I have a couple of dozen tomes by Nikolaus Pevsner, each one detailing every building of note in the counties of England, but the book that has been at the heart of my ecclesiastical tourism around England has always been John Betjeman’s Pocket Guide to English Parish Churches. Published in 1958 it covers some 2,000 examples.
In that I’ve recorded every visit I’ve made to an Anglican
church since the mid-1960s, so I’ll be coming up to half a century quite soon.
The most visited counties over that time are Kent (97 churches) and Oxfordshire
(52). I used to live near the former, and am now adjacent to the latter.
So it’s a pleasure to be able to recommend a new book,
Oxfordshire’s Best Churches by Richard Wheeler. It is well-researched and
beautifully written, dealing in detail with the architecture, sculpture and
stained glass of fifty buildings covering a thousand years of creativity and
change. Shamefully, I’ve only been inside eleven of them. And there are shorter
entries on a further sixty-five, together with superb photography (taken by the
author) and nice typography throughout.
Altogether a joy to have. Enthused by it, we visited one of
the most charming and atmospheric in the county, North Stoke.
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