Concrete

By: Stephen Parnell

Narrated by: Matt Addis

Bloomsbury presents Concrete by Stephen Parnell, read by Matt Addis.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

Concrete has an image problem. Portrayed as boring, cheap, and thoughtless, it is often considered synonymous with bad architecture. For many, concrete is architecture gone wrong – dogmatic, ugly, and as miserably grey as English drizzle.

Stephen Parnell’s Concrete is an apologia of concrete, second only to water as the world’s most consumed material. From the personal, intimate scale of jewelry to the monumental scale of Brutalist architecture, Parnell explores the personality of concrete and how it is embedded and embodied in everyday and familiar objects. He revels in concrete’s ambiguity and contradictory qualities, from its sensitivity to the tiniest imprint to its immense compressive strength in hydroelectric dams, and traces how concrete is both the ultimate unaesthetic material as well as the quintessential building block of modernity.©2026 Stephen Parnell (P)2026 Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Critic reviews

Concrete has been accused of crimes from vulgarity to enabling the climate crisis. Parnell has assembled an excellent, nuanced case for its defence, arguing incisively for a richer understanding of this most divisive and paradoxical of substances, but also for both it and its creators to urgently change their ways.