In an interview on British Buildings

Tell me about Summoned by Bells, the Betjeman.

Well, this is his verse autobiography and I’ll tell you why I think it’s fantastic. Most people write about buildings in a very, very dry way – ‘There’s a buttress from 1490’ – but he does it in a much more human way, like he’ll talk in the same way about them as he does about the girls he loves or his great friends, in a beautiful, wonderful, moving way and he doesn’t use the jargon, even though he knows the jargon inside out. He just communicates the beauty of buildings much better than a dry, stiff, architectural historian does. Also, in that particular book he talks about growing up and the way he first sees buildings as a child, and he drops things in all the time. He was brought up at the foot of the hill down towards Kentish Town from Highgate and he talks about the church where he was christened, a big Victorian church. And he wrote some fantastic poems in Summoned by Bells and elsewhere about Kentish Town which I love. It’s where I live, but not many people do write poems about Kentish Town. He gets it exactly right and he’s not being patronising about rundown parts of London. He gets the beauty and the feel of places and who goes there and what it looks like from the top of a bus and just observing. So, I think he’s an absolute genius when it comes to talking about buildings in human terms.

Does he single any out?

Well, he talks about going to Marlborough [School] which he absolutely hated and he talks about going to Oxford which he was chucked out of for failing his exams, and he loved the buildings, particularly Magdalen, where he was, and he imagines himself as an old don in New Buildings occasionally taking a book of poetry down from his shelves. But he was plucked away from this Elysium by failing his exams. So, it’s always like that – he’ll describe a beautiful building but it will be related to his life as well.