Just north of Bewdley in Worcestershire, beside the Severn Valley Railway, is the largest surviving interwars 'plotland' settlement in Britain. This is a village of dwellings built by their owners from improvised materials: old railway carriages, chicken coops, the fuselages of gliders etc. Decried as an instant slum and opposed by planning authorities it is today regarded as a valuable manifestation of working class history.
Meades investigates a new age community beside a Scottish air base, a furniture factory in a Dorset wood, and an experimental school in East Grinstead, all of which are geometrically linked by buildings that shun the orthodoxy of the right angle.
Meades investigates unusual houses, houseboats and lifestyles of people on the Solent.
Jonathan Meades considers the style of army and military buildings and architectural styles.
There are a surprising number of places in Britain called Bohemia. Even more surprising is the fact that two of them - in Hastings and the New Forest - have connections to the artistic bohemia of such painters as Augustus John, two of whose studios demonstrate how much domestic design would take from this type of building. Features a red Lada that's a mobile tip.
Documentary about unusual architecture, focussing on the theme of vertigo, with visits to aqueducts, office blocks, cliff-hanging houses, diving boards and catherdrals.
About the architecture connected with the ale industry - from pubs to oasthouses, maltings, breweries, and the art galleries and churches built by the big brewers.
Documentary about the architecture surrounding golf - the courses, the clubhouses, the suburban surrounds and the social institutions.
Jonathan Meades sings the praises of pigs, and visits them in pigsties, back gardens, show grounds and butchers' shops.
Jonathan Meades explores Belgium and discovers that surrealism is the norm in coffin shops, finch sport, horse eating, verticle archery, cinema-churches, and the museums of underwear, penguins and ironing.
Investigates technological relics from the 1960's
Documentary exploring the British love of caravans.
Investigates the churches that have been built since the Second World War, looking at the artchitecture etc.
Jonathan Meades explores Newmarket and its raison d'etre- the horse.
Jonathan Meades explores the Fens.
Salisbury Cathedral boasts the highest spire in Britain. Jonathan Meades, who was raised in its shadow, returns to one of the country's finest medieval buildings. He wonders how an atheist can love a building dedicated to the propagation of medieval superstitions and fears.
Jonathan Meades looks at how Portsmouth's architecture has been shaped by the dominating presence of the Royal Navy.
In the first episode of a five-part series, Jonathan Meades revisits the places his father (a biscuit rep) took him to as a child, in order to shed some light on his abiding obsession with buildings and places.
The Liverpool garden festival gave us the word 'regeneration'. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in Bilbao combined with this to create a fashion. Every city wanted a slice of regeneration and used 'landmark' buildings to get it. Jonathan Meades ponders this expensive craze and the effects of supposedly regenerated inner cities.
Jonathan Meades investigates the short and lustrous career of that most mysterious of High Victorian architects, Cuthbert Brodrick. Briefly the most celebrated architect in Britain after designing Leeds Town Hall, he went on to spend almost half a century of willed obscurity in Paris.
Jonathan Meades tells the story of Letchworth, the first British garden city. A social experiment, its legacy is Britain's ubiquitous, banal sprawl. Yet it all started so charmingly with naked dew-bathers, vegetarian mystics and sandal-makers roaming through Hertfordshire clay fields.
Jonathan Meades visits Stowe - the greatest of Enlightenment landscapes, an enclosed world of the utmost pomp. Its gardens, lakes, woods and, above all, follies are to be interpreted by those with a grasp of the classics to which they refer.
