History used to be about wars and dates, but to the architecture writer and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank, it's more about floors and grates. In his new book, he takes a keen-eyed tour of eight English houses, from Northumberland to Sussex, dating from the early 1700s to exactly 100 years ago, and ranging from an outlandish gothic pile to one of the first council flats.
This book asks: why these Black heroes? What did their blackness do within the worlds built through storytelling among Arabic-speaking Muslims in the Middle Ages? What possible futures did it conjure and delimit, what present orders did it explain, and what pasts did it help to index morally, geographically, and culturally?