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In this episode Clive unveils some new research. It’s the result of a coffee shared with his guest in today’s podcast, Nicholas Boys-Smith. Nicholas founded Create Streets, a social enterprise, think tank and urban design consultancy in 2012. The coffee shop was on a schizophrenic part of the street, half of it being Victorian terrace — brick built, repeating classical windows, a lot of variety in the modest shops and cafes as street level — the opposite side of the street having been rebuilt not so long ago in a Modern style of unornamented grey walls and window openings without mouldings. Nicholas commissioned Deltapoll to conduct a visual preference survey, showing a randomly chosen group of over 2,000 people of all ages, backgrounds, ethnicity and geographical location within the UK which they preferred of two options: 1, the street as it is. 2, a photoshop of the street with Modern section replaced by a copy of the 19th-century terrace. The result was conclusive. Only 17% of the sample chose the Modern image, 83% preferred the Victorian one.

People say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but that’s not quite right. There are a lot of aesthetic matters on which most people agree. They would prefer to live in neighbourhoods built as they were in the past, with variety and interest, rather than a Modern development that seems bleak and unfriendly. The results of the survey can be found on the Create Streets website www.createstreets.com. Importantly, this was not a chance result but entirely predictable (indeed he did predict it). Create Streets have undertaken numerous similar projects and the outcome is always the same.

This shines a spotlight on new development. How are developers ever going to convince the public that it is a good thing, when so many people are instinctively opposed to it? The subject stirred in Clive’s mind when he visited the sublime landscape garden of Rousham in Oxfordshire, laid out by William Kent in the 1720s and 1730s. His client General Sir James Dormer was a friend Alexander Pope, himself a keen landscape gardener. The views from it are now threatened by the proposal to build an enormous housing development nearby. What can be done to save it?

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Worcester Cathedral rises above the banks of the River Severn as one of England's great medieval buildings, its honey-coloured stone and soaring central tower dominating the city's skyline much as they have for over nine centuries. Who better to discuss its architecture and history than John Goodall?

Founded in 680 as a monastic community, the earliest fabric of the cathedral dates from a rebuilding begun in 1084 under Bishop Wulfstan, the only English-born bishop to retain his see after the Norman Conquest and later canonised as a saint. His original crypt survives intact, a rare and atmospheric example of Norman architecture that still forms part of the working cathedral.

Yes, yes – we know that during the following four centuries the building was steadily transformed, absorbing Gothic additions in the Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles, so that a walk through its nave and choir amounts to a tour through the evolution of English medieval architecture. But what about the cathedral’s TWO royal tombs? One is that of King John, whose effigy is one of the earliest depicting an English monarch. John died at Newark but chose to be buried here between the shrines of two Worcester saints, Wulfstan and Oswald.

Nearby lies the exquisite Prince Arthur's Chantry Chapel, built for Henry VIII's elder brother, whose early death in 1502 unexpectedly cleared the path to the throne for the future Henry VIII. As Prince of Wales, Arthur had been at Ludlow, the centre of administration for Wales.

Beyond its royal connections, Worcester Cathedral is celebrated for its cloisters, chapter house, and the peaceful green of College Green, as well as for its role as one of the three cathedrals hosting the Three Choirs Festival, the oldest music festival in the world. Its bells, stained glass, and Victorian restorations by Sir George Gilbert Scott add further layers to a building that has survived civil war, Reformation upheaval, and the passage of nearly a thousand years.

What riches for a podcast with John and Clive.

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Everybody in the world has heard of Buckingham Palace. The official London residence of the British monarch, it stands at the western end of St James’s Park, very near St James’s Palace. As well as being used for great occasions of State, accompanied by the daily ritual of the changing of the guard, it was also somewhere that successive kings and queens lived when they were in town. Now the decision has been made for HM the King to move out, giving Clive and John the excuse to consider its evolution as a work of architecture and changing taste.

The architectural story begins in 1703 when the Duke of Buckingham commissioned a house from the soldier-architect William Winde. Winde’s design for Buckingham House, published in Vitruvius Britannicus, would prove highly influential on the development of later Georgian country houses. Little remains to be seen of it now but it set the scale for what came later. In 1761 George III acquired Buckingham House as a private retreat for Queen Charlotte, to which he added several libraries for his famous collection of books: the foundation of the British Library. George IV turned the house into a palace, persuading Parliament to commission John Nash for the purpose. Nash produced a scheme that was both characteristically elegant in concept and slapdash in execution. The old brick building was clad in Bath stone, doubled in size towards the garden front, provided with wings to either side of a central courtyard, whose termination was a triumphal arch – later moved to the top of Park Lane and called the Marble Arch. Nash was by then an old man and the project ran hopelessly over budget. By the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, it also looked impractical: there were too few bedrooms and nurseries. Edward Blore to close the courtyard with a new East Front facing the Mall.

When Victoria died in 1901, after a long reign and with the British Empire at its zenith, a fund was established to remember her. This not only produced the sculptural composition of the Queen Victoria Memorial by the sculptor Sir Thomas Brock on a ronde-point (roundabout) in front of the palace but a revamp of The Mall culminating in Admiralty Arch by Sir Aston Webb – a set piece of imperial town planning. There was even enough money to reface the east front of the palace – work that amazingly was carried out in three months while George V was at Balmoral. Central is the most famous balcony in the world, on which successive generations of the royal family stood to wave to the crowd.

Presumably there will be less waving now, given the palace’s change of function – which is all the more reason to consider it as a work of architecture and art.