"We are surrounded by the greatest of free shows. Places"

Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and "the gaps between them", drawing attention to what he calls "the rich oddness of what we take for granted".

This book collects 54 pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers 'heavy entertainment' - strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge.

To read Meades on places, buildings, politics, or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible. "Everything is fantastical if you stare at it for long enough. Everything is interesting."



Jonathan Meades' books include three works of fiction –  Filthy English, Pompey and The Fowler Family Business  – and several collections including  Museum Without Walls , which received thirteen nominations as a book of the year in 2012. 

 An Encyclopaedia of Myself  was shortlisted for the PEN Ackerley Prize and longlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2014. His first and only cookbook,  The Plagiarist in the Kitchen , was published in 2017.  Pedro and Ricky Come Again  (2021) was the sequel to  Peter Knows What Dick Likes  (1988).

Meades has written and performed in more than sixty highly acclaimed television films on predominantly topographical subjects such as French nationalism, the Baltic and dictators' architecture. He also creates artknacks and treyfs. Treyf means impure, not kosher: it defines his approach to all writing, film and art. He lives in France.



'For the last thirty years Britain's most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment'



'Lively, inventive and pugnacious . . . In an English literary tradition that, sweeping up Ian Nairn, John Betjeman and Charles Dickens along the way, takes us back to William Corbett's Rural Rides'



'An indispensible companion to one of the most original and valuable commentators on architecture working today'



'Meades is consistently, cuttingly entertaining'



'Jonathan Meades is a consistently amusing and provocative polemicist and this book is a rollercoaster ride, though not to be consumed all in one go . . . It is all richly entertaining, invigorating and provoking'



'The scope of his ideas, the force of his arguments, the sheer vitality of his sentences: these things come at you like negative ions after a storm'



'One of the great revelations of Mr Meades's writing is his ability not just to expose the tawdriness and cynicism of those who manage our landscape and our past, but also to find interest and beauty in what others, affording it a passing glance, would find drab and unremarkable . . . It is an unfortunate cliche to call any book an eye-opener, but this one unquestionably is'