To take a walk around the mid-century houses bounded by Silverdale Road, Andrews Road and Crawford Close in Earley, Reading, is to walk with ghosts.

On the face of it, they are rows of very normal residential homes, but underneath are the remains of a vast mansion where one of Victorian England’s greatest ever rags-to-riches stories played out.

Solomon Joel was born in 1866, in Whitechapel's then poverty-stricken slums. His parents, Joe and Kitty, ran the long-since-demolished King of Prussia pub from a yard on Middlesex Street — colloquially known as Petticoat Lane.

The young Solly, his older brother, Woolf, and younger brother, Issac were intelligent and diligent — qualities that inspired Kitty’s brother, Barney Barnato, to pluck them from poverty and have them join him at his new company, mining for diamonds and gold in South Africa. Joel was just 15 years old when he left his parents.

Seventeen years later, Joel found himself unexpectedly in charge of the family firm when Barnato went overboard on a ship travelling from Southampton to South Africa. A year later, in 1888, Woolf was murdered in a blackmailing gone very wrong.

These tragic circumstances saw 32-year-old Joel, along with his brother, Issac, inherit a not-so-small fortune of £1,228,659, 18 shillings and five pence (about £143 million today).

By now Joel was at the helm of Barnato Brothers, a director at De Beers and chairman of the Johannesberg Consolidated Investment Company. He had a swift dalliance with politics which didn’t end particularly well (he was briefly incarcerated) before deciding, in 1903, to use some of his money to put down roots in England, and dedicate more time to his real passion — racing.

Joel purchased Maiden Erlegh, a small, 14th-century mansion, largely rebuilt in 1878, and situated on the fringes of Reading.

He wasted no time changing the property, vastly extending it to include more than 70 bedrooms, tennis courts (grass and hard), a cricket field, a six-and-a-half-acre lake and a croquet lawn. His pièce de résistance, however, was a lavish, barrel-vaulted, Pompeiian-style Italian marble swimming bath, complete with marble columns, risqué frescoes and a family crest mosaic at the bottom of the pool.

Outside, the ornamental gardens were dotted with neo-Classical temples. It was said that Joel's main reason for such lavishness was so he could create employment in an area where unemployment was rife. He also donated 20 acres of land to the National Playing Fields Association.

For himself, Joel founded the Maiden Erlegh Stud Farm, whose champion foals would go on to win, among others, The Derby and The St Leger Stakes.

When he died in 1931, aged 65, he was worth just £1 million, 40% of which was due in death taxes. Maiden Erlegh was quickly put up for sale.

The lavish interiors were sold at auction on December 7, 1931, by Knight, Frank & Rutley. There were 1,762 lots, including pieces of Chippendale furniture and original artworks by Canaletto, Constable and Gainsborough, fire extinguishers and plants from the garden.

The 470-acre estate, house and stud farms were advertised as 'Ripe for Immediate Development'.

The Reading Standard was worried, writing in early 1932 that there would be: '...very real risk of undesirable developments... It would be deplorable of the next few years should see the estate, or any considerable portion of it, transformed at the hands of speculative builders, into streets or avenues of houses.'

The house was sold to Captain T. S. Waterlow Fox in February for £25,000 (about £1.5 million) who used it a boys school until 1942. It was subsequently used as a training college by the Church Army, a conference centre by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and, finally, a sanctuary by Hungarian refugees of the 1956 Soviet invasion.

In March 1960, now in the hands of new speculators, the bulldozers reared their ugly arms. The Reading Standard’s fears were about to become reality.

Parts of Maiden Erlegh still exist. The lake is still there, as is Joel's beloved stud farm, though there are reports that the land is haunted by a ghostly horse. The swimming baths — photographs of which survive in Reading Museum's archive — was shipped to the Caribbean by artist Elma Clarke.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Church Rate Corner is a late masterpiece of one of Britain’s greatest Arts-and-Crafts architects, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. He was born in 1865, in the same propitious decade as C. R. Mackintosh and Sir Edwin Lutyens, as well as Frank Lloyd Wright; architects who made their reputations with outstanding domestic architecture in the 1890s.

Baillie Scott’s path to success was indirect. His father made a fortune in Australia, then returned to Britain in 1860 as a wealthy man, marrying, and living in south-coast resorts. As the eldest son, Baillie Scott (Scott was his family name; Baillie the forename that he used professionally, perhaps to distinguish himself from the architectural dynasty founded by Sir Gilbert Scott), was expected to follow his father’s footsteps in the colonies. In preparation, he trained for two years at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, but, on graduation in 1885, he made a decisive break and began articles with C. E. Davis, city architect of Bath. This was his only architectural training.

After three years with Davis, in February 1889 Baillie Scott married Florence Kate Nash, his landlady’s daughter. The couple travelled to the Isle of Man for their honeymoon — and stayed for 12 years. Baillie Scott later said that he was so seasick going out that he couldn’t face the ferry journey back. More probably, he had no definite plans, Florence was pregnant (their daughter Enid was born in November 1889) and Baillie Scott picked up some work with a local surveyor on an ambitious residential development, before opening his own practice on the island in 1892. His first houses were in a vernacular cottage style, inspired by the work of Ernest George, which was widely published. Indeed, publications were the primary source of Baillie Scott’s architectural ‘literacy’, isolated as he was on the Isle of Man.

Baillie Scott’s originality was displayed in one of his first projects, the Red House, which he built for his own family in 1892–93. A distinctive feature was the use of demountable panels to divide the three ground-floor reception rooms — hall, drawing room and dining room — which allowed them to be unified on special occasions. Baillie Scott decried the conventional division of houses into small, boxy rooms, what he called the ‘mansion in miniature’.

Baillie Scott’s transformation from a provincial architect to an international celebrity began with a series of articles he wrote for The Studio, which reached a wide, non-technical audience. His first article came in January 1895, a 3,000-word essay describing ‘An Ideal Suburban House’. On the strength of these articles, he was not only commissioned to build the ‘Ideal’ house in Knutsford, Cheshire, his first project in England, but also interiors for the Grand Duke of Hesse at Darmstadt in the late 1890s and a treehouse for the Duke’s sister-in-law, Princess Marie of Romania. Success in the 1901 Haus eines Kunstfreundes (House for an Art Lover) competition further bolstered Baillie Scott’s reputation and he worked in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Russia.

In 1901, the architect and his family moved from the Isle of Man to Bedford. Initially, work was scarce and Baillie Scott wrote his book Houses and Gardens in 1906, setting out his ideas on domestic design and illustrating his early projects. In a 1933 edition of this lavish tome, he explained his understanding of the term domestic architect, ‘so-called, not, as the title seems to suggest, because he is a kind of family pet in contradistinction to his fierce and untamed brethren of the wild, but because he is primarily a designer of houses and cottages for people to live in and to provide a comfortable and inviting setting for their domestic life’.

In 1911, fire severely damaged his Bedford home and studio, destroying all the early records of his practice. His office closed during the First World War, but reopened afterwards with Edgar Beresford, previously his chief assistant, as a partner. Work was plentiful in the 1920s, but dried up in the 1930s and the practice shut at the outbreak of the Second World War. Its records were lost in the Blitz and Baillie Scott died in February 1945.

Church Rate Corner was designed in 1924 for Miss Marjorie Duckett. She knew of Baillie Scott because she previously lived in Storey’s Way, Cambridge, where he built five houses. The new house was to be her married home with Arthur Sewell, assistant secretary of the Cambridge Local Examination Syndicate, but he died in 1926 and, after she married again, Church Rate Corner was put on the market. It was purchased by Joan and Stanley Bennett, fellows of Girton and Emmanuel Colleges respectively, who remained for more than 50 years and brought up four children there. When Joan died in 1985, the house was sold to only its third owners, Michael Nedo and Gillian Moore, who have lovingly cared for the house and garden to the present day.

The delight of Church Rate Corner derives from the absence of any jarring or distracting features. Simplicity and restraint prevail. Early in his career, Baillie Scott’s handling of ornament in joinery, metalwork, plasterwork, stained glass and embroidery contributed greatly to his reputation. It was a talent he took to extremes at Waldbühl, a house begun in Switzerland in 1907 (Country Life, January, 17, 1991). After the First World War, however, his work assumed a new austerity. It is tempting to see this change as a response to the trauma of the conflict and in parallel with the austere simplicity of Britain’s war memorials. One wartime project, the restoration of a historic cottage in Great Chart, Kent, now called Baillie Hall, may also have influenced his ideas. ‘When modernising an old building,’ he wrote in 1933, ‘the architect should be chiefly commended for the things he omits to do. It is so often desirable to adopt a policy of masterly inactivity.’

What Church Rate Corner lacks in elaboration it gains in refinement. In Houses and Gardens, Baillie Scott had asserted that: ‘The house which, for want of a better word, we must continue to differentiate from the ordinary house as “artistic”, bases its claims not on its frillings and on its adornments, but on the very essence of its structure.’ Here, all the materials are of the best quality and used directly: wide timber boards for the ground-floor doors, the simplest rounded architraves, brick-edged fireplaces with separate oak mantle shelves, a solid balustrade for the stairs without turned bannisters, trowelled render externally and textured plaster internally.

