The Stones of Britain

I have read Jon’s book with sustained delight. It is partially that his voice is so distinctive and so compelling. There are sentences that make you want to stand up and cheer. More fundamentally though, this is a strangely, even uniquely, personal engagement with stone - the very thing most of us consider to be impersonal, obdurate, resistant. The passages that describe Jon in the landscape are striking, so is the tactile engagement with stone, and the weaving together of built environment and mythopshere. This is a book in which the character of stone begins to acquire a life of its own. These stones speak. I will carry this with me as I might carry a bird book, to identify the ground beneath my feet. Like Jon himself, The Stones of Britain is full of charm and enthusiasm.

Jon Cannon (1962 - 2023), architectural historian, lecturer and author, worked for the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England and English Heritage. Jon is the author of several highly acclaimed books, including Cathedral: The Great English Cathedrals and the World that Made Them (Constable, 2007), The Secret Language of Sacred Places (Duncan Bird Publishing 2013), and Medieval Church Architecture (Shire Publications 2014). Jon presented the TV documentary How to Build a Cathedral on BBC4 (2008).

Jon died in May 2023, shortly after writing this book.

For more than a decade, Jon was ‘Keeper of the Fabric’, then ‘Canon Historian’ at Bristol Cathedral, and his memorial, carved into the fabric of the Cathedral’s Berkeley Chapel, recognises his contribution to the building, and his wider contribution to the understanding and appreciation of religious buildings.

Jon wrote: ‘I have a vocation, and it’s to do with places; with communicating, enthusing, analysing - in short, extollagising - about the nature of ‘old places’, and what makes them tick.’