Books

Pugin, Potter, Russell and Lennon...

... globish, cliché, iconic abuse, yob-gods, sprawl... and much, much more in the latest collection of Meades's work, published by Unbound. Every bit as rich and catholic as its predecessor, Peter Knows What Dick Likes, but bigger, darker, funnier, and just as impervious to taste and manners.

'Jonathan Meades is the most significant cultural critic writing in English today... There are more gems in this wonderful book than I could cram into a dozen of these columns.'
Simon Heffer, The Daily Telegraph

'Meades scorns fads. He will never be flavour of the month, and would never want to be: he’d

rather eliminate the concept. He is sui generis, a law unto himself. We must celebrate him while we can.'

Daniel Janes, The London Magazine

Pedro and Ricky Come Again (Unbound, 2021)

'Nothing wilfully invented. Memory invents unbidden.'

The 1950s were not grey. In Jonathan Meades’s detailed, petit-point memoir they are luridly polychromatic. They were peopled by embittered grotesques, bogus majors, vicious spinsters, reckless bohos, pompous boors, suicides. The title is grossly inaccurate. This book is, rather, a portrait of a disappeared provincial England, a time and place unpeeled with gruesome relish.

'What can appear as isolated jottings in the end come together in a pointillist canvas to form by far the best picture of the 1950s I have read.'
George Walden, The Times
'The most brilliant, bracing but hairshirtless social history of mid-20th century provincial England that I have yet and, likely, will ever read.'

Caroline Jackson, Country Life

An Encyclopaedia Of Myself (Fourth Estate, 2014)

This is an anti-cookbook.

A recipe book that is also an explicit paean to the avoidance of culinary originality (should such a thing exist), to the daylight robbery of recipes, to hijacking techniques and methods, to the notion that in the kitchen there is nothing new and nor can there be anything new. It's all theft.

‘The Plagiarist in the Kitchen is hilariously grumpy, muttering at us “Don’t you bastards know anything?” You can read it purely for literary pleasure, but Jonathan Meades makes everything sound so delicious that the non-cook will be moved to cook and the bad cook will cook better.’

David Hare, The Guardian

The Plagiarist in the Kitchen (Unbound, 2017)

There is no such thing as a boring place.

Birmingham's beauty, the Isle of Sheppey, the Isle of Rust, postwar churches, Pevsner and Nairn, the futile vanity of 'landmark' buidlings... A collection of 54 pieces and six film scripts on topography, urbanism, architecture and non-architecture which dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy.

'One of the best writers on architecture this island has produced.'

Douglas Murphy, RIBA Journal
'For the last 30 years Britain's most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment.'

Owen Hatherley, London Review of Books

Museum Without Walls (Unbound, 2012)