There are exquisite details: the latches on the boarded timber doors (Fig 8), the window ironmongery and the candelabra, re-created by the present owners to Baillie Scott’s design, in the dining room (Fig 2) and breakfast room (former kitchen). The house also takes advantage of some technical advances in construction, a detail that distinguishes it from the purest tradition of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement. It makes use of steel rather than exposed oak for the first-floor beams, for example, cavity construction with a ventilated air gap for the external walls and a gravity-fed central heating system, which is still in operation. However, the innovations that Baillie Scott used were integrated with traditional construction methods.

Although it is close to the centre of Cambridge, Church Rate Corner has no street frontages. A driveway leads to a private garden-world that surrounds the house and the front door is almost hidden to the side of the building. The main façade addresses a garden amphitheatre backed by tall yew hedges, a treatment advocated in the 1933 edition of Houses and Gardens where Baillie Scott speaks of the importance of ‘enclosure’ and adds: ‘We need good backgrounds in the garden to display flowers to the best advantage. For this purpose there is nothing better than a hedge of English yew.’

The garden façade is almost — but deliberately not — symmetrical (Fig 1). It comprises a single range with deep, tiled roofs, brick chimneystacks and a commanding double gable. There are wooden window frames with rectangular leaded panes and the walls are rendered and limewashed. Within, the rooms are intimate in scale and every door opening aligns with a window looking onto the garden. Most rooms have two modestly sized windows (over-large ones were one of the architect’s pet hates), giving beautiful lighting and modelling.

There are no demountable screens or wide openings between the rooms at Church Rate Corner, another point of difference from his early houses. Rather, three distinct ground-floor rooms face south onto the garden — the study (all Baillie Scott’s Cambridge houses were designed for academics), the drawing room (Fig 4) and dining room. A pneumatic door kept kitchen smells at bay; a hook could hold it back for the family to walk to meals. On Baillie Scott’s drawing, the full-glazed bay window in the drawing room (Fig 5) has a masonry wall at low level like the other windows, but, somehow, a change was made. The glazed bay, which incorporates doors to either side giving easy access to the garden, is almost without parallel in Baillie Scott’s work, but greatly adds to the charm of the house.

In terms of planning, there is a simple division between bedrooms on the first floor and reception rooms below. Connecting the two is a timber staircase of striking simplicity (Fig 3). As originally designed, Church Rate Corner clearly distinguished between the family rooms facing the garden and the less favourably located kitchen and services for the servants. Today, however, the kitchen is the centre of family life and this change has been made at Church Rate Corner by connecting the former kitchen, scullery and larder together and adding a garden door (Fig 6). This sensitive work reflects the infinite pains taken by Dr Nedo, a meticulous editor of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s manuscripts, to preserve the character of the house (Fig 7).

His care extends to the furnishings, which are exactly in the spirit of Baillie Scott. These comprise a few, well-chosen pieces and occasional rugs laid on the polished, boarded floors. It is hard to imagine a more perfect realisation of Baillie Scott’s ideal of domestic harmony. Few, if any, of Baillie Scott’s many houses have been conserved in such a marvellous way and it is a happy circumstance, therefore, that this article corrects a curious anomaly; that Baillie Scott never published Church Rate Corner, which today possibly gives the most perfect impression of his aesthetic vision in later life.

Today, the only Baillie Scott building open to the public is at Blackwell, overlooking Windermere in the Lake District (Country Life, July 12, 2001). This is now a popular Arts-and-Crafts gallery run by the Lakeland Arts Trust and there is a personal connection between it and Church Rate Corner through my late wife, Diane Haigh. She was the conservation architect for the restoration of Church Rate Corner in 1992 and the project architect for the restoration of Blackwell in 1999–2001. She also restored a number of other privately owned Baillie Scott houses in Cambridge, the most recent completed in 2025 with Liz King as executive architect. This work underpinned her monograph on the architect, Baillie Scott: The Artistic House, which is soon to appear in a revised edition with substantial extracts from Baillie Scott’s engaging writings. He is an architect whose work deserves to be much better known.

'Baillie Scott: Architect and Author’ by Diane Haigh and William Fawcett is published by Lund Humphries (£50). A special exhibition about Baillie Scott at Blackwell, Cumbria, runs until March 20, 2027.

In 1961, Country Life published two architecture articles by Mark Girouard on a striking Scottish property called Abercairny Abbey, in the same number of weeks.

The first article described the house as: 'Perhaps the finest example in Scotland of a Gothic abbey of the early 19th century.'

However, these were no ordinary architecture articles. They were the building’s obituary because in 1960, on the orders of its owner, Abercairny was paid a short and terminal visit by the demolition men.

Abercairny was situated deep in the bucolic Perthshire countryside, a few miles from the spa town of Crieff. It, like so many others, stood on the site of another building, demolished to make way for a newer model.

Colonel Charles Moray inherited the Abercairney estate from his brother, in 1784, initially employing Thomas White — Capability Brown’s former foreman — to tame the Scottish landscape. It is presumed that White was responsible for the picturesque lake and main planting schemes.

Satisfied with the land, Moray turned to the house. He tinkered around with plans to extended and enhance the existing property, but finding no solution that pleased him, was determined to begin again. He would settle on a grand and very fashionable Gothic-Revival abbey.

It took a few years for Moray to find the right architect. He eventually plumped for Richard Crichton, who had trained under the exacting eyes of Robert and John Adam. His accolades include the Bank of Scotland building on The Mound in Edinburgh, Balbirnie in neighbouring Fife, and Dunglass in East Lothian.

The building work began in 1804, but its progress was slow — hampered by supposed tensions between architect and client. The latter had one too many opinions. It was still a shell when, on October 18, 1810, Moray died.

Work began again, a few years later, on the instruction of a descendant, Colonel James Moray. According to contemporary newspaper reports, he introduced curling to his lake, to entertain local farmers during the frosty winter of 1812.

Crichton died, aged 46, in 1817, and the Abercairny project was handed to Richard and Robert Dickinson of Edinburgh. The house and stables were finally finished five years into Queen Victoria's reign. If it had survived, it would've have been a contender for the set of The Traitors.

Inside, stucco was moulded and painted to imitate more conventional, but expensive wood and stone carvings. They were executed by David Roberts — who started his career designing theatrical sets.

So intriguing was the castellated mock abbey that on September 12, 1842, Queen Victoria, passing through, alighted from her carriage to inspect it. She was said to have only got out 'for a moment', so it's hard to gauge what her reaction was.

Subsequent heirs made changes to the striking building, including the 1869 addition of a tower by Charles Stirling Home Drummond Moray.

This Charles, who also owned Blair Atholl, died in 1891. After this date, the building, which was, by now, no longer fashionable, fell from family favour. In 1904, adverts to rent Abercairney appeared in Country Life. By the mid 20th century, it was suffering from neglect.

It was requisitioned as a hospital for the majority of the Second World War, but managed to hang on to its original, Victorian gilded wallpapers, heavy damask curtains and stucco ceilings. Following the war, and with little protection in place for Victorian piles, the family decided to move to a smaller house on the grounds and do away with the expensive-to-maintain property.

Country Life’s photographs are considered to be the most complete visual record of this remarkable building.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Hartforth is a hamlet that stands a few miles north of Richmond above a little valley with a beck, the most northern tributary of the River Swale. Running through it is Jagger Lane, a road once busy with packhorses exchanging lead from Swaledale for salt and coal from ports on the River Tees. This once bustling scene has given way to a placid Georgian landscape and the surrounding grassy slopes are enlivened by field barns and other small buildings given a Gothick dress during the Regency. They were perhaps inspired by the spectacular Gothic Temple at Aske Hall, an adjoining estate to the south, which was designed for Sir Conyers Darcy in 1745 by Daniel Garrett, and Garrett’s coeval Gothick Culloden Tower at Richmond and Gillingwood Hall in the same valley. All this has given the Hartforth estate a Gothick genius loci that was a part-inspiration for the new house completed there in 2008 by Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth to the design of Digby Harris of Francis Johnson and Partners.

Home Farm is a Janus-faced new house in the spirit of Castle Ward, Co Down, or Castle Goring in West Sussex. It sports a Gothick façade towards the valley landscape (Fig 1) and a more severe Palladian entrance elevation (Fig 2) enclosed by historic farm buildings, including a listed cart shed, granary and a horse engine shed. This format was suggested by a set of drawings by Francis Johnson who, when awaiting his army call-up in 1943, had dreamed of an ‘Ideal House’ for himself and his lifelong partner Edward Ingram. It reflected their different characters: Gothick for Ingram and more restrained Palladian for Johnson. Like many youthful jeux d’esprit, it never made it to construction, but the discovery of the drawings in the firm’s architectural archive was an inspiration for Johnson’s business partner and successor Mr Harris when he was asked by Sir Josslyn to design a small new country house on his estate in North Yorkshire in 2004. Planning permission was unanimously granted for the out-of-the-ordinary design.

