Jonathan Meades occupies a cult status in certain corners of British culture. It is not without reason that the vast, online repository of his films, lovingly uploaded by an anonymous Samaritan, is called the Meades Shrine. Here you can find over forty films about architecture and culture, made between the late 1980s and the late 2010s, all produced by the BBC. This explosion of internet Meades-philia coincided with the release of ‘Bunkers, Brutalism and Bloodymindedness’ in 2014, perfectly lining up with a cultural boom that spanned from the ‘Brutalism Appreciation Society’ on Facebook to the horrible pencils in the Barbican Centre gift shop. Meades recently confirmed that there won’t be any more films to join the collection, with the closure of BBC 4’s commissioning process. It is a sad reflection on the state of British television that one of the only two white men (alongside Adam Curtis) allowed to make interesting documentaries is no longer able to.

So, why does this body of documentaries inspire such affection? Evidently, a lot of this has to do with ‘Meades’ the character. In his perennial costume of dark three-button suits and sunglasses, like a kind of brutalism-loving Blues Brother, he speaks to the camera, he tells us about buildings, and he talks about them in a way that few people have been allowed to do on television. Meades pilots this ‘self-caricature’ with aplomb: with his healthy scepticism towards established voices of authority; a position outside of consensus and a constant return to personal experience through purportedly autobiographical anecdote, which constructs a way of seeing the world into which the viewer can be initiated.

The instinct for architectural autobiography is there from the very start with Meades on TV. One of his first appearances on the BBC was in a 1988 episode of Building Sights, discussing Edwin Lutyens’ inscrutable Hampshire country house Marsh Court. The piece starts with a young boy in cricket whites, who veers off the green and strolls through the lush gardens of Gertrude Jekyll. Meades confides that he himself ‘came here with my own school’s resolutely underachieving second eleven… I got my usual duck, that gave me the opportunity to explore these unfamiliar grounds and the house set in them.’

It becomes clear that we are in the 1950s of Meades’ childhood. The camera follows one of the boys, complete with pads and bat, retracing the steps of the once-youthful presenter. This sense of a palimpsest, of Meades in the late 1980s narrating over the re-enactment of his own experience in the 1950s, is a core part of his project, which is concerned with how we subjectively perceive the buildings that make up the world around us. This conceit is layered into Meades’ architectural commentary, as Marsh Court itself is not designed to appear as one singular building from a singular moment – it is temporally dislocated and deliberately muddled with different scales, the styles of different eras creating a sense of what Meades calls ‘a game played in earnest’ that recurs in Meades’ retelling of this ur-scene in his love of architecture.

Variations on this origin myth recur throughout Meades work: another moment of youthful revelation included discovering a gardener had died of tetanus contracted through a rose thorn growing over a burial ground in Salisbury, a moment of realisation that ‘the very earth was contaminated by the chemical ghosts of millennia, the past was present… I began to get it.’ Over the course of the films we too are invited to ‘get it,’ to adopt Meades’ idiosyncratic and contrarian way of looking at and thinking about the past, about architecture.

Meades is a connoisseur, but also an iconoclast and a detester of taste used to stymie pleasure. This is why he keeps returning to a primal scene of architectural engagement, most notably in ‘Father to the Man’, where the camera colludes in returning us to a state of innocence, to that feeling of experiencing the world around us for the first time. We experience the Hampshire villages which Meades explored with his father—a travelling biscuit salesman—through the medium of low, lumbering shots, with signage half-glimpsed through gaps in fences and the ordinarily legible streetscape transformed into a warren of incomprehensibility. The disorientating experience of the built environment for children is of course a product of the fact that most of it was designed by adults, for adults. Meades’ imaginative leap here is a fundamentally empathetic one, asking: when we comprehend and critique architecture, whose perspective are we viewing it from? What assumptions do designers make about the subjectivity of the end user, and how can design be made to work more effectively for people often left out of decision-making?

