Although the texts and the drawings are entertaining and sometimes comic, the book serves a serious purpose: making readers aware of good – and bad – architecture.

[1] Lancaster's Pillar to Post was published in 1938, illustrating and commenting on the exteriors of Western buildings from ancient times to the present.

He added humorous touches to his drawings, such as two Georgian men cheating at cards, a bored Regency man slumped in a deep chair, Victorian aesthetes striking poses, and an actress's gartered and slippered leg emerging from behind a screen in the Edwardian section.

The longest, "Art Nouveau", compares that style with "the flamboyant Gothic of the later Middle Ages" and "mid-eighteenth-century rococo".

In the words of The Sketch: "All England laughed at Osbert Lancaster's satirical fun over architectural styles in Pillar to Post.

In 1959 Murray published Here, of All Places, which in one 190-page volume combines much of the content of both books, with a few sections dropped and many more, particularly on American architecture, added.

[18] The reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement called it "Not only the wittiest introduction to its subject, but one of the most stimulating as well", and The Bookseller commented that nobody else could combine deep learning with wit as Lancaster did.