The scheme, however, had been long in gestation. Sir Josslyn inherited the Hartforth property unexpectedly more than 50 years ago at the nadir of the post-war English country estate. It had been the childhood home of his grandmother Mary, Lady Barnard, under whose welcoming roof and battlements at Raby Castle in Co Durham he had been born and brought up. Hartforth Hall, a Georgian house extended with the coal money of her Straker father, remained the home of his childless widowed great-aunt Mrs Cradock when he inherited the farms and woodland. It was by then reduced to characteristic post-war decay, its contents largely dispersed and dry rot rampaging.

The future of Hartforth did not look assured in the 1970s. Shortly after, Sir Josslyn found himself shouldering another heavier responsibility in the form of Lissadell, the Greek Revival family seat in Co Sligo. It was then in a state of near dereliction, with a leaking roof and rotten structural timbers. The remarkable story of Lissadell’s revival will be told in a future article, but the Gore-Booths eventually sold the property and, in December 2003, returned to the North-East of England. By then, Hartforth Hall had been sold and was being run as a small hotel. In the event, the focus was soon the Home Farm, overlooking the hamlet with its little green.

As far back as 1984, Sir Josslyn’s imagination had been fired by a small, but almost evangelical exhibition ‘Classical Survival: Classical Revival’ at the Building Centre, London WC1, showcasing the then underappreciated architectural achievements of Raymond Erith, Johnson, John Simpson and Quinlan Terry. Soon after, at Mr Harris’s suggestion, John Cornforth published three articles on Johnson (Country Life, October, 11, 18 and 25, 1984), who was then at the height of his game at Garrowby and Sunderlandwick in East Yorkshire and Settrington in North Yorkshire. These and other publications, sowed the seed that was to come to fruition at Hartforth 20 years later.

Sir Josslyn’s feeling that a manageable new house designed by the Francis Johnson Practice might be the best policy was confirmed when, as a Raby trustee, he recommended Mr Harris for the major refurbishment of Selaby Hall on the Raby estate. The result was impressive. They first met on site at Hartforth in 2004 on a snowy Ash Wednesday and agreed that a ‘model farm’ would complement the listed farm buildings. The adjacent farmhouse was not listed, being a plain stone structure with a sole claim to historical fame: that the young William Hague had been the tenant there for six months when first elected MP for Richmond.

The concept of a miniature Palladian villa with a centralised plan in the manner of the architects Sir Robert Taylor, Sir Edward Lovett Pearce, Thomas Ivory or John Carr seemed the perfect solution. Sir Josslyn, having a strong interest in architecture and Georgian culture in general (he was a trustee and treasurer of the Georgian Group for many years), played a large role in the conception. A plan was gradually conceived with a central geometrical staircase (the spandrels being useful for services), flanked by drawing room, dining room and, not a library as in Taylor’s houses, but a large modern kitchen. It led to a perfect partnership between client and architect. As Mr Harris commented: ‘It is rare for client and architect to be completely in accord, but when it does happen it makes for the happiest of jobs.’

This constructive symbiosis is manifested at Hartforth in both the excellence of the general concept and the perfection of every detail. It is not an exaggeration to say that Home Farm is an architectural masterpiece of the 18th-century revival. This has been recognised by the Georgian Group Award for the ‘best new building in a Georgian Context’ and Hartforth’s inclusion in the revised ‘Buildings of England’ volume Yorkshire: The North Riding (2023), where it is described as Johnson’s ‘most successful North Riding design… a composite of Georgian and Gothick ably brought to life by his successor Mr Harris’. The contractor responsible for the excellent construction work was Steve Mellows from Castle Bytham in Lincolnshire.

An integral part of the scheme was the surrounding valley landscape, which has been treated as a seamless extension of the Georgian parkland around Hartforth Hall. Before work began at Home Farm, the opposite side of the beck was marred by an unsightly pig shed. This was demolished and the area grassed and dotted with clumps of trees. Mike Ibbotson of Colvin & Moggridge was the landscape consultant, but Sir Josslyn had a large personal input.

The informal avenue on the central south axis, derived from Sledmere, East Yorkshire, was his concept. Peter and Sal Sharp, for whom Mr Harris had remodelled Borwick Lodge in Lancashire, initially advised on the planting scheme of the garden, which includes the courtyard and a formal layout to the east with a central stone-edged canal, leading to the orchard with a Gothick folly, screening the pre-existing farm cottages, with later help from Prunella Scarlett and Debbie Collier. The new and extended landscaping at Hartforth provides a perfect setting for the new house and helps incorporate it into the historic surroundings.

The design of the house faithfully fulfils Johnson’s ‘Ideal’ on a larger scale, with a castellated south front complete with balconied bow overlooking the new landscape and ogee-headed windows, constrasted by a severer Palladian courtyard elevation with a giant pediment enclosing a Diocletian window. Extra distinction is achieved by the use of sandstone from Witton Fell Quarry in Wensleydale for the exteriors, complementing the rubble of the subsidiary retained ranges.

There is a Doric cornice derived from Robert Adam’s Lansdowne House in London, in the rectangular entrance hall (Fig 3). A pair of symmetrical niches flank the door to the central full-height staircase hall beyond. The plan of the stair is a Pythagorean Ellipse, a form reflective of Sir Josslyn’s love of geometry at school (Fig 7). There are subtle Gothick touches in here, such as the arched steel handrail and the blank arches at first-floor level. The stairs are a marvel of cantilevered Tadcaster limestone. Another feature of all the main rooms is the superb mahogany joinery, by Houghtons of York with French polishing by David Podmore: the panelled doors and the curving hand rail of the stair which, in Johnsonian manner, ends in an elegant scroll inlaid with an ivory disc. (The architect kept an old Victorian billiard ball for this purpose, sliced as required.)

The north-south axis is continued in the central D-shaped dining room (Fig 4). This room has a Gothick ceiling embellished with cusped arcs. The new stucco work in here, as throughout the rooms, is by Stevensons of Norwich. An especially splendid feature is the parquetry timber floor, reflecting the ceiling pattern. Such luxurious parquetry is a revived craft instigated by the restoration of the George IV floors at Windsor Castle. It was executed by Weldon Flooring.

Another eye-catching feature is the set of Gothick dining chairs made by Pascal Silvestre of York, based on an 18th-century design, which were first discovered in a local saleroom. They were painted appropriately by Charles Hesp, who was responsible for all the specialist painting in the main rooms. Tom Helme, who made Farrow & Ball paint into a national brand, came out of retirement to advise on decoration.

To the west is the simple Classical kitchen, treated as a principal room in the way of most modern houses, with a Serlian arch into the pantry (Fig 6). Beyond in a retained single-storey range, with reused Yorkshire sliding sash windows from the old farmhouse, is the sitting room, back hall and laundry.

The whole of the east side of the house is taken up by the drawing room (Fig 9) with perfect Palladian proportions, 36ft by 18ft and 12ft high, with a canted bay overlooking the east garden (Fig 5). This room was designed to contain a display of paintings in elaborate Florentine frames collected by Sir Robert Gore-Booth on a second Grand Tour of Italy in 1837; they are a survival of the collection originally in the Picture Gallery at Lissadell. The chimneypiece was designed by Mr Harris and carved by Jose Sarabia; the marbled painting was executed by Mr Hesp.

On the first floor are four principal bedrooms and bathrooms, all with lovely views from the windows, but the final surprise of the house is the top floor, which comprises Sir Josslyn’s library with fitted bookcases and the Diocletian window overlooking the courtyard, village green and all comings and goings. There are also views over the landscape from delightful round windows (Fig 8).

Home Farm, Hartforth, is a remarkable creation: the joint work of a client with sophisticated tastes and a traditionally skilled architect at the height of his powers. The whole concept with its designed landscape and beautifully finished and arranged interiors is in the best English country-house tradition. It has Irish touches too; not only the retained contents from Lissadell, but the general character of a compact Georgian house.

The greatest tribute of appreciation comes, perhaps, from the walkers who have replaced the pack horses on nearby Jagger Lane and over the picturesque stone-arched bridge across the beck: they tend to think the house is 18th century and has been there for 200 years, rather than 20.

This feature originally appeared in the September 30, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

William Montgomery holds a silver cup presented to his ancestor and namesake with an inscription in several different fonts that reads: ‘To William Montgomery of Grey-abby, Esquire, as a tribute of Gratitude and Esteem, for his spirited and disinterested conduct in which JUSTICE, HONOR AND HUMANITY, were eminently conspicuous, in the preservation of the valuable cargo of the Brig Lagan of Belfast, wrecked on Burial Isle, 11th Jany 1813. This cup is presented by the owner of the vessel & the proprietors of the cargo.’

According to reports in the Belfast News-Letter, this small, two-masted vessel was armed with 10 light cannons and was ready to sail to London from Belfast on January 1, 1813. Contrary winds, however, kept her in port for more than a week before she set off on her ill-fated voyage.

The ship must have been trying to weather Burr Point at the eastern extreme of Ireland and part of the Grey Abbey estate; the rocks of the appropriately named Burial Isle lie just beyond the point.

There is no record of the details of the wreck, but the inscription implies that the cargo and at least some of the crew survived. 

‘Wrecking was a frequent occurrence on the east coast of the Ards Peninsula at the beginning of the 19th century,’ explains Montgomery. ‘I enjoy the wonderfully effusive inscription on the cup.’

