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.

In the form of a spoof tourist guide it lampooned greedy and philistine property developers and incompetent and smug local government who between them have gradually spoiled a typical English seaside resort.

[6] Lancaster's biographer James Knox describes Pillar to Post as "a disarming picture-book with a reforming agenda: to address 'the present lamentable state of English architecture' caused by the passivity of the intelligent public who 'when confronted with architecture, whether good, bad or indifferent, remain resolutely dumb – in both the original and transatlantic senses of the word'".

Others have more extravagant headings such as "Pont Street Dutch", "Stockbrokers Tudor" and "By-pass Variegated"; although Lancaster said that some of the more whimsical terms were already in circulation, most were either invented or popularised by him.

[9] On the reverse of the title page Lancaster wrote, "All the architecture in this book is completely imaginary, and no reference is intended to any actual building, living or dead".

For the second edition of the book, published by Murray in 1956, Lancaster added two new sections on more recent architectural styles: "Festival Flats" and "The Wide Open Plan".

"[13] and a reviewer in the US commented that the book "puts more fun and sense into architecture and points out more wearisome nonsense in its mere 87 pages than any rock-heavy trestle we know".

[14] Another reviewer commented on the way Lancaster lampooned the monolithic structures of the Russian communist and German Nazi regimes, which in his caricatures of them were "extremely funny" and "scarcely distinguishable" from each other.

[21] 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.