Jennifer Sherwood

The newly revised Pevsner guide to the buildings of Oxford and South-East Oxfordshire This updated guide addresses half a century of change and development since the previous edition, including a wealth of ambitious new buildings for the University and its colleges. Familiar buildings such as the Bodleian Library and the Radcliffe Camera are reinterpreted, and the many renovations and extensions are described and assessed. Oxford’s commercial buildings, suburbs, and houses are also explored in depth, including much that is published here for the first time. The county area extends from the outskirts of Oxford to Henley-on-Thames, following the historic Thameside boundary of Oxfordshire and taking in the hills of the southern Chilterns. Here the new volume includes fresh accounts of major country houses such as Nuneham Courtenay and Thame Park, new assessments of church restorations, furnishings, and stained glass, more inclusive coverage of commercial buildings in the towns and a fuller selection of vernacular and rural buildings across the whole of this attractive and rewarding part of England.

This volume is a fully expanded and revised architectural guide to the greater part of Oxfordshire, based on Jennifer Sherwood’s 1970s account, full of new information and with specially commissioned photography. The vernacular architecture of the villages and farms is well represented here, as well as notable town architecture and the medieval parish churches for which the area is well known. Oxfordshire is also a county of great houses, from the romantic medieval ruins of Minster Lovell to the late flowering of Lutyens’s 1930s Middleton Park; the grandest, however, is Blenheim Palace, the Baroque masterpiece designed by John Vanbrugh (1664–1726).