Enfilade

From Profile Books:

Madeleine Pelling, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti, Rebellion, and the Making of Eighteenth-Century Britain (Profile Books, 2024), 352 pages, ISBN: 978-1800811997, £25.

What if walls could talk? For historian Madeleine Pelling, they can—if you know where to look. Hear the voices of the eighteenth century in this eye-opening new history of Britain’s most tumultuous period, told through its graffiti.

A brilliant new cultural history of the long eighteenth century, Writing on the Wall is told through the marks its citizens left behind, bringing into focus lost voices from the highest to the lowest in society. From the centre of London to the islands of the Caribbean, Pelling goes in search of graffiti, evidence of how ordinary people experienced the world-changing events that defined their lives—from political prisoners to sex workers, homesick sailors, Romantic poets, and the artisans of the industrial revolution. Here are lives, loves, triumphs, and failures, scratched into the walls of prisons and latrines, chalked up on doors, and etched into windows. The names of their creators may be lost to history, but together they tell the real story of Britain’s most rebellious and transformative century.

Madeleine Pelling is a cultural historian, author and broadcaster. She holds a PhD from the University of York and has held research fellowships at the universities of Yale, Edinburgh, and Manchester.  She is co-host of History Hit’s After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal, a podcast that shines a light on the shadier corners of the past and which brings a rigorous historical lens to folklore and true crime. She is also a regular contributor for television, most recently for Titanic in Colour (Channel 4, 2025), Mayhem! Secret Lives of the Georgian Kings (2025), Queens that Changed the World (Channel 4, 2023), and Who Do You Think You Are? Australia (Warner Bros, 2023). Her words appear in The Guardian, The Independent, BBC History Magazine, and History Today.

From W.W. Norton:

Lee McColgan, with a foreword by Roy Underhill, A House Restored: The Tragedies and Triumphs of Saving a New England Colonial (New York: Countryman Press, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1682688366, $25.

Shop Class as Soulcraft meets A Place of My Own in this lyrical meditation of a woodworker steadfastly repairing a historic home.

Old houses share their secrets only if they survive. Trading the corporate ladder for a stepladder, Lee McColgan commits to preserving the ramshackle Loring House, built in 1702, using period materials and methods and on a holiday deadline. But his enchantment withers as he discovers the massive repairs it needs. A small kitchen fix reveals that the structure’s rotten frame could collapse at any moment. In a bathroom, mold appears and spreads. He fights deteriorating bricks, frozen pipes, shattered windows, a punctured foundation, and even an airborne chimney cap while learning from a diverse cast of preservationists, including a master mason named Irons, a stone whisperer, and the Window Witch. But can he meet his deadline before family and friends arrive, or will it all come crashing down? McColgan’s journey expertly examines our relationship to history through the homes we inhabit, beautifully articulating the philosophy of preserving the past to find purpose for the future.

Lee McColgan has worked on Boston’s Old North Church, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, and other buildings. His work has appeared in Architectural Digest, The Boston Globe, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives with his wife in the Loring House in Pembroke, Massachusetts.