In an interview on British Buildings

Now, Architecture in Britain 1530-1830.

That is quite a... I did a term of architectural history as part of history at Oxford, and I’d been interested in buildings in a very unformed way and this was the first book that made me see the order of architecture in Britain. Elizabethan architecture with a very strong English, medieval feel to it and how Inigo Jones came in the early 17th century and classicism completely took over for 100 years and then Palladianism, then Victorian Gothic and it all started to click together like a series of rooms in a long corridor, the order of things. It’s quite a dryish academic book but it puts things together beautifully.

I’m very obsessed with Samuel Pepys and find it so sad that there’s nothing left of pre-Fire London.

I know. Isn’t it tragic? And part of it is the Second World War, of course, but the planners after the war actually got rid of quite a lot of what remained of 17th-century pre-Fire London. But there is still that pleasure of winding streets on a medieval pattern, but it’s not like the real thing. You know that Christopher Wren wanted to redesign the city after the fire on a Parisian/New York grid system, but thank God he didn’t. So we still have higgledy-piggledy streets but it’s not the same as having the buildings.