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A Hampshire theme emerged recently on my research travels, with more than one visit to one of the areas of my youth, including a trip to Chawton near Alton to see the Jane Austen House Museum and Chawton House, the manor house owned by Jane Austen’s brother, Edward Knight; I was lucky enough to be there on a glorious sunny afternoon and enjoyed a tour of the house Jane Austen shared with her sister, mother and friend Martha Lloyd, the security of which allowed her to resume her writing (thronged with visitors from the US). We used to glimpse Chawton on the drive back to school when I was a teenager.

The pale, stone manor house and the church form a very English picture and are only a few minutes walk away from the cottage museum. This is open less to the public, although there are regular tours and I enjoyed a detailed personal tour of the house which is owned by a trust and the home of a centre devoted to early women’s writing, which has carried out an exemplary restoration.

I was back to the same county a week later giving a talk to the National Trust Winchester Association on the interior decoration of great country houses from Hatfield onwards; there was a very enthusiastic audience and also a chance to meet up with some old friends who live nearby, and who provided wonderful hospitality, also as it happened in a romantic old rectory.

This month, I was also honoured to be asked to be President of the Friends of Croome Park in Worcestershire, the Capability Brown landscape which is now owned by the National Trust. The trust has also recently taken on a long lease of the mansion house too, designed by Brown around an older house, Adam added some fine ceilings and the Tapestry Room long in the Metropolitan Museum in new York. My visit last week was also blessed with glorious fine weather, although it had the effect of blurring the outline of the Malvern Hills, thus spoiling the effect for which Mr Brown so earnestly strove.

Recent Highlights:

Most inspiring charity work encountered: fundraising and welfare work for “the Rifles, Care for Casualties”: www.careforcasualties.org.uk,
supporting British Army riflemen and their families, especially those who have suffered casualties, injuries or stress in the Afghanistan campaign.

Best Lecture Heard: Lord Edward Manners on Haddon Hall Derbyshire, part of the John Cornforth Memorial Lecture series held at Christies; a through and amusing account of this wonderful and complex country house.

Best TV documentary: BBC Four on Ashile Gorky, very beautiful and thoughtful programme made by his grand-daughter Cosima, who I knew when she was 12 in Tuscany in 1984.

Best Book Read: Jose Saramago, Blindness, recommended by a Fellow of Queens, a riveting Dantesque and Orwellian story.

Look out for:

After dinner speech on “Travels Round Country Houses” at the AGM, evensong, reception and dinner for the Order of St Etheldreda, the Friends of Ely Cathedral; Friday March 30, from 5.30.

my forthcoming feature on Loseley Park in Country Life in the May 20 issue.

My lecture on Ruins, June 20 at the Little Shop of Horrors in Hoxton, see link for Hendrick’s lecture series

Working on projects in Winchester and then near Tisbury, so stayed the night with old friends Olly and Camilla Akers-Douglas in their beautifully restored farmhouse; Camilla is a writer and editor, who I have known for years, and Olly is a talented landscape painter newly associated with the Portland Gallery. He has a splendid remote studio carved out of a large barn

Back via London, so I was able to visit the celebrated Leonardo da Vinci exhibition at the National Gallery, which brought together so many interesting paintings and important preparatory drawings and demonstrated the technical and intellectual depth of Leonardo as a painter. It focuses especially on his role as a court painter to the Duke of Milan and how this gave him the freedom to concentrate on his art. This wonderful exhibition was expertly curated by Luke Syson – he has now just moved to the Metroplitan Museum of Art In New York.

I also recently visited Rockingham Castle in preparation for a feature that I am writing for Country Life, to be published in february It was a splendidly wintry day, which seemed rather fitting for this picturesque old house. Rockingham has a dramatic 14th-century gatehouse, but once you pass through the gate the house you see is mostly as rebuilt in 16th century – with parts remodelled by Salvin in the mid 19th century. I am interested in Charles Dickens’ visits here, the amateur dramatics and readings, and the inspiration he drew from the house and garden when creating Chesney Wold, the seat of the Dedlocks in Bleak House. This was a house that he loved, and he was close to Richard and Lavinia Watson who were his hosts.

Cambridge has been looking very lovely in the snow, although it did all come down very quickly in a huge storm while we were all out to supper on Saturday with my father and stepmother at Loch Fyne opposite The Fitzwilliam Museum. I had spent the day contributing to a study day on Oliver Messel at the Victoria and Albert Museum which had all the contributors speaking; Stephen Calloway very good on the Bright Young Things, Sarah Woodcock on his theatre and Keith Lodwick on his film set and costume design. I very much enjoyed the event and there was an excellent showing of young theatre design students.

