I'm with him on cottages and castles, palaces and prefabs, even his jeu d'esprit inclusion of Lutyens' great doll's house for Queen Mary, but I part company with him when he includes Oxbridge colleges (but no other university, I think, saving the castle at Durham) or monastic ruins such as Rivaulx or Fountains Abbeys, or a Victorian gaol. He writes: "My list embraces any structure in which men and women have laid their heads, provided only that they are in some degree accessible to public view". It sounds good, but sorry: a gaol is no more a house than an abbey. Such places have other purposes. I'd expect to find more hotels, though. There are a few, such as the Lygon Arms in Broadway or the Feathers in Ludlow, but they seem to be there mainly because they were once houses. Some people live and die in the Savoy, you know.

The sense of inconsistency grows. The late Sir Denys Lasdun is ticked off for one of his less successful interventions at Christ's College Cambridge, but his entire Fitzwilliam College is unaccountably omitted from the Cambridge list, as are his remarkable residential blocks at the University at East Anglia (recently listed) in that case presumably because they are not Oxbridge. Universities should either be covered properly, or left alone.

Jenkins has a problem with modernism in general. He mentions it only rarely and then nearly always in disparaging terms. He sounds incredulous that the National Trust should have acquired the architect Erno Goldfinger's 1937 house in Hampstead ("Ask not the reason why", he sighs). This is a house built in the first half of the last century. But that is too recent for Jenkins, whose preferred period is broadly Georgian. An entire epoch of English housing - the inter-war period of heroic modernism by Berthold Lubetkin, Amyas Connell, Patrick Gwynne and others, not to mention what came later - is dismissed in a couple of lines. "Modernism's harsh materials of steel, glass and concrete found no response in the English climate or the English temperament," he pronounces. Strange that this very style and these very materials should be so fashionable today.

Here we have a man writing in the 21st century whose chronology of English housing ends with "The Victorians and Beyond". If you go to the promising-sounding section "The Future of the English House", you might expect to find a discussion of emerging design, perhaps in the light of the current mini-wave of new country house building, but you do not. You find instead a general chat about how best to present the old piles to the public. This determined avoidance of the modern is odd, when you consider that the conservation movement in general long ago converted to the cause of historic modernism, including English Heritage, a body of which Jenkins was once deputy chairman. Heavens, even the fogeyish Landmark Trust, rescuer of picturesque domestic ruins, has now taken on and restored a threatened 1970s modern house. But Jenkins' own views on domestic architecture, to judge by this book, remain stuck in the mindset of 30 years ago. Old is good: new (pretty much anything since Art Deco) is bad. Unless it is made to look old, of course.