Six English Towns S01 E06 Ludlow, Shropshire

' Local stone ... bricks baked from the local clays, oaks from the forests ... wherever local materials were used they look right.' Ludlow, in the centre of the Welsh Marches, is probably ALEC CLIFTON-TAYLOR'S favourite small town. It exemplifies precisely his concept of a pattern of building - stone for the church, the bridges and the castle; wood for the medieval houses, often carved with great exuberance as at the Feathers Hotel; plaster for the ceilings, and brick for the handsome houses of the Georgian town. But there are some Victorian shockers in ' polychrome machine-made bricks in jazzy patterns' and the Market Hall, apostrophised by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as ' Ludlow's bad luck.'