Published in 2001, Christopher Woodward's In Ruins has for me become one of those books that I feel a yearning to reread at least once every year. Effortlessly beautiful prose that seamlessly stitches the closing scenes of Planet of the Apes ("Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!") to the competition that led to the magnificent poem Ozymandias ("My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"), Woodward's book explores the enduring appeal of ruins through a myriad sequence of anecdote, history, literature and art. I defy anyone to read the sequence that describes the variety of plant life found in the Colosseum in the 19th century and the explanation of how it may have got there without being moved. This is history writing at it's very best: encapsulating a whole era and civilisation with one perceptive and inciteful connection.

What does the modern tourist see when he or she walks around the sand blasted, health and safety roped modern 'ruin' equipped with their audioguide? History repackaged, cleaned up, preserved in an archaeological limbo. When Paul Nash stumbled across the fallen stones of Avebury he made a visceral connection with the place, a connection you would struggle to make in the Avebury of today (the stones are now upright, tidied up, spic & span), they are (horror of horrors) 'educational'. Woodward's contention is that ruins are organic, living things, they are fleeting and should be allowed to decay. Let the Colosseums of yesterday become the building stones of today, enjoy them while you can, but let them grow old (dis)gracefully.