SEASHAKEN HOUSES

A LIGHTHOUSE HISTORY FROM EDDYSTONE TO FASTNET

TOM NANCOLLAS

Particular Books, 240pp, £16.99

‘It’s a book to make you feel safe on a cold winter’s night. Pour yourself a glass of something warming, sit back and feel thankful you’re not in one of the bizarre structures,’ Mark Mason wrote in the Daily Mail. Bella Bathurst in the Spectator described it as ‘a first-hand travel guide to seven places you almost certainly have no chance of ever visiting ... lighthouses are the only buildings which are specifically designed to be avoided; if you’re up close to a tower light you’re either a maintenance engineer, or you’re a victim of shipwreck.’

Henrietta Mckervey in the Irish

found it ‘a meticulously researched and fascinating account of rock lighthouses around Great Britain and Ireland’. She thought ‘the writing fully comes alive in the asides and anecdotes’ and Mason agreed the book is one ‘of unsettling and sorrowful tales’. Some early projects were greeted with dismay, Mckervey noted: ‘An 18th-century lighthouse scheme was met with indignant opposition from Land’s End residents, unwilling to be deprived of shipwreck booty.’

‘Nancollas is intrepid and persistent’ in visiting these isolated structures, Bathurst noted. As a building conservationist with a love for structure and heritage, he knew ‘what it took...to make buildings capable of withstanding the greatest forces of nature’.

Tessa Hadley in the Guardian concluded, ‘This book is a hymn to the almost superhuman ingenuity, expertise and labour of the men who worked to make the wild seas safer.’