GHASTLY GOOD TASTE or a Depressing Story of the Rise and Fall of English Architecture

This copy is in mint unmarked condition, bright, tight, white and square. Quarter bound in black clot to the spine with bright silver gilt titling to pink paper covered boards. There is a mint, nine feet long, architectural panorama tipped in to the rear paste down. The price clipped dustwrapper has one or two small closed tears and is sunned to the spine but has now been coveres in clear, removable, protective film. If you have never seen or experienced a snook being cocked then this is the book for you. John Betjeman was also passionate about architecture, 'preferring all centuries to my own'. In his first prose work, Ghastly Good Taste (1933), he vigorously defends his love of Victorian and Edwardian architecture, considered deeply unfashionable at the time. With the savage humour of his famous satire 'Slough', he attacks notions of Modernism and (at the other extreme) unthinking antiquarianism. In this the revised and annotated edition the rise and fall of English architecture is illustrated with a specially drawn fold out nine foot long panorama of architectural styles. Ref SS6.