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When Walter Basset married Cecilia de Dunstanville in 1150, he not only gained a wife, but one of the most important (and profitable) estates in England. And, over time, the Basset family would go on to become one of the most powerful Cornish mining dynasties. In fact, the family, their home and ancestral lands were so well known that Winston Graham wove them all into his epic 'Poldark' series.

When Country Life decided to photograph the gardens in the late 19th century, the Basset estate encompassed land from Redruth to St Ives, and 12 miles of Atlantic coastline.

It's safe to assume that the Editor was not very happy with the resulting images. Fourteen survive in our Archive, but none of them were ever published. Until now.

We own plenty of unpublished photographs of Britain's great country estates and gardens, but what makes this situation unusual is the fact that the photographer would have suffered through an arduous and expensive steam train journey — on what would go on to become the Riviera Express.

On the odyssey — which culminated in a bumpy carriage ride from the station to the house — the photographer would've been encumbered by a heavy camera, lenses and tripod. Plus a number of fragile, large-format glass plates.

In the background of these photographs, there are tantalising slivers and wholes of the now-lost Tehidy House. A myriad houses took it in turns to stand on the Basset's land during their tenure of it, and this one was relatively new.

Tehidy was commissioned by John Francis Basset in 1861 and was a vast expansion of an existing Palladian house by Thomas Edwards of Greenwich.

Edwards’s elegant, symmetrical mansion was built with large quantities of imported Portland and Bath stone, supplemented with granite from the family’s quarry at Carn Brea. His grand design consisted of a central pedimented main block connected via curved, sweeping quadrant wings to four detached corner pavilions.

Inside, the property was decorated with sumptuous Adam style ceilings and fireplaces, and paintings by Peter Lely, Sir Anthony Van Dyck and Thomas Gainsborough.

John Francis's enhancements were overseen by William Burn of Piccadilly — and the result was what is now considered to be Cornwall's first modern manor house.

In just two years, the property doubled in size, eventually comprising a grand entrance hall, seven reception rooms, 21 principal bedrooms, 14 servant's bedrooms and a very generous, for the time, six bathrooms. Plus, electric lights, a hot-water heating system and fire hydrants.

This modernisation, however, came at a cost: £150,000 to be exact, or more than £16 million in today's money.

Unfortunately, the family fortune — built on the tin and copper mining industries, both of which were now in decline — was dwindling. John Francis, however, didn't have too long to worry about things. Six years after the build was finished, he died, aged 39.

His two brothers inherited the estate and its mounting debts, but they too died, in 1888, and so it passed to a son called Arthur.

Arthur’s main passion in life was racing — a disastrous hobby for anyone in financial difficulty, but he clung on to Tehidy until 1915. Remarkably, it did sell — to Cornwall County Council. Their plan to convert it into a much-needed tuberculosis isolation hospital succeeded and by late 1917 the first patients were in place.

On February 26, 1919, Sister Everett — who was comforting someone about to succumb to the disease — noticed an unusual smell and raised the alarm. The building was on fire.

The local fire brigade battled valiantly to extinguish the flames but, by the next day, all that remained of Tehidy were the exterior walls and the quadrant pavilions.

The hospital was quickly rebuilt, but without, of course, the wonderful original interiors. In 1986, it was transformed once again and divided into luxury apartments.

The grounds, and parts of the Basset estate now form Tehidy Country Park.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

Whitehall is a name and place synonymous with the British government. Amid its familiar landmarks — such as the Treasury, Foreign Office, Banqueting House and the gates of Downing Street — are several important buildings that continue to serve as offices and are rarely seen by the public. Just beyond Horse Guards, facing a jumble of Victorian frontages and recessed from the road behind high screen walls are three interlocking properties of this kind. They jointly manifest more than 400 years of naval history, and conceal some little-known interiors of great interest.

The youngest of the three, contrarily known as Old Admiralty, is the showiest. It is not seen from Whitehall at all, but forms one side of Horse Guards Parade beyond. Constructed during the 1890s and the early 1900s, it was a major addition to the much older pair of buildings that quietly spans the Whitehall frontage and stands on sites long associated with the Royal Navy.

The connection extends back to 1622, when the 1st Duke of Buckingham took up residence here in a property called Wallingford House, built upon the former timber yard of Whitehall Palace. Buckingham had been appointed Lord High Admiral in 1619 and brought his office with him to Whitehall. In 1628, the year of Buckingham’s death, Charles I converted the office of Admiral of England into a commission, with the control of the Royal Navy passing to the Board of Admiralty. A parliamentary act invested authority upon seven commissioners or Lords of the Admiralty Board. Their roles included a right to a residence and there were several early offices around Tower Hill.

When the Buckingham lease expired in 1694, Wallingford House was demolished, presenting an opportunity for the construction of a new home for the Admiralty (which since the Restoration in 1660 had been operating from Duke Street, Westminster). Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned to erect ‘a Sufficient Pyle of Building’, which he provided swiftly and to straightforward design. This was up and occupied by 1695, but was ultimately destined to last no more than three decades.

By 1723, the Admiralty, having purchased and cleared adjacent properties, demolished the Wren building, considering it in bad condition and failing to meet needs. Upon the now enlarged site rose the grand edifice we see today, three-sided around an open courtyard as designed by Thomas Ripley. What is today known as the Ripley Building was conceived as a piazza and was to comprise townhouse residences for the Admiralty Lords in the wings, with the central block providing space for offices and a fine board room. Entrance to the offices was through a giant Ionic portico (Fig 1), its pediment surmounted with the Admiralty badge in a carved cartouche.

The present proportions of the portico are a compromise. In the original scheme, a larger, wider pediment would have limited light to the upper windows. An 11th-hour rejig addressed this, but, as the stone columns were already cut, a proportional concession had to be made, squeezing the hefty columns into the narrower configuration we see today. When it was first completed, the portico was criticised and even mocked, but, since 1761, a screen closing it off from the street has softened its awkwardness (Fig 2).

The screen is Robert Adam’s earliest work in London, a Doric arcade set between pedimented pavilions. In the pediments are carvings by Michael Henry Spang of the prow of a Roman ship and a British man-of-war. Beneath, triple niches were intended for statuary. Central to the screen composition is an entrance archway carved with panels of dolphins and surmounted by beautifully writhing hippo-campi. To either side are pedestrian gates. The present form of the screen, which respects Adam’s original design, actually dates back only to a restoration of 1923. That’s because, in 1827, the Duke of Clarence — later William IV, but then Lord High Admiral — smashed two side entrances through the structure to create more convenient access for his carriage.

Beyond the screen, the official residence of the First Lord of the Admiralty was in the left-hand corner of the internal courtyard. By 1781, this accommodation was already considered insufficient. A proposal for adding ‘a few rooms’ behind was approved by the Prime Minister and Treasury. Properties immediately beside it on Whitehall were purchased in 1785 by the Naval Commissioners, then cleared to make way for an expanded Admiralty House.

The project, undertaken by Samuel Pepys Cockerell, grew rapidly in ambition. What had begun as a proposal to create a few new rooms gradually transformed into the creation of a grand aristocratic mansion, comprising three main storeys with basement and attic. Cockerell was a student of Sir Robert Taylor, from whom he took on the role of surveyor to the Admiralty. As Taylor resided at Spring Gardens just to the rear of this site, he would certainly have been involved in his protégé’s project, although he died shortly before the building was complete by Christmas 1788.

As the concept had begun life as a rear extension, the approach to the enlarged Admiralty House remained via the existing Ripley courtyard. This left what would have been a large forecourt area between Cockerell’s new building and the street free for a detached, double-height kitchen. A high, blind wall topped with formidable iron railings and scrolled lamp brackets conceals this structure from Whitehall. Despite being hidden, the street façade of Admiralty House is well balanced and polite, of golden stock brick with simple stone dressing. Its centrepiece is a Venetian window framed within a semicircular recess.

The entrance to Cockerell’s mansion remains through Ripley’s front door. Only as the visitor enters the inner hall does the building assume the grandeur of an official residence, with a vaulted ceilingand fluted Doric pilasters and columns (Fig 3). Facing the visitor as they enter is an oversized cast-iron stove in the form of a columna rostra, a Roman victory column ornamented with the prows of ships and celebrating a naval engagement.

At the far end of the inner hall is an arch that frames a magnificent stair. It rises away from the visitor, then divides into paired return flights transcribing a graceful horseshoe curve. This imperial stone staircase maximises elegance in compact perfection (Fig 4); three floors of restrained wrought-iron balustrade and balconied landings, with a glazed dome sailing overhead.

From the inner hall, four grand rooms open to form a suite for formal entertainment. The function of these spaces has changed over the centuries, but today they are named the State Dining Room, Drawing Room, Music Room and Band Room. On the floor above is a matching circuit of rooms intended as the First Lord’s private apartments. Services and stairs are neatly tucked away to resolve this compact plan.

