Edwin smith’s photographs capture the beauty of age on buildings, of the patina that time, wear and weather give to metal and stone. Smith (1912-71) is one of the pre-eminent British photographers of the last half of the twentieth century: his pictures of dignified decay give nobility not just to the grand sweeps of monumental architecture but to cottages, walls and tenements. His “most rewarding work”, he wrote, was the photographing of rural parish churches during the 1950s and 1960s – especially for his 1952 book English Parish Churches. He has a trick of showing how intimate and unguarded these old churches are, with their years of worship ingrained in them. John Betjeman, of the same post-Second World War generation of conservation-minded British writers and a