Hamilton Parish, Bermuda's Architectural Heritage series, Volume 4 (Bermuda, 2002, Bermuda National Trust, 230pp, boards)

This analytical compendium of the architectural history of Hamilton Parish is nothing less than a superb contribution to the Bermuda historical record.

Virtually every page is filled with fascinating insight; the photographs are well selected and truly representative; the text is crisp and addictive; and the overall effect is to consistently reward the reader for the investment of time.

No volume can offer more.

This is the fourth in the series. Books have been published on Devonshire, St. George's and Sandys.

Research for this volume began in 1996, and 43 volunteer contributors - researchers, photographers, illustrators and readers - carried it along the path to publication.

Diana Chudleigh was the writer and David L. White its editor.

Edward Chappell, director of architectural research for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation of Virginia, acted as architectural consultant and contributed an introductory overview.

Book reviews, like any endeavour, should demonstrate balance, but it would be hard to find the shortcomings of this book, or indeed of the series in which it is merely the latest entrant.

The oversized, laminated volume has the feel of a labour of love; one senses that mere professionalism would not have produced the almost magical quality evident throughout its pages.

So exhaustive is the information, so detailed the approach, that one almost wonders if the subject merits such powerful effort.

Suburban Hamilton Parish, after all, is a few square miles of volcanic real estate essentially in the middle of nowhere.

Yet in these pages a vital tale emerges of its development from picturesque obscurity to the vibrancy of today's semi-central Parish.

Many architectural reviews suffer from the dryness of wood left outside under cover for years.

At fault is the missing human element.

Buildings, and their development, are of interest chiefly to architects, surveyors and students of history.

Buildings demonstrably used by people, together with images of those people, are a far more interesting proposition.

An example: the painting of the wooden bridge at Flatts Inlet that graces the cover of this work tells us much of what was, and is no more.

Yet the photo of Major Reginald Woodifield Appleby, a founder of Appleby Spurling & Kempe, striding purposefully, unbuttoned, across the bridge 90 years later says so much more.

This being an architectural review, the majority of the illustrations are of course of buildings, which is as it should be.

Nevertheless, those who appear in the photographic record contained in this book add immeasurably to its value.

The chief revelation of this volume is how quickly the beauty of Bermuda was decimated (in its literal sense, reduced by 90 percent) by modern development.

The Hamilton Parish and Bermuda so often evidenced in black and white photographs and paintings was essentially intact as late as the 1940s and, arguably, much later still.

In almost no time flat, it has been replaced by the urban sprawl that many consider to blight this charming little Island.

Nowhere is the cumulative effect of unbridled growth better evidenced than in Flatts Village.

The not inconsiderable charms this corner once had have vanished forever with two major developments, both horribly out of scale, without relation to their environment.

These are St. James's Court and the new Palmetto Gardens development currently under construction, which has wrested from Hamilton's Cumberland House the title of Bermuda's ugliest development.

Let us hope that no construction ever comes along to take that crown.

A series of appendices provide the kind of details that Diana Chudleigh, the indefatigable author of this work, could not meaningfully weave into her narrative.

A team of researchers has tracked the ownership of 68 of Hamilton Parish's longest-standing buildings, and an eyeful they make.

Pity those who attempt to follow this volume, and this series, from generations to come.

None will achieve the immediacy, the real flavour and the sheer power of detail that this volume brings to its subject.

It is, immediately, Bermuda's finest record of the development of Hamilton Parish and everyone involved is to be heartily cogratulated. Nothing so warms the soul as work of the highest quality, no matter in what field. This is a volume that deserves pride of place in everyone's library.