Museum Without Walls

‘Richly entertaining, invigorating and provoking’ Literary Review

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 fifty-four 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 him on places, buildings, politics or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible.

‘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’ Rachel Cooke, New Statesman

‘For the last thirty years Britain’s most consistently surprising and informative writer on the built environment’ Owen Hatherley, London Review of Books

‘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’ Jonathan Glancey, Architectural Review

‘An indispensible companion to one of the most original and valuable commentators on architecture working today’ Building Design

‘Meades is consistently, cuttingly entertaining’ Financial Times, books of the year

Hardback: 464pp

Published: Wilton Square (November 2025)

ISBN: 9781783528530