My interest in medieval church towers was first sparked when I began my career as an architect. Our training included spending time at an art college, and it was here that I first discovered the history of architecture, studying buildings from the Temple of Khonsu at Karnak to Eero Saarinen's Design Dome, by way of St Paul's Cathedral, Blenheim Palace, and nineteenth-century cotton mills! However, my attention was always most held by buildings from the Middle Ages – and particularly religious buildings.

After retirement (partly prompted by the enforced introduction of computer-aided design), I was able to spend more time investigating these wonderful buildings, and towers in particular, with the help both of Pevsner's Buildings of England and the navigational skills of my wife, Kathleen. The watercolours in this book are the fruits of my explorations in the ecclesiastical province of York (comprising the dioceses of Blackburn, Carlisle, Chester, Durham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, Southwell and Nottingham, and York); they cover an area stretching from Ancroft (Northumberland) in the north to Stanford on Soar (Nottinghamshire) in the south, and from Dearham (Cumbria) in the west to Easington (Yorkshire) in the east.

The reproductions of my paintings are accompanied by text extracted and adapted from the National Heritage List for England and I am grateful to Historic England for kindly granting permission to reproduce this material.

The National Heritage List text entries contained in this material were obtained on 10 November 2016 and are © Historic England 2016. The most publicly available up-to-date National Heritage List text entries can be obtained from http://www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/ the-list/.