The child’s perspective becomes a blank slate from which Meades questions the economic, social, and political networks of power that underpin questions of aesthetic taste. The perspective of architectural Englishness as ‘idyllic villages and mellow cathedral cities’ is the result of a conspiratorial effort in which ‘English Heritage, the National Trust, the television industry, the postcard industry’ are all complicit. The criminal consequence of this conspiracy, in Meades’ view, plays out through his work, in our failure to see value in the built environment of places like Portsmouth Dockyard, or post-bypass Birmingham. The evident democratising effect of this view is to advocate for the value of the places where the majority of people live, rather than the places whose aesthetics can be commodified by nostalgic idolisers of a certain vision of Englishness.

The vox pop becomes a tool in the documentaries for Meades to question what we mean when we talk about public taste in architecture – a vexed concept much abused by methodologically unsound public polling carried out by the reactionary right. In ‘Remember the Future’, a re-appraisal of the large-scale infrastructural architecture of the 1960s, local residents reflect on the gargantuan white-hot impositions on their bucolic countryside with warm positivity. ‘Mr & Mrs Miller’ describe their neighbour, Drax power station, as an unremarkable and natural part of the landscape. Elsewhere, an anonymous couple standing in front of the ‘golf balls’ at the RAF Menwith Hill radar array are given free rein with a standard issue Countryside Alliance complaint: ‘I think it’s an intrusion into our beautiful countryside… an eyesore.’ The camera pans to a CND protest complete with placards and caravans, and it becomes clear that the couple’s objection is not to the sublime radomes, but rather the protest against them. ‘Oh the golf balls! They’re quite impressive, I think they’re really quite attractive.’ Here we’re unpicking the pathologies of taste, bourgeois obsequiousness to the visual supremacy of the Anglo-American security state, and all at 8pm on BBC 2!

The other thing that marks these documentaries out from the dominant forms of televisual documentary-making is the active role the camera plays in forming the arguments that Meades is making. In ‘Get High’, we are invited to interrogate the vertigo-inducing interiors of post-modernist commercial development. Meades enacts his terror as he grips the metalwork of CZWG’s ‘Cascades’, or the camera floats out over the internal atrium of Ralph Erskine’s Ark in Hammersmith to the malevolent strings of the Cape Fear soundtrack. These are not the static shots of composed vistas, or the interminable forward-walking monologue to camera that dominate mass-market TV documentary film today, but an exemplar in using the camera to make your argument, in this case to embody a subjective perspective of the built environment.

This focus on embodied perception of these verti-philic interiors, and the use of the camera to enact it on film, enables Meades to make a subtle and under-considered point about postmodern public spaces like these. Namely that the visceral experience of height has become a commodified experiential selling point in recent commercial architectural projects:

Now that tall buildings have returned, they embrace the possibility of being dangerous playgrounds as well as offices, flats, or whatever. They pander to vertiphilia by making it a sensory service feature, along with air conditioning, toilets etc. The difference being that air conditioning and toilets are more or less necessities, whilst blister lifts, suicide friendly atria, sheer glass walls and hanging gardens, are not.

This is why Meades is such a vital figure in architectural criticism. All too often architectural critics concentrate on the potential symbolic meaning of a building’s form, without really grounding that analysis in the most important way that architecture impacts our daily lives: as a tool that structures the spaces that we move through on a daily basis, and structures our perceptive and emotional connections to the world around us.

As well as revelling in the power of the camera, and the central importance of subjective experience, the programmes also revel in language, as Meades has always done throughout his work. He satirises the jargon that justifies cultural regeneration projects like Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim (‘if architecture is frozen music, Gehry is easy-listening for those who despise easy listening. Talking Heads in Titanium’) by adopting a ludicrously heightened version of the dialect of the regeneration industry, who are depicted in the film wearing bizarre masks standing round a fire, likening their faith in the power of cultural regeneration to a primitive, pre-modern system of ritualism.

These guru guys who coalface at the coalface of armageddon decisions instigating tough paradigms and vision inclusions in big thought canopies. They brainstorm, like they’re fire-bombing Dresden… Then they announce that the site-bite will contain a museum and gallery and cultural logarithm, with conference facilities for the regenerative community… a catalyst for economic growth and social progress. Why? Silly question. Because culture is good… the new, accessibly accessible fun-style fun arts.