Ornate vaulted and finely decorated ceilings cover the rooms facing Whitehall and magnificent marble chimneypieces feature prominently throughout. Cockerell sourced most of these from other great houses, including Egremont House in Piccadilly, York House on the Strand and a property called Wricklemarsh in Blackheath. Unfortunately, as the names and functions of rooms have changed, it has become impossible to say with absolute confidence which fireplace came from which house. Cockerell also purchased and re-used doors and doorcases, columns, even second-hand window shutters. Presumably, he was trying to save money in the light of the spiralling costs of the project as a whole.

Such space as was freed up in the Ripley Building by Cockerell’s expansion of Admiralty House was quietly annexed and converted into offices. Of this working part of the building, the Boardroom where the Lords of the Admiralty met was always the standout interior (Fig 5). With its carved decoration and panelling, Corinthian pilasters and portraits, the first impression is of an interior that has served unchanged as the nerve centre of British naval history from the age of Nelson to Churchill and beyond. This is not the case.

The panelling pre-dates the room, having been salvaged from the Wren building on the site that was demolished in 1723. The ceiling, meanwhile, was inserted by Cockerell in 1786 and the same pattern of interlacing circles and rosettes is found next door in the First Lord’s bedroom. Over the fireplace is an anemoscope, or wind-dial, framed by magnificent pearwood festoons attributed to Grinling Gibbons. The incised date of 1695 supports this. These include nautical instruments — ring dials, astrolabes, quadrants and so on — rendered in marvellous detail. Along the top of the chimneypiece is a frothy band of shells, fish, fruit, flowers, bay, oak and palm leaves (Fig 6). In the centre, Fame’s trumpets are combined with a royal crown, sword, sceptre and anchor and the motif of an eye in a sunburst.

The wind-dial, dated between 1707–14, is stylistically linked to another in the King’s Gallery at Kensington Palace, designed by cartographer Robert Morden with mechanism by Thomas Tompion. British seas and adjacent coastlines from Norway to the Pyrenees are mapped out, as ships, whales and allegorical figures shiver among the waves.

Not only, then, are the elements of this splendid room of different dates, but they have been demonstrably reconfigured over time. In the early 19th century, the wind-dial, for example, was located on an end wall (to the north) and built in with bookcases. The carvings, meanwhile, were assembled at the opposite end of the room and a series of pull-down maps installed above the fireplace. The current organisation of the interior broadly dates from 1847, after which two full-length portraits were introduced; Lord Nelson by Guzzardi, acquired by the Admiralty in 1848, and William IV by Beechey, purchased in 1894.

The mighty board table is most likely of 1789 and clearly bespoke. The semi-circular cutaway at one end is made, not for accommodating the corpulence of an undisclosed First Lord as sometimes imagined (and as the arrangement within it of a particularly magnificent chair implies). Rather, it was designed for the hard-working secretaries, to allow better access to the inevitable sea of paperwork that they needed to manage.

Explosions have twice near-destroyed this room; once from a Fenian bomb in 1885 and then again during the Blitz in the 1940s. That the repair has in each instance constituted faithful reinstatement indicates the great historical importance attached to this space.

In 1964, the Labour government merged the Board of Admiralty with the Air Ministry and War Office to create the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which relocated to the present MoD across Whitehall. Thereafter, the buildings have been used by other Government departments and the Boardroom has become a quiet survival. Shown on building tours and occasionally used for meetings, it has, over the decades, taken on the revered air of a museum piece; library-quiet and with the reassuringly warm aroma of dust and beeswax. Having not outwardly changed in nearly 180 years, this is no surprise and makes the evocative interior all the more delightful.

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Laid in the chancel floor of St James’ Church, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, are the brass portraits of a husband and wife. Each full-length figure is framed beneath an arch and is shown with their hands pressed together in prayer. The former has a neatly forked beard and the latter wears her hair braided and bound in a net. The portraits are not of a knight and his lady, although both are dressed in flowing robes and the former carries a sword. Rather, the Latin inscription reveals them as William Grevel (or Greville) and his wife, Marion, who died respectively in 1401 and 1386. The former is strikingly styled as ‘sometime citizen of London and the flower of wool merchants of the whole of England’.

This was a considerable boast considering that, at the time, wool was the principal product and export of the kingdom. Whether strictly true or not, however, Grevel was a figure who grew wealthy as a wool merchant. The descendant of a family with Flemish or Norman roots that had settled in Chipping Campden by the late 13th century, Grevel became a considerable landowner and is credited with building a large surviving house in Chipping Camden. By the terms of his will, he also gave 100 marks ‘towards making the new works’ of the church (Fig 1). His monument, in fact, is ornamented both with a coat of arms — a mark of gentility — and his merchant’s mark, used to identify his wool.

Grevel was representative of a much larger group of individuals and institutions that grew rich in the late Middle Ages on the proceeds of Cotswold wool. This area of limestone upland that spans parts of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire provided excellent pasture. Too dry for cattle, it was perfectly suited for sheep and its wool became internationally prized. One of the ways in which the profits of the wool trade were invested was in the construction and furnishing of parish churches.

The history of sheep grazing in the Cotswolds can be traced back archaeologically to the Roman period. Little is known, however, of its scale or importance in this remote period. Nor does the Domesday Survey, commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086, shed much light on the subject. What it does record is that wool from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, was reserved for the use of the Queen. Presumably, therefore, it was already recognised as being of high value. The real pioneers of England’s medieval wool production, however, were monasteries.

Caen Abbey in Normandy, for example, had a flock of 467 sheep on Minchinhampton Common, Gloucestershire, in the early 12th century. Coincidentally, this Common is one of the few medieval sheep runs to survive today in the Cotswolds (most have been ploughed up and turned to arable). Nor was farming the only means of profiting from wool. In about 1220, Gloucester Abbey founded a borough at Northleach and established an annual three-day fair there, timed to coincide with the shearing of the sheep flocks in late June. Northleach was well placed on the road network to receive wool from other Cotswold farmers and quickly became prosperous.

This growth in sheep farming was part of a much wider phenomenon across the kingdom in areas such as East Anglia, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Shropshire and Somerset. The climate generally was well suited to fine wool and the Cistercian Order in particular, with its monasteries in remote rural sites, grew wealthy on sheep. So valuable was this commodity to the Cistercians that, in 1193, the Order was compelled to make a gift of the year's clippings towards the ransom of Richard I. By the 13th century, there developed a trade in future wool production, with all the financial risks that involved.

In the Cotswolds, meanwhile, the same period witnessed the first documented attempts at breeding the best sheep for the region. The subject of the pedigree and history of Cotswold sheep remains controversial, so, too, the purposes for which the breed was initially kept, whether for wool or milk. What is clear, however, is that rams were being introduced to the region from elsewhere in the country by the 13th century.

As wool production grew, so did the cottage industry of weaving cloth. The Cotswolds had naturally occurring fuller’s earth to use in the mills where the cloth was washed and cleaned. By 1200, Minchinhampton Common had four such fulling mills alone and, not long afterwards, a cloth called Cotswolds — presumably a local weave — is recorded. That said, the finest woven cloth was produced in Flanders and, during the 13th century, this connection between Flemish traders became firmly established. They were soon joined in the Cotswolds from the 1290s by Italian merchants.

Seeing the profits generated, in 1275 Edward I became the first English king to levy tax on wool exports as a quick means of raising large sums of money. For the remainder of the Middle Ages, the Crown attempted to manage the sale of wool to its own financial advantage and as a tool of economic embargo. It was in symbol of the perceived importance of this national product that at some point in the mid 14th century, during the reign of Edward III, the Lord Chancellor famously took his seat on a woolpack in the House of Lords.

One result of these changes was that the wool trade suddenly became documented in great detail and also that it came under the control of big and vastly wealthy interests, many of them predatory. This shift in the character of the trade was further exaggerated by the impact of the Black Death from 1346. The collapse in population not only emptied the landscape, opening it up to more intensive farming, but it simultaneously left big landowners without the manpower to manage their own estates. A new mercantile class now emerged, of whom Grevel at Chipping Campden is a perfect example.

This change in the structure of the wool trade had an important architectural effect, encouraging investment by wealthy members of the laity in parish churches. It should be said that monasteries, notably Winchcombe, Cirencester and Hailes (Fig 6), continued to build on a lavish scale until the end of the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, however, the Reformation has swept away nearly all trace of what they created and the loss is important. These were the institutions that probably set the architectural pace of change and which retained the most important masons.

Patterns of investment in parish churches could be complex and the process of construction prolonged. A wealthy family might simply build a burial chapel and attach it to a church with little regard for the existing fabric. An early example of such a project probably funded by wool is the extraordinary transept of Minchinhampton (Fig 8), which by tradition was constructed by a local landowner, John of Ansley. The design, dated stylistically to the 1330s, evokes the forms of a great church executed in miniature; the transept has a stone roof (rather than a vault), a massive rose window and two richly ornamented tombs of a knight and his lady.

More commonly, however, parishioners contributed to larger collective building works, each contributing as their means allowed. Such projects sometimes focused on the construction of a grand church tower, which might be designed in overt competition with those of neighbouring buildings. Alternatively, they might involve the reconstruction of the nave, which in a parish church was the particular responsibility of the laity. The wool trade created a number of outstanding individual donors, as in the case of John Fortey at Northleach. At his death in 1459, his will included a bequest of £300 towards ‘the new middle aisle… already begun by me’. His brass in the church shows his feet resting on a sheep and a woolpack, clear evidence of the source of his wealth (Fig 7).

