Built by Roma Agrawal review – the secret lives of structures

A chatty unravelling of surprising stories behind our built environment by the engineer and campaigner for women in engineering

You might think that cement is cement, whether it's used to hold together the bricks in your house or mixed into the concrete of the great columns that support the Shard. So it could come as a surprise to learn that the Chinese added sticky rice to the mortar of the Great Wall, to give it extra flexibility and avoid cracking; or that the Romans added animal blood to their recipe, believing it made it more resistant to frost; or that the dome of the Taj Mahal is held together with a kitchen-cabinet mixture that included shells, gum, sugar, fruit juice and egg white.

Observations from Agrawal's childhood in Mumbai are mixed with her teenage years wowed by skyscrapers in New York