Simon Thurley

Houses of Power is the result of Simon Thurley’s thirty years of research, picking through architectural digs, and examining financial accounts, original plans and drawings to reconstruct the great Tudor houses and understand how the great Tudor monarchs actually lived. Far more than simply an architectural history – a study of private life as well as politics, diplomacy and court – it gives an entirely new and remarkable insight into the Tudor world.  Simon is our leading architectural historian, a regular broadcaster on television and radio, and was until 2015 the Chief Executive of English Heritage and the government’s principal advisor on the historic environment in England.