The nave of Northleach is a very coherent interior (Fig 5) with restrained detailing and it compares closely in design to the nave of Chipping Campden (although the relative dates of the two are uncertain). Northleach is made imposing by the visual extension of the arcade columns into the clerestory and there are integral stone brackets to support a lost tomb tester. This was almost certainly intended to dignify Fortey’s monument. In technical terms, the design reflects an awareness of early-15th-century buildings in Bristol, Oxford and Coventry. The name of the mason who conceived it, however, is unknown. Might both interiors be based on a lost monastic original?

There were different ways of making money from wool and at different times into the 16th century, taxes and royal policy variously gave advantage to those who produced it; those who acted as intermediaries in its sale; or those who wove it into cloth. In nearly all its forms, however, wool trading involved complex financial transactions of high value over long distances and was intensively regulated both by government bureaucracy and also by specialist guilds.

For example, a local woolman in the late 15th century might contract to assemble a stipulated quantity and quality of wool on behalf of a buyer. The buyer, perhaps a London mercer, then appointed a ‘packer’ to assess the quality of what was supplied. This was weighed and packed into so-called sarplers, bundles of two or three sacks of wool. Each sarpler was then marked with a merchant's mark and taken to the king’s beam for weighing and payment of duty. Only with proof of that payment could wool be legally shipped to the Staple at Calais for sale to foreign merchants.

By 1500, the profits of wool were encouraging the further intensification of sheep farming in the Cotswolds. This in turn encouraged a further burst of building in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Two outstanding church building projects in the Cotswolds deserve individual mention. The new porch and nave (Fig 2) of Cirencester parish church St John the Baptist were collective undertakings of quite exceptional ambition, the former partly funded by a gift of 40 sheep in 1492 by Robert Stone, and the latter begun from 1514. Given how the building commands the market place today, it’s hard to believe that it once stood in the immediate shadow of an even greater abbey church (Fig 3).

No less remarkable is Fairford, Gloucestershire, rebuilt largely through the generosity of John Tame, a wool merchant, who died in 1500, and his son Edmund. In creating this splendid building, Tame was in part seeking to stake Fairford’s claim as a commercial rival to Cirencester. The interior is now famed for its outstanding and coherently planned cycle of stained glass, begun in the first decade of the 16th century and attributed to the King’s Glazier, Bernard Flower (Fig 4).

The magnificent windows of St Mary’s in Fairford are a reminder that architecture was only one aspect of the late-medieval investment in parish churches. Large sums of money could also be paid towards fixtures such as stained glass and rood screens that tend not to survive, as well as for costly vestments or for the stipends of clergy employed to celebrate services. Rich as the architectural legacy of the late Middle Ages remains in the Cotswolds, we only see a shadow of what once existed.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Nicholas Leke, the fourth and last Earl of Scarsdale (c. 1682-1736), led a reasonably blessed life. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Derby, and as an envoy to Vienna. And, in 1707, he inherited some land after his elder brother died without issue.

By 1724, he'd tired of the house sitting on it and, wanting to leave a lasting impression on his ancestral plot, decided to build something better. It was said that he asked for something grander and ever more impressive than Chatsworth.

The 4th Earl commissioned Francis Smith of Warwick — who designed nearby Derby Cathedral — to build this new mansion. Sutton Scarsdale Hall.

The resulting structure was definitely imposing. Standing three stories high and nine bays wide, it loomed large over the land from a lofty ridge. Constructed from biscuit-coloured ashlar from Rang Quarry, a mile away, it featured work by some of the era's most refined craftspeople.

These included master carver Edward Poynton of Nottingham, who dressed the stonework with exquisitely hand-carved pillars and pilasters, topped with fine Corinthian capitals. And artists Albert Artari and Francesco Vassalli from Italy, who laboured over the fine stucco work in many of the rooms, including the grand entrance hall. 

Needless to say, this all came at a cost and the extravagance was said to have inspired William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. When the Earl died in 1736, aged just 53, he left behind no heir and a mountain of unpaid debts. 

The house was sold off and changed hands numerous times in the following centuries, eventually landing in the hands of Richard Arkwright, the son of Sir Richard Arkwright, inventor of the Spinning Jenny, in 1820. It still belonged to the Arkwright family when Country Life was invited to visit in 1918.

The ensuing article, published a year later, did not mention any problems, but it is clear from the photographs — reproduced here — that something was amiss. Hardly any photographs of the interiors were taken and, in those that were, there are just a few pieces of oddly-placed furniture. In photographs of the outside, the lawn and beds look unkempt. The photographer, out of choice or under instruction, also went to great lengths to conceal the fact that the gardens no longer overlooked peaceful green fields. Sutton Scarsdale Hall was now surrounded by coal fields.

In June of that same year, the preliminary notice of the sale of the whole estate was announced in the press. By October, the 70-house village, the Arkwright Arms pub and more than 340 acres of land (not including mineral rights) had been auctioned off. The hall was sold afterwards to a consortium of local businessmen.

This group wasted no time in calling in the asset strippers. If something could be sold, it was — even the roof, which left Artari and Vassalli’s presumably unsalvageable, exquisite work exposed to the elements.

In 1946, Sir Osbert Sitwell, a local landowner, purchased the decaying remains to stop them from being entirely demolished. They were duly awarded Grade-I listing in 1951. Sir Osbert, realising the enormity of the cost of preservation, then gifted the hall to the Ministry of Public, Building and Works (now English Heritage). 

In 1970, a second article by Country Life helped to publicise the hall's plight and secure some much-needed funding.

It is still possible to visit the bones of Sutton Scarsdale. The once crumbling walls are now safe, but the roof and windows have never been replaced. It's also possible to visit parts of the hall in a less exposed setting. Sections of three of the principle rooms are on permanent display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a fourth, pine-panelled one lives in its entirety in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Originally acquired by notorious newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, it then sold to a Hollywood production company — who used it as a backdrop in Kitty — before making its way into the Huntington’s collection.

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Over the course of last year, a striking new prospect tower appeared in the formal gardens of Doddington Place in Kent. As well as being a delightful new creation, this is a commemorative monument to two brothers, Henry and Christopher Oldfield, who grew up here and both died tragically young. It has been commissioned by their father, Richard Oldfield, who chose the position of the tower at the end of the main garden terrace. From there, it enjoys views both over the formal gardens and the wider landscape as it falls away towards the park. Enclosed by trees on one side, it is slightly masked from the house.

The architect of the tower, Thomas Croft of Thomas Croft Architects, has a family connection with the house, which was rebuilt in its present form after 1862 for his ancestor Sir John Frederick Croft. Sir John also commissioned Markham Nesfield to design new gardens, although it is not clear how fully his surviving plans, dated 1874, were realised. The Croft family sold the estate to Gen and Mrs Douglas Jeffreys, who, in 1909, commissioned the architect J. D. Coleridge to extend both the house and the gardens. Mrs Jeffreys was Mr Oldfield’s great-aunt.

Doddington Place’s gardens are listed Grade II and open to the public. The Oldfields’ brief was that the tower should be in stylistic contrast to the other garden buildings, but visually understated so as not to intrude too aggressively. They also wanted an easy climb for visitors to enjoy the views from the upper floor, as well as a room within the structure, so it could be used as a summerhouse.

These choices suggested a steel-frame structure on a single supporting column. An initial, rejected design was for an ‘inhabited tree’ in steel and glass.

Another element of the brief was that there should be two stairs, which agreed with the demand imposed by building regulations that there should be two means of access to the tower’s viewing platform. The result was a double-helix stair around a central volume, a design that also felicitously expresses in architecture the character of the tower as a memorial for two people. It further echoes their connection as brothers that, as completed, the two stairs rise from two circles of paving, with the central column set in the area where they overlap (Fig 1).

The central column gives the design a clear visual focus and suggests a degree of structural daring as well. It also means the tower is designed to move very slightly — and safely — in strong wind or when people walk up it.

Each of the three tiers of the structure has a different architectural character. At ground level, the impression is of a gazebo embraced by the rising stairs. On the first floor, the central volume of the tower opens out to form the summerhouse. This room is polygonal in plan and enclosed by walls of glass (Fig 2). Doors lead to it from the landings on either side. It has a matching floor and ceiling pattern of panelled oak with a central roundel, the latter forming a shallow, central pendant.

The viewing platform on the top level is open to the elements, but enclosed by a skeletal structure with a pitched crown (Fig 4). This shape was inspired by the eight-sided Tower of the Winds in Athens, Greece, built in the 1st century AD. It was first made familiar to British audiences through the engravings published by James Stuart and Nicholas Revett in The Antiquities of Athens (1762) and has been widely copied in the design of garden buildings. Rising through it is a central flagpole that continues the line of the central supporting column below.

The double-helix design means the tower reads in different ways, depending on the viewpoint. After some discussion, the decision was taken to orient it so that it appears symmetrical when viewed from along the terrace (Fig 3). This arrangement also serves to reduce its visual impact. It was with the same purpose in mind that the frame of the stair rails is infilled with a fine steel mesh rather than multiple spindles. Another point of debate was the colour of the main structural members and a two-tone scheme was considered. In the end, however, the tower was painted brick red, a colour that sits comfortably with the surrounding foliage and also references the materials of the main house.

