Warwickshire

Warwickshire's buildings generally reflect a comfortable, well-to-do feel. Stratford-on-Avon is an excellent place to see the buildings of a late medieval and Georgian country town. The great medeival fortresses of Warwick and Kenilworth Castles are among the leading exemplars of their type. The superb range of country houses and landscaped gardens extends from the medieval perfection of Baddesley Clinton, and picturesque Compton Wynates to the eighteenth-century sophistication of Packington Hall. Birmingham and Coventry are major cathedral cities (though neither is anything like the conventional picture of an English cathedral). The nineteenth-century buildings of Birmingham, religious, civic and commercial, are outstanding in their quality and variety, while Coventry is one of the most imaginative examples of a twentieth-century city centre rebuilt after wartime destruction.