Jonathan Meades
Jonathan Turner Meades is an English writer and film-maker. His work spans journalism, fiction, essays, memoir and over fifty television films, mainly for the BBC. His most recent novel, Empty Wigs, was published in February 2025.
He has described himself as a "cardinal of atheism" and is both an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society and a Patron of Humanists UK.
Meades was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2019.
Early life and education
Jonathan Meades was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, the only child of John William Meades, a biscuit company sales rep, and Margery Agnes Meades, a primary school teacher. The family lived in an "unbelievably cramped" terraced, thatched cottage in the East Harnham area of the city. Meades was educated until the age of 13 at the nearby Salisbury Cathedral School, within Salisbury Cathedral Close.He discovered a fascination for place and the built environment whilst accompanying his father on sales trips during school holidays; he would be left unattended and free to explore while the elder Meades conducted his business with the grocer. This later developed into a full-blown passion for architecture following a visit to Edwin Lutyens' Marsh Court on a school cricket trip at the age of 13. He also developed an early love of France on the frequent trips which his family took there, made possible by his Francophile mother's father, who worked for Southern Railway, the company which ran the Saint-Malo and Le Havre ferries.
In 1960 he was sent as a boarder to King's College, Taunton, which he has described as "a dim, backward, muscular Christian boot camp". He later "walked out" of the school and was sent instead to a crammer in London, where he lodged with the painter Vivien White, daughter of Augustus John.
After a year at the University of Bordeaux and unsure of what to do next, he decided to become an actor after a chance meeting with Charles Collingwood and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art from 1966 to 1969. His contemporaries there included Robert Lindsay, David Bradley, Stephanie Beacham, Michael Kitchen and Richard Beckinsale. He later described it as a "Sandhurst for chorus boys" where students were "martially drilled", teaching them the value of discipline, craft and technique.
Although he ultimately decided against joining the acting profession, the training which he received would prove essential in his later television career, as would his extra-curricular interest in French New Wave cinema, in particular the work of Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Robbe-Grillet. His regular Sunday pastime of exploring the capital with his Pevsner Architectural Guide would also benefit him later. On leaving RADA, he was told by the Principal, Hugh Cruttwell, that he might as well abandon acting until he reached middle age, at which point he might become an interesting character actor. When the two met again decades later, after Meades had established himself on television, Cruttwell joked that he had not realised that the character would be called "Jonathan Meades".
Writing
Journalism
Following a period as a freelance copywriter, Meades began writing for the literary magazine Books & Bookmen in 1971, setting him on a career as a journalist and critic. In 1973 he reviewed a V&A exhibition on Victorian architecture for the magazine, igniting a passion for the style and prompting him to explore even more of London than he had to date. Using the unlimited travel afforded by Red Rover bus passes, he rode on random buses for 20 minutes and then got off, no matter where he was.After leaving Books and Bookmen in 1975 he wrote for the sex education magazine Curious and joined the staff of Time Out, then became The Observer
In 1981 he became the editor of Richard Branson's short-lived listings magazine Event, then from 1982 was the features editor of Tatler. It was here that he first had the opportunity to write about food, filling in as restaurant critic after Julian Barnes resigned, using the pseudonym "John Beaver". He was also invited to contribute to the bi-monthly restaurant magazine À la Carte around this time. In 1986 he was offered the job of restaurant critic at The Times, replacing comedy writer Stan Hey. Meades was a great success in this position, taking the job more seriously than his predecessor. He won Best Food Journalist at the 1986, 1990, 1996 and 1999 Glenfiddich Awards.
Despite his success, he often tired of the repetitive nature of the job and threatened to leave several times. The paper responded by increasing his salary. He finally quit around 2000, having been pronounced morbidly obese by his doctor: he had put on around five pounds per year, or one ounce per meal, during his tenure. He then managed to lose a third of his body weight over the course of the following twelve months, using a strict diet of protein and citrus. He remained with The Times as a columnist until 2005.
In the years since, he has done less journalism but has contributed essays and reviews to numerous publications including the New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, The Spectator, The Daily Telegraph and The Times Literary Supplement.
Books and other writing
In 1982, Harpers & Queen published three short stories which Meades had written about "rural lowlife". These, along with four more, were collected in 1984 as Filthy English, his first volume of fiction. Andrew Billen of the London Evening Standard later described them as "bucolic horror stories". A few more stories appeared in his first anthology of journalism and essays, 1989's Peter Knows What Dick Likes, the title of which is a reference to the supposed superiority of male-on-male fellatio.He contributed to the screenplay of the 1992 French-Italian adventure film L'Atlantide, directed by Bob Swaim, and also wrote three unproduced screenplays in the 1980s and the 1990s: Millie's Problem, The Side I Dressed On and The Brute's Price.
His first novel, Pompey, was published in 1993. A dark, epic family saga set in the titular city of Portsmouth, it was widely praised and favourably compared to Sterne, Scarfe, Steadman, Nabokov and Joyce, amongst other "great stylists". On its 2013 reissue, Matthew Adams wrote in The Independent, "Where his first collection of stories, Filthy English, achieved the distinction of covering in aggressively vivid prose the disciplines of murder, addiction, incest and bestial pornography, Pompey exhibits an even greater concentration of his aptitude for squalor... by the end of the opening two pages, which must rank among the most startling affirmations of omniscience in 20th-century literature, the reader has met with an arresting injunction: 'After using this book please wash your hands.
A second novel, The Fowler Family Business, followed in 2002. A tale of suburban sexual deceit in the funeral trade, it was described by the London Evening Standard as "hilarious and very black". An anthology of his food journalism, Incest and Morris Dancing: A Gastronomic Revolution, was published in the same year. In a 2010 interview with The Arts Desk, he discussed his work on a third novel.
An anthology of journalism, essays and TV scripts on the built environment, Museum Without Walls, was published by the crowdfunded imprint Unbound in 2012.
Meades' memoir of his childhood in the 1950s and early 1960s, An Encyclopaedia of Myself, was published in May 2014. It was long-listed for that year's Samuel Johnson Prize and won Best Memoir in the Spear's Book Awards 2014. Roger Lewis of the Financial Times said of the work that "If this book is thought of less as a memoir than as a symphonic poem about post-war England and Englishness – well, then it is a masterpiece.".
In 2015, the publisher and record label Test Centre released a spoken word vinyl album by Meades entitled Pedigree Mongrel, consisting of readings from Pompey, Museum Without Walls, An Encyclopaedia of Myself and unpublished fiction, combined with soundscapes created by Mordant Music. The sleeve of the album featured photography by Meades, including an abstract self-portrait on the front cover. Also in 2015, Meades, along with Laura Noble, contributed essays to Robert Clayton's photographic collection Estate, which documented life on the soon-to-be-demolished Lion Farm housing estate in Oldbury, West Midlands in 1990.
A book of "borrowed" recipes, The Plagiarist in the Kitchen: A Lifetime's Culinary Thefts, was published by Unbound in 2017. According to Meades, it is "devoted to the idea that you shouldn't try and invent anything in the kitchen, just rely on what has already been done... I hate the idea of experimental cookery, but I like the idea of experimental literature.".
Isle of Rust, a collaboration with the photographer Alex Boyd featuring text based on Meades' script for his 2009 film about Lewis and Harris, was published by Luath Press in 2019.
An anthology of uncollected writing from 1988 to 2020 entitled Pedro and Ricky Come Again, described as "the best of three decades of Jonathan Meades" and the sequel to Peter Knows What Dick Likes, was published by Unbound in March 2021.
Meades' long-awaited third novel, Empty Wigs, was published by Unbound in February 2025 and received critical acclaim.