Archive for the 'Architecture' Category

Our Austen evening at Moggerhanger

We
have just had a very enjoyable evening at Moggerhanger House in Bedfordshire, where
as a current trustee I had been asked to help develop the cultural profile of
the historic house which has been beautifully restored over a number of years
by the Moggerhanger House Preservation Trust. The trust took on the restoration
from the Christian ministries (Harvest Vision) who gave Moggerhanger a purpose
after it had languished in a state of semi-dereliction after closure as a
hospital. The restoration led by architect Peter Inskip has taken this
masterpiece (designed by one of Britain’s leading architects, Sir John Soane,
one of my great personal heroes) back to something like its original form, with
all Soane’s ingenious, even playful use of space and light. As well being
involved in the trust’s general overseeing of this remarkable house, I have been
asked to help with the furnishing of the rooms, which can still be used for
events. Indeed our proudest achievement has been to furnish over twenty
bedrooms, helped by Jonathan Miles of Trumpington Gallery in Cambridge, with
antiques acquired from auctions and second hand shops: the result is
dazzling; the beds of course are new and very comfy. These can now be used by
conference and wedding parties. We have also re-furnished the old library for
use as a sitting room and introduced new books on architectural history and art
for visitors to enjoy – including our new book of essays on Moggerhanger Park
published in December 2012. We have been thinking of ways to help “curate”
Moggerhanger as a place of cultural resort and, at my suggestion, but with the critically
important help of Mary Burt and the very game Friends of Moggerhanger Park, we held a dedicated
Jane Austen evening at the house – the house was finished 200 years ago last
year, and Pride and Prejudice was
published 200 years ago this year so there is a synchronicity. A kind friend
and theatre director Steve Siddall devised a performed set of readings by the
talented young actress Emerald O’Hanrahan (the voice of Emma in the Archers), with selections from Austen’s
novels, her juvenile writings and letters. This was performed in the Eating
Room, newly restored after a beam had to be replaced, and accompanied with harp
music played by Armande Fryatt, and a performance of Regency dance by costumed
dancers. We were somewhat caught out by the enthusiasm of take-up and were sold
out a week in advance. Chairman of trustees the Countess of Erroll held a
buffet supper at Woodbury Hall for those attending the Austen event, and the whole party had a great
atmosphere: there is no probably better way for a Regency country house of this
character to be than thronged with happy, laughing people enjoying
entertainment and company, with food, music, wine and a sun setting against the
trees of Repton’s park. Emerald was a captivating performer and I think the
event left an impression on the whole audience – and the house too.

Best
Book: Rereading Charles Dickens, David
Copperfield,
wept twice while reading the early chapters.

Best
Exhibitions Seen: Pompeii and Herculaneum at the BM & the Hermitage at
Houghton

Look
out for: my article on Jane Austen and Bonomi in this year’s Georgian Group
Journal, published at the end of May

At Home in the Hilles

April 2013

The highlight of this month was certainly the opportunity to visit Hilles House in Gloucestershire, designed and built by Detmar Blow. It sits on a wonderful elevated position with views across to the Severn valley, and was built in the fullest arts and crafts spirit. It is lived in by his grandson also Detmar, and additional layers of interest have been interested by his mother Helga de Silva, and his late wife, Issy Blow, and the house lives up to its creative origins as a place of retreat for artists , designers and musicians of all sorts. We were entertained by Lavinia Verney, Detmar’s sister in law, and also given advise on family history and the evolution of the building, completed before the first world war and restored after a fire in the early 1950s.

The balance of the manorial solidity of the building, and artistically simple oak boards and stair-treads all speak of the building traditions in which the original Detmar Blow worked, inspired by his friendship with Ruskin, and encouraged personally by Morris and Philip Webb. There was a romantic idealism in his acquisition of a Cotswold property, but he had married a member of the aristocratic Tollemache family and wanted to provide an appropriate home for her also. This is one of the houses where the movement of light around the day transforms the character of every room, every corner. It is a Romantic corner of idealistic England, and I feel quite awestruck and deeply grateful for the day and night I have spent there.

Best Book Read:

The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory by Deborah Alun-Jones

Best Play Seen:

Pitmen Painters at the Cambridge Arts

Best Exhibition:

Piranesi’s drawings at Paestum (see my review in Country Life)

January Thoughts

Cambridge looks pretty good in the snow, but the pavements get alarmingly icy after a while. But it is curious how attractive it makes everything look, different cleaner, more unified. The melting of the snow has left all the fields around Cambridge very wet and the Cam fairly high.

I have been working on my forthcoming book The English Country House Drawing Room, which I am enjoying hugely, tracing the elusive origins of this important room type in inventories and other sources; the book will also include a selection of important drawing rooms in English country houses newly photographed.