The local authority, Swale Council, enthusiastically embraced the idea of the tower. The structural engineer was Michael Coombs, who has recently retired as a managing partner at Alan Baxter Associates, and it was manufactured by Littlehampton Welding. The whole was prefabricated and shipped to the site for erection. Now it is completed, Mr Croft sees echoes of other buildings, including the astonishing Monument to the Third International of 1919–20 designed for Petrograd (St Petersburg) by Russian architect Vladimir Tatlin. This vast and unrealised building was intended to incorporate glazed rooms that rotated at different speeds.

The new tower is a magnificent addition to what is already a delightful and varied garden. It’s also a very unusual structure in that it somehow reveals its interest more from within — when enjoyed as a point of prospect — than from without. In that regard, it inverts the usual character of a memorial.

Rather than draw the visitor in and command their attention, it offers them a platform that dignifies the views outwards into the world. At Doddington Place, that is a world well worth an easy climb.

Doddington Place is open to visitors from Easter to the end of September — see their website for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

It's a bright, crisp morning in central London and the Underground station is filling up with people rushing in from the Strand clutching takeaway coffees. It is a familiar scene, but look more closely and you’d spot some clues that none of us is on our way to the office. There’s a distinct absence of anything digital and among the posters pasted to the walls is one exhorting travellers to ‘Look Out In The Blackout’. Where — and, indeed, when — are we?

Aldwych station opened in 1907 (as Strand) on the site of an old theatre, part of what was then the Great Northern, Piccadilly & Brompton railway — now the Piccadilly line. It was envisaged as the track’s southern terminus, but construction work above ground meant that it ended up on its own branch and was never well used: the first and second shuttle services that departed for Holborn were empty and the third carried a single passenger.

The service was scaled back and soon it was quicker to walk to Holborn. Aldwych, officially the least-used stop in central London by the 1980s, limped on until 1994, when it was closed and became one of the London Underground’s ‘ghost’ stations. The only way you can see it today is by booking one of the tours organised by the London Transport Museum, which also runs trips on decommissioned Tube trains.

Over the course of a day touring three different ghost stations, I realise that the capital’s apparently orderly transport network is actually like a kitchen drawer piled high with old phone chargers and mystery cables: the past and the present are permanently tangled together. To travel in Aldwych’s wooden lifts, built long before the catastrophic Kings Cross fire of 1987, is to descend through layers of London’s history. When we step out into the carefully preserved subterranean hall, with its ornate ticket windows and botanical dado-rail friezes, 2026 feels a long way away — we have travelled back in time to the early 1900s and ‘Tubemania’, when the rapid expansion of London’s underground railways was driven by private companies.

Several of these employed Leslie Green to design their stations. There are plenty of his projects still in service (including Regent’s Park and Russell Square), but seeing one divorced from the modern grind makes it so much easier to imagine how they once must have looked, the oxblood-tiled fronts gleaming in a city otherwise covered in soot and the half-moon windows illuminated by electric lights.

Each station was given its own colour scheme and unique platform-tiling pattern by Green, who was influenced by both Art Nouveau and the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, believing that utility and beauty could — and should — coexist. There is something particularly poignant about seeing his work frozen in time like this, given that he died of tuberculosis in 1908, aged only 33.

As we troop down the old stairs to the eastern platform, which closed first in 1917, the dust is deadening, but the scene that greets us feels eerily alive — and familiar. As well as being a popular vintage filming location (Charing Cross’s closed-off Jubilee line platform gets the modern bookings), it’s recognisable from Ministry of Information photographs of Londoners camping out during the Blitz, when Aldwych became an air-raid shelter. This, ironically, drew crowds far bigger than anything seen in peacetime: 1,500 people slept here every night.

As well as having its own library, the station hosted performances from ENSA, the Entertainments National Service Association (people joked the acronym stood for ‘Every Night Something Awful’). A newsreel of George Formby entertaining shelterers is projected onto the wall and the music makes the back of my neck prickle; I half expect a figure to materialise from the gloom and ask if I’ve got a light. (That’s another thing you notice down here: the smoke stains.)

Some ghost stations, such as Aldwych, stand separately, but others are hidden within still-living stations, as at Green Park. There, an unassuming door near the stairs leading up to Piccadilly opens onto another station entirely — one that no longer officially exists.

Green Park was once two separate stations, Dover Street and Down Street, which were amalgamated and renamed in 1933 to meet passenger demand. The Green-designed surface building was taken out of service (it’s a corner shop today), as were sections of the station itself — which came in handy in 1940.

Our guide leads us across a hidden walkway over the eastbound Piccadilly platform — dotted with grilles through which you can see trains arriving and departing below — to a space with incongruous cornicing and skirting. This is all that remains of the wartime headquarters of the London Transport Executive Board, which quite literally went to ground after its offices took a hit in the Blitz.

Lord Ashfield, its chairman, had the disused sections of Green Park turned into offices accessed by a covert lift, complete with a typing pool and kitted out with furniture from railway hotels (he had a wallpapered bedroom, too). There was also a canteen not subject to rationing, so lunchtime meetings were always well attended. Other organisations had the same idea: Brompton Road, another Piccadilly line ghost station, was home to the Anti-Aircraft Brigade office.

Butting up against all of this is a more recent slice of history, which we reach by cutting across the station’s lunchtime crowds, unlocking a gate and descending a long, echoing flight of concrete steps. It’s suddenly very cold and the reason why looms up ahead of us.

As any Underground regular knows, each line has its own microclimate, with newer, deep-tunnel examples running faster trains requiring more temperature and air-pressure regulation. The Victoria and Jubilee lines are cooled at Green Park by a jaw-dropping ventilation shaft, easily 100ft high and cine-matically armour-plated. It’s extraordinary to think that the people above us in Blue Bull Yard almost certainly have no idea that they’re standing on top of this science-fiction scene.

My last stop of the day is a station I’ve passed through hundreds, if not thousands of times: Piccadilly Circus, which opened in 1906 on the then Baker Street & Waterloo Railway (now the Bakerloo line). In 1922, with some 18 million people passing through its turnstiles annually, it was reconfigured by architect Charles Holden around an ambitious underground ticket hall. The design called for a state-of-the-art flat steel roof able to withstand the weight of the traffic (dubbed ‘The Prop of London’), which was mocked up to scale for testing inside the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre.

The real thing was painstakingly built in sections; Piccadilly’s statue of Eros had to be removed to Victoria Embankment Gardens. Eleven escalators, still fairly new to London — Harrods had the first in 1908 — were installed to do away with the notorious lift queues. Travertine and red scagliola marble and bronze fittings, chosen by the Underground’s managing director Frank Pick, gave the station the look of a modern Roman temple when it reopened in 1928. Future Official War Artist Stephen Bone was commissioned to paint a giant ‘Hub of Empire’ mural above the escalators, featuring a world map with London at the centre. This was removed at some point before the Second World War to make way for advertising; nobody knows where it ended up.

Beneath our feet, in a secret part of the station accessed by a locked gate, the clock stopped in 1928: alongside Piccadilly’s working tunnels are disused ones that never reopened after the renovation. The grime is thick down here, but beneath it Green’s original teal and green tiling is still visible, together with the direction signs Edwardian passengers would have followed. We retrace their footsteps to the shafts that once housed the lifts made redundant by the escalators. The voids feel like the backdrop to a deadly battle in a Bond film; it’s hard to believe we’re directly under the Hard Rock Cafe.

As at Aldwych, Piccadilly’s passageways were crammed with people during the early days of the Blitz. The resulting scenes were so squalid that Clementine Churchill pressured the government to kit them out with bunks and proper sanitary facilities. ‘Refreshment Specials’, trains dispensing off-ration treats, were also laid on, manned by staff from Lyons Corner Houses. Standing in the now dark and deserted corridor, I can almost hear the excited children queueing up for rock cakes and their weary parents trying to keep them in check. Lives began and ended down here and, although not everyone believes in ghosts, I imagine most people who have taken one of these tours will have felt haunted by Londoners past.

Back upstairs in the ticket hall, our guide points out something I’ve never spotted before: set into the station’s inner wall is a map, which tells the time around the world thanks to an ingenious scrolling band moving at exactly the same speed as the Earth’s rotation. Like so much we’ve seen today, it’s a relic from another time — but, if you stand close enough, you can still hear it ticking.

The artworks saved by the Tube

London Underground stations didn’t only shelter people during the Second World War. China from Buckingham Palace, ceramics from the British Museum and the Elgin Marbles (lowered down with ordinary ropes and pulleys) were hidden in Aldwych and Tate stowed its treasures beneath what is now Green Park, before they were moved to Piccadilly Circus as part of a 150-crate consignment also containing priceless pieces from London Museum.

Everything was transported in secret in March 1941, under the noses of those taking cover from the Blitz, thanks to special screens and a train with covered windows dreamt up by art historian Margot Eates.

