Architecture

One of Britain’s first mosques, the Shah Jahan,Woking, completed in 1889 and financed by the female ruler of Bhopal

The problem with British mosques

30 June 2018 9:00 am

My earliest memory of a mosque is being with my father in London’s Brick Lane Mosque. He was a member…

Extension of credit: the vaults, part of David Chipperfield’s redevelopment of the Royal Academy

How lucky we are to have the Royal Academy

26 May 2018 9:00 am

What is the Royal Academy? This question set me thinking as I wandered through the crowds that celebrated the opening…

Garden of earthly delights: horticultural apprentice Emma Love in the newly reopened Temperate House at Kew

The real stars of Kew’s newly restored Temperate House

19 May 2018 9:00 am

The glasshouses at Kew Gardens are so popular that they can be quite unbearably busy at weekends. And why shouldn’t…

The Church at Vétheuil, 1878

The public are quite right to love Monet

14 April 2018 9:00 am

Think of the work of Claude Monet and water lilies come to mind, so do reflections in rippling rivers, and…

In 1985 it was ‘the most expensive building ever built’: HSBC’s Hong Kong headquarters designed by Norman Foster

From Stansted to corporate swank: superstructuralism has a lot to answer for

7 April 2018 9:00 am

Amid the thick of the Crimean war, Florence Nightingale dispatched a plea to the Times deploring the lethal conditions of…

A blue-and-white loggia overlooks the entrance to the Residence in Tunis

Mission statement: the importance of a fine British embassy

16 December 2017 9:00 am

At first blush this looks like one of those run-of-the-mill coffee-table books published just for the Christmas market — expensively…

The Russian summer embassy at Büyükdere on the Upper Bosphorus, built in 1840 for General Nikolai Ignatiev. The Tsar’s envoy is said to haunt it still

A love letter to Turkey’s lost past

2 December 2017 9:00 am

Patricia Daunt’s collection of essays is a fascinating exploration of some of Turkey’s most beautiful and evocative places, from the…

The old ways

28 October 2017 9:00 am

I’m sitting across a café table from a young man with a sheaf of drawings that have an archive look…

More secrets and symbols

28 October 2017 9:00 am

Being reflexively snotty about Dan Brown’s writing is like slagging off Donald Trump’s spelling: it just entrenches everyone’s position. In…

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,…

Perception vs objective reality

21 October 2017 9:00 am

I hate to tell you this, but every time you watch television you are being duped. In fact there are…

The Normansfield Theatre in Teddington, a beautiful ‘lost’ Victorian playhouse, is still used for concerts and music-hall evenings, and by small opera companies

Pleasure palaces and hidden gems

9 September 2017 9:00 am

Theatre buildings are seriously interesting – as I ought to have appreciated sooner in the course of 25 years writing…

Hope, the blue whale, replaces Dippy, the diplodocus, in the Natural History Museum’s Hintze Hall

Cathedral of creation

12 August 2017 9:00 am

Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but…

The Shard’s angled, fractured sides change its appearance according to London’s sky conditions

Towering extravagance

29 July 2017 9:00 am

The Shard is an unnecessary building. Nobody apart from its developer asked for it to be built. Nobody was crying…

Epiphanic

29 July 2017 9:00 am

‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported…

To buy cheap art, buy architecture

15 July 2017 9:00 am

Of the 375,000 listed buildings in England only 2.5 per cent are Grade I. Half are churches; many are otherwise…

True or false? The Temple of Bel, Palmyra, before and after its destruction at the hands of Islamic State

Why confront the ugly lie of Islamic State with a tacky fake?

28 May 2016 9:00 am

Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries

The lifts are lovely: Tate Modern’s extension reviewed

28 May 2016 9:00 am

Tate Modern, badly overcrowded, has built itself a £260 million extension to spread everyone about the place more. This means…

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

The obelisk in the Place de la Concorde. Its transport from Luxor to Paris took seven years and involved the destruction of an entire village

Are Egypt’s obelisks more stunning even than the pyramids?

23 April 2016 9:00 am

On the banks of the River Thames in central London, an ancient Egyptian obelisk, known as Cleopatra’s Needle, reaches towards…

Further dispatches from Syria’s maelstrom

16 April 2016 9:00 am

The mechanic, blinded in one eye by shrapnel, spent three days searching for his family in the destroyed buildings and…

Is this LA?: Dilapidated deco in Downtown

The heart of Los Angeles feels like somewhere else entirely

9 April 2016 9:00 am

There’s a certain kind of Englishman who falls hard for Los Angeles. Men such as Graham Nash, who swapped the…

Flying from Donald Trump to the beautiful ruins of another empire

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Just as the presidential race in America started to get really crazy, I left for India. On the morning of…

Left: The main gate to the mighty citadel has withstood centuries of invasion. Now much scarred, it presides over a bombed-out city, including the wrecked medieval souq (above), until recently the world’s largest and most vibrant covered historic market and Unesco world heritage site

Syria's Stalingrad: how Aleppo slipped from tolerance to terrorism

5 March 2016 9:00 am

Justin Marozzi on the bitter irony of Aleppo’s ancient motto

Brute force: St Peter’s internal elevation

The embarrassing story of Scotland’s most important 20th century structure

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Finding St Peter’s is not straightforward. I approach the wrong way, driving up a pot-holed farm track between a golf…