Best Books Read this month:
Claire Tomalin Charles Dickens: A Life
John Martin Robinson Felling the Ancient Oaks

Best Lecture heard: Paul Crossley, Slade Lectures

Important date: January 28th, is Archie the Jack Russell’s 4th birthday

Recent articles:

Feature on country house theatres and amateur theatricals, Country Life, in December 7, 2011
Interview with Chris Cole, compass collector in the The Field magazine, February 2012 issue, and interview with Dr Michael Darby, beetle collector, in The Field March issue
Interview with Lady Emma Barnard about life at Parham, in Sussex, The Lady, Jan 27, 2012

January 2012

Down to Cheltenham Literary Festival to take part in a panel discussion on the Edwardian Country House with Lucinda Lambton and Dan Cruikshank. It is a most beautiful day and I am a little jealous of the race goers for the opening National Hunt event at Cheltenham race course, but am very well looked after by the Festival and given lunch in the writers room, one of a number of festive tents in Montpellier Gardens. We have a delightful audience of over a thousand, very enthusiastic with lots of good questions – how would these houses have smelt? was my favourite. I enjoy panels because you can’t prepare too hard and it is like a conversation between friends and creates interesting cross-currents. Dan talks about Marsh Court which is a wonderful Lutyens house and Lucinda Lambton about the extraordinary characters of this period – the eccentric millionaires, industrialists and dukes. I think the Edwardian country houses hold a special place in people’s imagination because it was the last era of luxury. On Saturday, up early for more novice rowing training, and arrive by the boathouse to see a glorious sun pouring through mist rising from the frost on Midsummer Common – what a sight!

At the beginning of July, I went down at West Dean to deliver a lecture to the Attingham Summer School made up of international, and many American, curators, architects and art historians, as well as people working for the National Trust and some of the great private collections, and they do an intensive course visiting great houses and collections both National Trust and privately owned.
They are always an excellent and interested audience, I enjoyed talking to scholars from India, America, Australia, the Netherlands, and wish I could follow their tour just more just for the benefit of their cross-fertilisation of ideas. Staying with my father and his wife in Guildford, on the way back, we discussed the article I had written for The Lady on the excellent restoration of the Watts Gallery, which lies only a few miles away, the gallery built by G.F.Watts “England’s Michelangelo”, the nineteenth century painter, in a shady woodland in Compton.

In London, a few days later, I was able to attend private view of Devotion by Design at the National Gallery, an excellent show of Italian altar paintings from before 1500, drawn almost exclusively from the gallery’s own collection. It is full of stunning treasures, including work by Piero della Francesca, Fra Filippo Lippi and Luca Signorelli. The gallery has been lit in an atmospheric gloom to suggest those medieval churches in Italy where these paintings came from – while the paintings themselves are lit carefully to show all the changes in style, technique and construction in this rich and changing period from the late middle ages to the early renaissance. During this period, the altarpainting developed from the complex and deeply venerated image with numerous saints and scenes from the life of Christ to the larger scale, single subject altar-painting of the renaissance. These were the most admired of works when the National Gallery collection was formed.

As we hurried away in the pouring rain, we admired the pluck of the youngsters camping out days before the Harry Potter premiere. I thought of them this morning as I rowed in an eight for two hours in the pouring rain. Well, it is England in July.

Best book read this month
fiction: John Buchan Greenmantle
non fiction: Sir Roy Strong Visions of England
Best meal: wedding anniversary supper at The Cambridge Chop House
Articles to note: James Birch collection of Christine Keeler in next month’s The Field
Best event: ordination of college friend Justin Gau at St Pauls Cathedral

My recent travels have been enhanced by a visit to Chatsworth to work on research for a feature in Country Life and the opportunity to see the new exhibition space, just off the service room off the Great Dining Room, and to see the delightful exhibition curated by Hannah Obee, devoted to the character and the collecting of the 6th Duke, the son of the famous Georgiana and the Regency connoisseur who transforms the character and most importantly the comfort of the great house at Chatsworth. I am also lucky to spend some time looking at other aspects of the early nineteenth century Wyattville work to the house with director of collections, Matthew Hirst. At Chatsworth, there is always more to discover and more to understand. The exhibition includes a number of captivating portraits of the 6th Duke’s pet dogs, one of which used to travel in his coach when he visited Italy, and a collection of the menus he collected at famous banquets to show to his own cooks, as well as letters, paintings, jewels and bills – its well worth a detour between the Great Dining Room and the superlative Statue Gallery.

The following week I am in York, lecturing to the York Consortium of Craftsmen and women and Conservators, on “English Ruins” and am very well looked after by Peter Brown, who arranges for a tour to see, among other things, the new carved stone work on York minster, and also the conservation of the stained glass in the adjoining workshop, both of which are breathtaking in different ways – we are blessed that such skills exist in the modern age. My talk is at ‘The Merchant Adventurers Hall’ and I am given a very jolly dinner by the organisers and meet old friends including, Michael Stannicliffe, architect for York and St Pauls, and Dick Reid the carver, whose York workshop set such a high standard in carving for so many years. They also put me up for the night in Middlethorpe Hall, one of the HHH group, now owned by the National Trust – a really delightful place, I sink into an armchair and read about Elizabethan literature before going to bed, and feel as if I am in a well appointed private house.

Otherwise my researches for various projects have embraced eighteenth century lady gardeners, the abolition of the slave trade, the Boer war and the tastes of the Indian princes between the wars and much much more – I still find it difficult to believe some of the stories about the Maharajah of Alwar, deposed in 1933. Never, I am pleased to report, a dull moment.