Thomas Hardy: Conservation Architect: His Work for The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.

This book is a detailed study of sixteen cases, fourteen of them in Dorset, in which Hardy was involved as a life member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. Letters are quoted in full and there are several contemporary photographs. The buildings range from Saint Sophia in Constantinople to churches intimately associated with Hardy, like Fordington and Puddletown, and there are secular buildings too, notably the White Horse at Maiden Newton, a splendid thatched Elizabethan inn (as we see from a photograph in Hardy's possession) which seems to have been wantonly pulled down.

Hardy never practised the profession he had been trained for after he had become …