Jonathan Meades

British architecture according to the Great Man school of history

7 December 2024 9:00 am

Simon Jenkins seems excessively preoccupied with the flamboyant houses of the privileged, leaving his narrative tottering beneath the weight of gaudy swank

A familiar OE-led balls-up: Rory Stewart’s The Long History of Ignorance reviewed

24 August 2024 9:00 am

In my next life I intend to have my brain removed in order to become a telly executive. You know:…

The art of menus

1 October 2022 9:00 am

Jonathan Meades on the art of menus

Notre Dame from above (image: Lana Sator) and, right, Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster's Millau Viaduct (image: Bernard Jaubert / Imagebroker / Rex / Shutterstock)

Notre Dame is an architectural nullity

27 April 2019 9:00 am

Notre Dame is only important from a Shakespeare’s-birthplace point of view. Architecturally it is a nullity beside the cathedrals of…

View of Marseille from the basilica of Notre-Dame de la Garde, also known as La Bonne Mère, traditionally regarded as the city’s protectress. ‘The Good Mother intervenes at sick beds, down shadowy streets, and in the dark hours of night,’ writes Iain Sinclair [image: Getty]

How do our surroundings affect our health and happiness?

15 September 2018 9:00 am

The Wellcome Trust puts on some of the most engaging exhibitions in London and holds in its permanent collection a…

The Factory (image: OMA/Factory)

The Bilbao effect

21 October 2017 9:00 am

Twenty years ago I wrote of the otherwise slaveringly praised Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao: I’m in a minority of, apparently,…

Hillingdon Civic Centre: a dozen red bungalows clumsily buggering one another

Jonathan Meades on the postmodernist buildings that we must protect

21 May 2016 9:00 am

Best of postmodernism: is that an oxymoron? Jonathan Meades thinks not

Is Julian Barnes right to think Lucian Freud will survive? Jonathan Meades thinks not

30 May 2015 9:00 am

The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions…

Scapegoat for all of urban life’s ills: Le Corbusier, c.1950

How dedicated a fascist was Le Corbusier?

23 May 2015 9:00 am

The ‘revelations’, 50 years after he drowned, that Le Corbusier was a ‘fascist’ and an anti-Semite are neither fresh nor…

Leonardo da Vinci: ‘La Belle Ferronière’ 1495–1499 (Musée de Louvre, Paris) and (left) Follower of Leonardo da Vinci: ‘La Belle Ferronière’ c. before 1750 (Private Collection)

Museum curators and art forgers are two of a kind: they’re both vain and self-deluded

16 May 2015 9:00 am

Louis the Decorator and his chums in the antiques trade use the word ‘airport’ adjectivally and disparagingly. It signifies industrially…

The Heckler: Curators were once donnish scholars. Now they’re hip illiterates

25 April 2015 9:00 am

As a purveyor of lairy souvenirs Venice outdoes even Lourdes. The scores of shops and booths that peddle this lagoonal…

Outsize origami: Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton

Le French bashing has spread to France. Are things really that bad?

13 December 2014 9:00 am

The popular sport has spread to France. Are things really that bad, wonders Jonathan Meades