Another project took me to the research department of the Imperial War Museum reading the correspondence of a first war officer Lt Col Herbert Trevor, who wrote regular letters home to his parents, Sir Francis and Lady Trevor, I am looking for the references to his home, but am immensely moved by the evidence of a life of full of action, promise and a sense of courage, dreadfully wasted when he is killed in 1917.

One of the threads I followed was the story of the horses he took out from Oxfordshire, and whose health and condition are frequently referred to until they were both killed by the same shell. His parents send out two dogs, who find life at the front quite hard, but are useful ratters. One is smuggled out in a general’s kit bag; much care is taken in trying to get the dogs home.

The handwriting gets increasingly looser as the young officer becomes more and more tired by endless trench warfare, and then a last note to his parents, I am well; then the notice of his death in action. What a terrible waste it all seems nearly a hundred years later. There is something very personal about the letters; it is a privilege to read them. I feel humbled.

Best Play: saw Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at the Vaudeville with Sam West and Anna Friel, hugely enjoyed.

Recent articles: The Liberal Use of Colour: the history of the National Liberal Club and Anyone for Drinks in the Library, both in Country Life magazine.

New Book: pleased to announce the publication of Moggerhanger Park, which I have co-edited with Jane Brown with essays by a group of distinguished authors on the history of this important Sir John Soane designed house

New York, Philly and Milwaukee

Much public speaking in recent weeks, including contributing to the Attingham Trust’s 60 anniversary conference, in which I raised the issue of the future of the sector of historic house museums in local authority ownership, many worrying stories around, and yet I think these include some very important houses and collections and collectively are a major player; a week later I contributed to a debate on “preservation v modernization” at the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican; the latter an especially lively debate, the audience, young and London biased overwhelming not enthusiastic for preservation – at least they said they weren’t; mind you the one person who put his hand for preservation was one of the youngest in the room.

To New York and Philadelphia to lecture for the Royal Oak, on country houses and country sports, a historical review which I hope helped identify the intense identification of these sports and landownership itself, then in terms of how they influence art, architecture and landscape of the English country house. Mid town Manhattan, back to normal after the hurricane, but met some who had seen the devastation on Coney Island etc, include my own cousin who works with the poorest families of the Bronx. I then flew up to Milwaukee I lectured on the English country house, the history of interiors and the story of Kenwood House, at the Milwaukee Museum of Art, in their splendid new building by Calatrava, looking out over Lake Michigan. I visited the extraordinary Ten Chimneys, the preserved home of two Broadway actors, Lynne Fontaine and Alfred Lunt, each room like a stage set of a Noel Coward play – a very amusing and well cared for place.

Best Books Read:
Hugh and Mirabel Cecil, In Search of Rex Whistler
John Fletcher, Gardens of Earthly Deer Park: the history of deer parks

Best Exhibitions
William de Morgan at the Watts Gallery & Hollywood Costume at the V&A, & Bernini terracotta sculptures and the Roentgens furniture at at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and the Lost Prince at The National Portrait Gallery; also enjoyed the Hollywood Costume.

Best Meal Out:
Mele and Pere in Soho

cocktails at the ritz to winning my blades in the Cambridge Bumps

July
On July 4, we celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary with a cocktail at the Ritz and supper at the Wolseley. It doesn’t seem 20 years at all – life has been so full.
On the first weekend of July I contributed to a panel in a conference on amateur theatricals convened by Professor Judith Hawley of Royal Holloway at the London hq of the University of Notre Dame; I am very interested in the different ways in which country houses were used for entertainment and creativity in their history – the day ended with a performance of one of the late Georgian romantic comedies popular in the Regency country house. Papers were wide ranging and scholarly and one of the most surprising was given by Dr Hugh Denard about using digital imaging to recreate the private theatricals performed in an ancient Roman villa.
The following week I had the great excitement of rowing in the Cambridge Town Bumps for the first time in a crew under the aegis of the Champion of the Thames Club, we were the very modest novice-and-new-recruits crew, the 9th Men’s Boat; we have been rowing together as an eight only since Easter (three of us complete novices), but have enjoyed having a goal, and the good offices of Oliver Harwood and David Levien as coaches; we chose the name Automaton in honour of our Greek stroke and our hope that we can row like a robot; we earn a place after our first timed race, and are entered in the Bumps with a new cox, Jane Risdall; we begin at the bottom of the bottom Men’s Division: I am happy to say that we bumped each night, “earned our blades” and on the last day rowed as the sandwich boat in the next division, and bumped again, five bumps in a row something of a club record. This has been one of the proudest achievements of my life – I was not much of a sportsman as a child, too much of a day dreamer and always the last to be picked for teams; I can never thank our coaches or my fellow crew members enough. Our gallant men’s captain, Gez Wynn Story supported us through the week and made a video for anyone who might be amused to see it – this shows the fourth bump which is what you need to do, to “earn our blades”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pagQnf3MJ58&feature=youtu.be

