England has more unspoilt towns than any country in the world. In this series, the architectural historian ALEC CLIFTON-TAYLOR has made a personal choice of six, based not so much on the historical appeal of a fine cathedral, a castle or a church but the range and quality of the ordinary domestic houses and the use made of the traditional building materials of England - stone, brick, wood and plaster. ' I'd like every programme to be an exercise in looking.'
' Local stone ... bricks baked from the local clays, oaks from the forests ... wherever local materials were used they look right.' Ludlow, in the centre of the Welsh Marches, is probably ALEC CLIFTON-TAYLOR'S favourite small town. It exemplifies precisely his concept of a pattern of building - stone for the church, the bridges and the castle; wood for the medieval houses, often carved with great exuberance as at the Feathers Hotel; plaster for the ceilings, and brick for the handsome houses of the Georgian town. But there are some Victorian shockers in ' polychrome machine-made bricks in jazzy patterns' and the Market Hall, apostrophised by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as ' Ludlow's bad luck.'
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