Museum Without Walls

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 what he calls '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.

Publication of the hardback in 2012 was greeted with stunning reviews and the book was one of the most frequently chosen Books of the Year.

"Meades is a walking personification of the encounter of words and building. He is literate, conjuring Borges, Nabokov or Ezra Pound. He dazzles with words. He parades wit prose. He piles up images and associations into teetering constructions, and then moves deftly on before we can see if they collapse. His writing can take us into the mind of a buzzard and out again, without apparent effort. When he wants to kill with words, he can swivel and stab in an instant…He loves buildings and, more than buildings, places – “the greatest of all free shows”, as he calls them. His promiscuous appetite takes in almost anything…You should just sit back and enjoy the ride."
ROWAN MOORE, Observer

"The sentences and vocabulary in this book zigzag between the lordly and the thuggish, between high culture and low, between grand assertion and intricate description…I hope he grumbles on for decades to come'
ANDY BECKETT, Guardian

"Museum Without Walls is sonorous with [his] voice and reveals how much of it is in the writing rather than the delivery. The voice is immensely learned, auto-didactic, and thankfully channelled through RADA and journalism rather than RIBA and academia. The essays are literary rather than 'architecture writing', to which they deliver several brutal kickings... To enjoy Meades on television will be to enjoy Musuem Without Walls, and we now have an indispensible companion to one of the most original and valuable commentators on architecture working today"
WILL WILES, Building Design

"A sense of subversion suffuses every page. From Canary Wharf to Buenos Aires or mushroom-hunting in the forest, he will inspire you to look and think and look again"
BEN FELSENBURG, Metro

"For the last thirty years Britain's most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment… What Meades does most often is praise things, especially things that are habitually ignored: he is surely our greatest exponent of what the Russian Formalists call ostranenie, “making strange”… Meades's work is so generous, so rich and so obviously contentious that to mount a critique of it seems churlish. No one else could combine of the aesthetic and political positions he flexes so aggressively"
OWEN HATHERLEY, London Review of Books

"Meades loves architecture, which is exactly why he can be so acerbic and funny about it. In this collection… he suggests that the fabric of our cities is the greatest free entertainment available. From French provincial municipal architecture to the coincidences of Stalinist and Nazi design, Meades is consistently, cuttingly entertaining"
EDWIN HEATHCOTE, Financial Times Books of the Year

"Jonathan Meades writes with his mouth full, so to speak, and he looms out of the TV like a bailiff; but I loved his Museum Without Walls, a series of barked exhortations to live more attentively"
KEITH MILLER, TLS Books of the Year

"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"
TIM RICHARDSON, Literary Review

"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 other, affording it a passing glance, would find drab and unremarkable… It is an unfortunate cliché to call any book an eye-opener, but this one unquestionably is. It forces us to think critically about the environment we live in: what works, what doesn't, what insults the eye and what elevates the mind. We will find that too much of our country is in bad taste or of no taste at all but, following the Meades method, we shall also find much that, if examined closely, brings joy"
SIMON HEFFER, Standpoint

"I pick up Jonathan Meades's new collection of essays, Museum Without Walls and I read a paragraph or three. It's the writerly equivalent of stand of the top of Kinder Scout and breathing deeply. 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, with the result that you soon start to feel an awful lot better – envious but revitalised too.
RACHEL COOKE, New Statesman