celebrating our crew's first Bump

Winning Our Blades Cambridge Town Bumps 2012

A Comedy of Errors in Farsi

June
June began with a surprising diversion as we were invited to see an all-Afghani Farsi-version of Comedy of Errors performed in the old Palace at Hatfield; simple scene descriptions were projected on the wall so us non-Farsi speakers could follow the plot, which was acted with real power and wit. It was sad to read how the theatrical group, who had performed in the Globe Theatre’s cultural Olympiad, had experienced persecution in Afghanistan because men and women act together on the stage, which is apparently frowned on by extremists. We laughed a lot at the semi-pantomime elements in this most complex of Shakespeare’s comedies – although I naturally did not follow all the jokes that the Farsi speakers in the room did. This was a really extraordinary experience and I was pleased to have dragged the teenage daughters and some other friends who have travelled in the Middle East. This was a month of theatre, as I also went to see my step-brother Hugo Wilson directing an amateur performance of An Ideal Husband in the Compton Village Hall, a curiously potent play about trust and reputation in politics; it’s a very wordy play but I think the cast kept the spirit of the story alive, with its curious mix of tragedy and comedy; a play I had never seen before and thoroughly enjoyed.
Best Exhibitions Seen: The Search for Immortality: Tomb Treasures of Han China at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and Dickens and the Artists at the Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey
Much enjoyed: the spectacle of the Royal Wedding, elegant and unforgettable British ritual, and amused by the couple taking the title the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge

Matters of May

May

One of the highlights of May was attending the retirement event for Brian Allen of the Paul Mellon Centre in London, held at the Royal Academy, a gathering of the art and architectural history world in the “Fine Rooms” at Burlington House; Brian Allen has been the godfather of British art studies for decades and everyone in the room seems to have been touched by his discerning support. In the same fortnight I also managed to get to the launch of Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s new book published by Yale University Press on historic London squares, and catch up with many old friends including Mark Girouard, Simon Bradley, Michael Hall and others.

Much of this month has been devoted to research and writing but travels in May included a visit to Cliveden, the handsome Italianate mansion built in the mid nineteenth century to designs of Sir Charles Barry, and also the former home of the Astors, owned by the National Trust and for some time a grand hotel, now in new management; the view from the terrace is still quite stupendous. When Harold Macmillan was told by a journalist what he thought of Cliveden becoming a hotel said, “it always was, dear boy.” This was a month for great Victorians and I also had a tour of the National Liberal Club designed by the Alfred Waterhouse, which has some wonderfully preserved and evocative interiors, with numerous busts of Gladstone peering down quizzically in almost every room.

I have been immensely proud of my daughters over the past few weeks, the oldest ploughing her way through AS-levels, and the youngest exhibiting a beautiful collage portrait of my late mother in her school scholarship art event, the first in the new art school with was opened by Anthony Green RA – her design for the logo for the new art school was also chosen.

Best Book Read: Collected Works of Saki

Best Exhibition: Picasso and Modern British, Tate Britain, exploring Picasso’s impact on Duncan Grant, Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore at others.

Best Pub visited: The Falkland Arms at Great Tew in Oxfordshire

May

Easter and beyond

Later April, down to Dorset for the annual bucket and spade. I wake early to work on my current book project, a history of a remarkable London house and find that I am absorbed in that other world quite easily despite the distance.

We come to Dorset every year, the same house, the same beach. We usually catch up with some good friends who live down here, and often bump into other friends too. I especially enjoy catching up with architect Stuart Martin and his portrait painter wife, Binny Matthews, and we admire the handsome long room which they have added to their remote farmhouse, with a light-filled painting studio above. I hugely admire Binny’s paintings, which I first saw at Castle Drogo many years ago, where she painted the last Drewe to live in the house.

When down in Ringstead, we spend most of time down on the beach, walking the cliffs or playing lawn cricket with the nephews and niece, and am pleased to catch up with one of my godsons who lives down in Devon. Easter service is up on the cliff as every year, and despite some rain it clears up for the Sunday morning. The rain is a pain! Working on the London house book when we get back and investigating the bombing of central London in 1940, and the extraordinary story of the refugees from Nazism who were interned in 1939/1940 – not a great chapter in English history.

Recent Highlights:

Best Fun: Rowing strokeside with the Champs Rowing Club – especially as the weather improves!

Best Pub Visit: I was very lucky to be able to spend a night at the King John’s Inn in Tollard Royal, elegant and comfortable, with a really excellent menu and wine list; the pub is hung with black and white sporting photographs by Charlie Sainsbury-Plaice who also took the photographs for my collecting column in The Field. Service is down to a fine art here, and the pub is popular with local shooting parties (which explains occasional sightings of pop stars here)
Look out for: My feature on Loseley Park, Country Life, May 20 issue.
My next public lecture is on English Ruins, and is on the evening of June 20 at the Little Shop of Horrors in Hoxton, see link for Hendrick’s lecture series

Hampshire days and a nod to Austen

Blog

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