The fifteen centuries from AD 450 to the present day is the span covered by this book. In it Doreen Yarwood makes clear the reasons - political, technical and stylistic - why British architecture took the form it did during this long period. In doing so Mrs Yarwood considers in detail the most significant of the buildings which were the visible manifestation of that architecture. She discusses, too the long scries of architects who brought these buildings into being. To illustrate her account Mrs Yarwood uses more than 600 pictures reproduced both from her own drawings and from photographs.
The buildings of Scotland and Wales arc naturally also included in this survey. Unlike other architectural histories this one takes into account the work which was being done contemporaneously in Europe. Mrs Yarwood has an unequalled personal knowledge of the architecture of Europe and it is this familiarity which frees her from the narrow insularity from which her predecessors have sometimes suffered.
A further notable virtue of the work is the way in which it relates building activity to the life of the time. Building of all types - ecclesiastical and secular, civic and domestic - is covered, and there is a proper consideration and illustration of architectural and ornamental detail. The notable work produced by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century engineers is given due weight.
Equally admirable as a history and as a work of reference, The Architecture of Britain is the most comprehensive and best illustrated study of its subject that has perhaps ever appeared. Because of its greater succinctness, and its wider European terms of reference, it is a notably more valuable work than Mrs Yarwood’s earlier book, The Architecture of England, on which it is partly based.