" Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact". - Thomas Huxley
Jonathan Meades was born and brought up in Salisbury. He spent four years at school in Taunton where he learnt about scrumpy and shirking. He subsequently went to RADA. He lived in central London until 2006 when he moved to beyond the back of beyond near Bordeaux in order to devote himself to conversations about combine harvesters. He is the author of several books including three works of fiction - Filthy English, Pompey and The Fowler Family Business - and two anthologies of journalism Peter Knows What Dick Likes and Incest and Morris Dancing. He is currently working on a book entitled An Encyclopaedia of Myself.
Meades has written and performed in some 50 television shows on predominantly topographical subjects such as self-built shacks, the utopian avoidance of right angles, the lure of vertigo, the deleterious effects of garden cities, Birmingham's appeal, and the everyday surrealism of Belgium : some of these are available on The Jonathan Meades Collection DVD.
Magnetic North (2008) - a journey from Flanders to Helsinki - was described by Robert Hanks in The Independent as having ‘a sweep, an intellectual confidence and a sense of mischief you won't find anywhere else on TV. Meades is an artist of television.'
His next book will be published by Unbound, an experiment in crowd-funded publishing. It's a collection of essays entitled MUSEUM WITHOUT WALLS. Subscribe at Unbound.co.uk .
Jonathan has been our guest on Little Atoms five times.
Interview one first broadcast on 3rd March 2006.
Interview two first broadcast on 11th May 2007.
Interview three first broadcast on 31st October 2008.
See also here for Live event with Jonathan Meades and Will Alsop, recorded 19th November 2010 at The Free Word Centre.
See also here for live event with Anna Minton, Alan Penn and Jonathan Meades "Who's Mind is it Anyway? - What's Behind the Built Environment" recorded 13th October 2011 at the Bishopsgate Institute.