Meades goes further than just a perfect skewering of the language of PR-led cultural regeneration, acutely diagnosing the social and political ramifications of inner-city Britain, through gentrification and developer ruthlessness, at a time when mainstream architectural coverage struggled to see past the colourful promises of these regeneration projects. As Meades pithily put it, ‘within a few decades inner city Britain will start to resemble inner-city Europe. The inner city will cease to be an epithet for social woes… this is what the European model means. No riots within the ring road.’

Meades’ work is laced with a desire to ironise and satirise. Sometimes jokes are made at the expense of buildings, such as in ‘Absentee Landlord,’ where the architectural choices of the twentieth-century Church serve as punchlines in visual jokes that can only work on film. The camera often colludes in these jokes through visual misdirection – in one shot Meades is shown walking down some steps, but as the view zooms out, it reveals that he is actually on the roof of a church. Similarly a firefighter is shown running up a concrete spiral staircase, reminiscent of a freestanding fire station drill tower, only for the crane shot to move backwards, revealing Meades and a team of firefighters watching the fire fighter ascending the campanile of a modernist church.

There is undeniably an echo of Jacques Tati, the modernist critique developed across films like Mon Oncle and Playtime, where modernist architectural elements are used as punchlines in slapstick jokes that distinctly recall silent cinema. However, unlike Tati, Meades’ visual jokes are not made at the expense of modernism per se, but specifically at the expense of modernist church architecture. This is deeply bound up with his trenchant atheism. He compares these buildings as ‘exercises in pure form,’ to other modernising tendencies in the church: ‘agnostic clergy, and vicars with electric guitars trying and failing to reclaim the best tunes.’

The wry tone works by presenting what Meades proclaims to be wholly tautologous – a modern Christianity, an unachievable necessity. The stairways to nowhere, and the misplaced fire station’s tower, signify a church struggling to represent itself, to find an architectural form of its own that replaces the forms of the past. Meades reflects, ‘I don’t want to meet God, not after what I’ve said about him,’ but the ultimate conclusion of ‘Absentee Landlord’ is that architectural form has agency within culture, and expresses ideological or ideational struggles, and should therefore be taken seriously, even while making jokes.

Meades’ work is undeniably political, and his political views are always iconoclastic. They’re grounded in a disregard for the views of in-groups, a willingness to slay sacred cows and a staunch atheism that occasionally draws him into self-contorted positions. He is undeniably beloved of a certain shade of the left, sufficient to prompt inclusion in an infamous description of the archetypal millennial left Londoner. It is difficult not to see ‘Remember the Future’ as an exemplary piece of early hauntology, imagining and yearning a world where we never grew cynical and timorous about nuclear power stations and mass housing, where a muscular white-hot state with a 95% top marginal rate of income tax felt untrammeled in shaping the fabric of the natural world and the lives of its citizenry. But his is a politics with its tongue consistently and firmly lodged in its cheek. In ‘Remember the Future’, he wields a ‘Tonybennometer’, a device designed to objectively measure the white hot heat of a given project. Happily he finds that Emley Moor broadcasting mast, formerly the highest structure in Europe, registers a maximum ten ‘Tonybenns’, by stark contrast to the brutalist housing estates colourfully reclad, dormer and bay windowed to regenerate them in line with the priorities of the 90s, which prompt not a single peep from the ‘bennometer’.

There is much to learn from Meades in the way we talk about architecture and the built environment. He takes a thrill in language, in taking the piss out of the pretentious, but he’s also profoundly concerned with what it is actually like to experience buildings, how people make sense of the world around them. The documentaries are exemplary exercises in what film can do to heighten and develop our understanding of architecture. They champion the unloved and the under-considered landscapes of Britain, while being deeply funny and not taking themselves too seriously. It seems a profound shame that I can’t for the life of me imagine any major television network commissioning something like that today.