… A triumph.' – The Times

'A mine of information presented in an effortlessly accessible style. Unlike many books that merely convey stories attached to buildings, this is social and architectural history delivered with forensic insight' – Country Life

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This is the story of the superbly elegant early eighteenth-century Pallant House in Chichester. It’s the story of 19 Princelet Street in Spitafields, built for a Huguenot silk-weaver, ultimately a synagogue. It’s also the story of – among others – a row of two-up, two-downs in Toxteth, a block of flats in London’s East End, and what Ideal Home‘s magazine described in 1926 as Britain’s ‘first modern house’ – in Northampton.

Together these buildings reveal the ways in which English homes have developed and changed over the past few centuries. At the same time, as Dan Cruickshank shows, they have much to tell us about the lives of their first occupants: their aspirations, their struggles, their place within society and relationship with their local community. The English House brilliantly weaves these two strands together, blending architectural and social history to create a series of brilliantly observed portraits of fascinating buildings.

London has been rebuilt and reshaped perhaps more than any other city over its two-millennia history. From the construction of the Underground to slum clearance and the Blitz, buildings have long been damaged or demolished to pave way for the new. Today, demolition is big business, and around 3500 buildings are destroyed each year, most of which are social housing.

Paul Knox traces the history of London from the Great Fire to the present day through twenty-five lost buildings. Knox explores surprising and unusual locations in the city’s history, like the Necropolis Station in Waterloo used by funeral parties traveling to a burial ground in Surrey. We see historic landmarks, like Christ Church Greyfriars and the Crystal Palace, as well as everyday places like the White Horse pub in Poplar and a housing estate in Hackney. This is a fascinating study of London’s restless landscape, showing how conservation has changed over 400 years.

Their mission – destroy Germany’s strategic outposts nestled along the port, while leaving the floating city unscathed.

As bombs rained down upon Europe, flattening city after city, Venice – La Serenissima; home of Titian and Veronese; immortalised in the serene landscapes of Canaletto – remained sacrosanct. Its artistic and architectural treasure too considerable, too precious to risk destruction.

But, as the push up through Italy reached its final, gruelling months, the Allies were confronted with a terrible dilemma. The ancient city of Venice was now closer and closer to the line of fire. As casualties mounted, the value of art, of history seemed diminished – just a month earlier Allied bombers had reduced the ancient hilltop abbey of Monte Cassino to a stony husk.

In a gripping tale, bestselling author Jonathan Glancey reveals the thrilling history of ‘Operation Bowler’. Joining audacious Wing Commander George Westlake DFC and his elite team, Operation Bowler explores how an unlikely squad of pilots executed one of the most meticulous and complex air raids of the Second World War, sparing not only Venice, but its people.

Charles Saumarez Smith paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose architecture was shaped by his personality. The book also explores Vanbrugh’s activities as a playwright and theatre manager, his circle of friends, his place in 18th-century society, and, in a final section, his influence on later architects from Robert Adam to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.