Biographical note

Strongly influenced by reading Nikolaus Pevsner's The Buildings of England, architectural review of the country, Grundy has taught at north-east schools since 1970. In the late 1980s he worked for the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission before beginning a more widely recognised career as an architecture writer and television presenter, especially in Northern England. He is a retired lecturer of English Literature at South Tyneside College. John Grundy does live commentaries aboard the Shields Ferry, which cruises up and down the River Tyne from South Shields to Newcastle during the Summer. He is also chairman of the Friends of Beamish. In the late 1990s Grundy co-wrote/edited the new edition of Niklaus Pevsner's Northumberland, part of Pevsner's Buildings of England series. Between 1987 and 1996, John Grundy appeared as a presenter on the BBC North East series, 'Townscape'. He presented the popular 'Town Portraits' which were later transmitted by BBC Two, and were amongst the first films transmitted on BBC International Satellite Television. Steve Robins, who produced all of Grundy's TV programmes from 1999, left Tyne Tees Television in 2005 and founded the production company Working Wonders TV which produced the last series of Grundy's Wonders, and Grundy's Northern Pride. Grundy Goes... (1996-99) broadcast on Tyne Tees partly involved Grundy becoming the interesting historical characters found in the histories of the buildings he visited. Townscape was on BBC One North East & Cumbria. Grundy's Wonders another, longer-running Tyne Tees series, Grundy explored architecture in the north-east, as well as Cumbria and Yorkshire. Grundy's Northern Pride has been broadcast since 2007 in the Tyne Tees and Granada Television regions and covers the same area as Grundy's Wonders plus North West England. Travels with Pevsner is a BBC Four series, an episode of which involved Grundy visiting places visited by Nikolaus Pevsner during his ambitious review of English architecture in the 1950s and 1960s. From 2010 John Grundy has presented a regular series for 'Look North' called 'Grundy's North', aired from BBC North East and Cumbria