Warwickshire's buildings generally reflect a comfortable, well-to-do feel. Stratford-on-Avon is an excellent place to see the buildings of a late medieval and Georgian country town. The great medeival fortresses of Warwick and Kenilworth Castles are among the leading exemplars of their type. The superb range of country houses and landscaped gardens extends from the medieval perfection of Baddesley Clinton, and picturesque Compton Wynates to the eighteenth-century sophistication of Packington Hall. Birmingham and Coventry are major cathedral cities (though neither is anything like the conventional picture of an English cathedral). The nineteenth-century buildings of Birmingham, religious, civic and commercial, are outstanding in their quality and variety, while Coventry is one of the most imaginative examples of a twentieth-century city centre rebuilt after wartime destruction.
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (January 30, 1902 - August 18, 1983) was one of the twentieth century's most learned and stimulating writers on art and architecture.
He established his reputation with Pioneers of Modern Design, though he is probably best known for his celebrated series of guides, The Buildings of England, acknowledged as one of the great achievements of twentieth-century scholarship. He was also founding editor of The Pelican History of Art, the most comprehensive and scholarly history of art ever published in English.