Lancashire Liverpool and the Southwest Richard Pollard, Nikolaus Pevsner

This work is a comprehensive guide to the buildings of South-West Lancashire. The great port of Liverpool dominates, with its cathedrals, mighty commercial buildings and warehouses, and Georgian inner city. Full accounts are given of its varied suburbs, complete with the churches, parks and villas of the mercantile elite. The industrial towns beyond include St Helens, still a thriving glassmaking centre; Warrington, with its own innovative New Town; and handsome Wigan, capital of the Lancashire coalfield. But most of the area remains rural, and in this distinctive landscape of moss and mere are some of England's most memorable buildings: Sefton church with its opulent 16th-century woodwork, the gorgeous timber-framed Speke Hall, and Georgian country houses including Knowsley, ancestral seat of the Earls of Derby, and Ince Blundell, with its extraordinary Neoclassical sculpture gallery. In this book, each city, town or village is treated in a detailed gazetteer. It contains a general introduction that provides a historical and artistic overview. Numerous maps and plans, over 100 new colour photographs, full indexes and an illustrated glossary help to make this book invaluable as both reference work and guide.

A native of County Durham, Richard Pollard attended Christ's College, Cambridge and the Courtauld Institute of Art, where he read architectural history, before joining SAVE Britain's Heritage. As its Secretary he was active in numerous campaigns to preserve threatened buildings, and wrote a number of reports and publications, including Silence in Court: The Future of the UK's Historic Law Courts. Richard contributed to the Pevsner Architectural Guide to Liverpool, and is currently helping to revise Yorkshire: West Riding (North). He remains active in building conservation, and divides his time between London and Yorkshire.

'[It] contains all the information required to transform you into a fountain of local knowledge. ... Each city, town or village included in the book is treated with a detailed gazetteer...' - Kristina Wood, Wigan Evening Post 'The thoroughness of these new revisions...is astounding. ... 745 exhaustively thorough and authoritative pages... Pollard is a more elegant and expansive writer... Pevsner has found a worthy successor.' - Stephen McClarence, The Times 'Now the county's architectural heritage can be explored and studied to a depth previously undreamed of thanks to the new Lancashire editions of the famous Pevsner Buildings of England series. ... [This is] a magnificent volume...[and] tells us everything we need to know. ... The new photographs which accompany the text are truly stunning. ... And the detail about every building is fantastic...nothing of importance is left out. ... This book demonstrates that this part of Lancashire has a built heritage to compete with anywhere and there's only one way to really explore it - with Pevsner's guide in hand.' - Robert Hawley, Lancashire Life