ARCHITECTURE IN BRITAIN AND IRELAND: 600-1500.

By Lucy Archer with photographs by Edwin Smith London: The Harvill Press. 1999. Hb [pounds]35, pb [pounds]25

This beautiful thoughtful book is the personal product of a collaborative empathy between Lucy Archer, daughter of sensitive architect, Raymond Erith, on whom she published an outstanding monograph in 1985, and the late Edwin Smith, a most subtle and distinguished architectural photographer. Smith's widow, Olive Cook, contributes a valuable Foreword explaining his near religious dedication to a task which he saw as 'worshipping with the eye' and 'offering the praise of my humble craft'.

The 352 black and white photographs were mostly taken with a half-plate bellows camera made by Thornton Pickard in 1904, requiring a tripod, black cloth, and exposures as long as 15 minutes. Taken in the '50s and '60s when there were fewer cars and tourists than now, arid no motorways, they speak of the deep silence then still widespread in the countryside, and are informed by an understanding of ancient crafts and local materials.

Though relying exclusively on existing lighting conditions, Smith was master of light, gravitating to those building parts where the light source lay diagonally in front of him and not behind. A startling image shows Salisbury nave at high level from behind a glossy black Purbeck marble column and capital which dominate the foreground. Published as first of three volumes, it has a text by Lucy Archer including accounts of the structure of English social and religious life in the Middle Ages, a 128pp gazetteer with mans, an illustrated glossary and a bibliography.