Perambulations are more detailed and abundant. Poor, flood-ravaged Upton receives its due as the paradigm of a small Georgian staging post, with its inns, stabling and town houses for the local gentry. At Bromsgrove we pause to deplore the ‘future uncertain’ of the South High School, a clever Sixties modernist compromise, while further north Alvechurch emerges as an absorbing layer cake of Plantagenet borough, canal port and Brummy overspill. As for Malvern, I had better declare an interest. My home town, its impossibly steep declivities transformed by Regency and Victorian architects and engineers into a fusion of Tuscan picturesque (there is even a ‘Bellosguardo’) with Tennyson’s towered Camelot, gets 40 pages’ worth of keenly focused appreciation, down to the very last crocket and cornice on the villas of Graham Road and Lansdowne Crescent.

Not surprisingly, I choose the Brooks-Pevsner Worcestershire as my major book of the year. As a hymn of praise to the county’s enticing variousness and exoticism, it is unsurpassed and, I suspect, unsurpassable. Its bulk, what’s more, makes it ideal for administering a well-aimed thump on the head to all those who would have you believe that the shire contains nothing worth stopping for. ‘Dim’? I don’t think so.

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