Real ghosts on the London Underground

Do ‘ghost’ stations have ghosts of their own? The British Museum station, which closed in 1933, is rumoured once to have been linked to the institution by a secret tunnel that allowed the spirit of Amun Ra — an Egyptian mummy whose coffin was brought from Egypt to England, provoking mysterious deaths — to wander around screaming.

Sometimes trains themselves are the focus of spine-chilling stories: the passenger-free ‘Kennington Loop’, on which there was reportedly a death many years ago, has long been whispered about thanks to tales of doors slamming on empty trains and drivers experiencing uncanny sensations.

Could there be a logical explanation? Some scientists believe a phenomenon known as ‘infrasound’, whereby sounds beneath the threshold of human hearing provoke a physiological response, is to blame. In 2005, a researcher from Coventry University used a special low-frequency microphone to monitor the Kennington Loop and found strikingly high infrasound levels.

To find out more and book tours, visit the London Transport Museum website.

This feature originally appeared in the September 23, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Katherine Parr will always be known in history as the bride who survived. In July 1543, this clever, confident woman put aside her personal feelings — and her love for Sir Thomas Seymour — to become Henry VIII's sixth and final wife. In contrast to her teenage predecessor Catherine Howard, Parr was older and more experienced, had been twice widowed already, and was approaching her 30th birthday She would stay with Henry for three and a half years, until his death in January 1547.

Her influence didn't stop there. She had been very close to all of Henry's children — particularly the future queens Mary and Elizabeth — and remained so for the rest of her life. Sadly, that didn't turn out to be very long.

Almost 400 years later Elizabeth Ashcombe stands beside the tomb of Parr in Sudeley Castle’s 15th-century chapel. The monument was designed by the great Gothic Revival architect George Gilbert Scott, who worked on the restoration of the castle and chapel. It was completed in 1862. The marble effigy was carved by John Birnie Philip, a London sculptor who regularly worked with Scott.

Parr was Henry VIII's final wife, but he was not her final husband. She secretly married Seymour just a few months after being widowed by the King, and was became pregnant at the end of 1547. She spent her confinement at Sudeley and was delivered of a daughter there, but developed puerperal fever. She died on September 5, 1548, and was buried the same day.

The chapel was damaged during the Civil War and the tomb destroyed. Her lead coffin, however, was opened in 1782 to reveal her body in almost perfect preservation. A letter to Horace Walpole in 1784 noted the skin was ‘light brown… the flesh soft and moist… the teeth were perfect’. She was also found to be of ‘low stature’.

Exposure to the air caused the body to deteriorate and, in 1817, it was briefly removed from the building to avoid further disturbance.

The new tomb is based on fragments of the original. ‘Katherine Parr seems to linger here,’ observes Lady Ashcombe.

‘It is deeply moving to know she lived here, died here and rests here still. She is not merely a name in the history of Sudeley — she is part of its atmosphere, its memory, and its soul.’

Visit the Sudeley Castle website to find out more about visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

When Sprotborough Hall, Doncaster, was put up for auction in 1925, it had a reserve price of £5,000.

The property dated back to the reformation and end of the reign of Charles II. From the 17th century, the house remained in the same family. That family would, in a twist of sublime historical fate, eventually reclaim the title of Baron Cromwell — although not that Cromwell.

Solicitor Mr Frederic Stockton Gowland of Ripon was the only person who bid over the reserve, securing the three-centuries old property at the bargain price of £5,100 (£276,970.81). He told the Hull Times he’d bought the 'fine original Charles II mansion' as an investment. He meant it. His plan was to strip it of its constituent parts, then demolish it for a profit. In 1925 there was little to protect a property such as Sprotborough Hall.

Despite surviving over 300 years, it was among hundreds of structures overlooked by the newly-formed Ancient Monuments Branch — a government department set up in 1913 to ‘schedule monuments’ — for not being ancient enough. Their primary focus was on prehistoric and Roman sites, or castles and abbeys, not post-Reformation mansions.

Sprotborough had been built by Sir Godfrey Copley between 1686-90, on a site high above the River Don. Sir Godfrey’s house was inspired by one he had seen in France. That property was Versailles.

Enthused by his visit to the grand palace, Sir Godfrey returned to his ancestral land on Christmas Eve 1685, and, having spent Christmas one last time in his old house, started the New Year with a (literal) bang, demolishing the existing property and beginning work on his own, South Yorkshire palace.

The end result was not particularly French in style. Indeed, Christopher Hussey describes the building as being 'singularly Jacobean' in its presentation. However, Sir Godfrey did install a Versailles-esque fountain in the forecourt — pressure-powered from a tank on the roof, which in turn was fed by a pump direct from the River Don. He also, unusually for the time, had a 35-feet long swimming pool constructed within the property, which apparently could be heated.

When Country Life’s Christopher Hussey visited Brigadeer-General Sir Robert Calverly Alington Bewicke Copley, KBE, CB, in 1922, he was a little sniffy about the interiors, only instructing the photographer to photograph the hall and its adjacent library. They were both picked out for their distinctly Carolean qualities.

Hussey’s accompanying article explained that the house had been let out for the only time in its existence in the mid-19th century, with the tenants partaking in some dubious, Victorian redecoration during their time in the house.

However, a year after the article, disaster struck. On June 23, 1923, Sir Robert, who had just returned from a trip to South America, died of suspected pneumonia.

Just four days later, his wife, Dame Selina Frances Bewicke Copley also died, according to some newspaper reports, in Sprotborough Hall during the funeral of her husband. The double family tragedy came just months after years of dedicated research had resulted in Dame Selina successfully petitioning for the termination of the abeyance in her favour of the ancient title of the Barony of Cromwell.

The couple’s eldest son, also Robert, therefore, lost both his parents, inherited a brand new title, two sets of crippling death duties and a gargantuan, ancient mansion overlooking the (by then) far-from bucolic industrial creep of Doncaster all within the same month. So the new Baron Cromwell decided to sell.

First there was the sale of the contents — a four-day, in-situ sale in October 1925. It was noted that the best furniture, art and books had been packaged off to Christie's and Sotheby’s for consideration.

The November book sale at Sotheby’s was much enhanced by the sale of one unrecorded poem On the late massacre in Virginia by Christopher Brooke, which fetched £2,700 of the total £3,987 realised. The work was considered to be the earliest celebration in verse of the British settlement in America.

Next came the sale of paintings at Christie's, which raised a further £6,000. It included four works by Sir Peter Lely, six van Dycks, and a Rembrandt, which fetched £126.

Earlier, on May 16, 1925, Country Life reported on the impending sale of the house itself. An anonymous correspondent was quoted: 'The mansion is one of the those very big ones (about 30 bedrooms) and I fear it may have to be pulled down.' The correspondent wasn’t wrong.

After Christmas, and just into 1926, The Times reported that solicitor Mr Gowland had handed his 'investment”'to the housebreakers. They were swift in their execution.

On February 27, 1926, newspapers reported on the sale of fixtures and fitting, including the front hall panelling, bookcases, mantlepieces, fine iron gates, tanks, engines and pumps. Stone balustrading was recycled to Riseborough Hall in North Yorkshire. Demolition began in May 1926.

Later that month, reports emerged that a number of murals had been uncovered beneath reeds and plaster in what was once the central hallway. There was a full-length portrait of a woman wearing a coronet, which was broken at the neck while being taken down, and a head and shoulders portrait of a man wearing a Stuart-era wig.

Nothing was recorded as to what happened to them, but one can’t help but wonder what other treasures were hidden within those historic, 300-year-old walls.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

The keep of Norwich Castle was a palace of the Norman kings and among the greatest and most ambitious secular buildings they ever created. Yet, since the 14th century, it has endured neglect, abuse and the well-intended, but misleading, neo-Norman conversion to a museum in the 1890s. In 2025, however, as part of a wider refurbishment of Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, it finally received the attention it deserves as a historic building and reopened after a six-year, £27 million project. A central aim of the reimagining was to enable ‘visitors to see and explore the rooms as they could have greeted Henry I when he stayed in Norwich in 1121’: ambitious, but, on the whole, a triumph.

Norwich Castle was begun soon after 1066 by William the Conqueror. At the time, the city was the fourth most populated in the kingdom and the wider region was faced with the threat of Scandinavian invasion. The castle was planted in a corner of the Anglo-Saxon town, overlaying at least 98 properties, with massive defences of earth and timber. It soon proved its worth when the Danes did, indeed, invade in 1069 and when held against the King by the Countess Emma, redoubtable wife of the rebel Earl of East Anglia, Ralph de Gaël, in 1075.

It was after these events that the present keep was begun. It is raised on a massive artificial hill or motte, which was heaped up over parts of the earlier fortifications. As a ‘keep’, the Norwich tower belongs to an exclusive class of castle building known in the Middle Ages as the ‘great tower’. The earliest in England — if with a close rival at Colchester, Essex — is the White Tower in London, begun by William the Conqueror in the 1070s. In varying proportions, great towers were intended as self-contained fortresses, houses and venues for business and ceremony. They were also unmissable reminders of the new dynasty’s permanence and power.

Exactly when the Norwich keep was begun is unknown, but it makes sense to attribute both the initiative and the brief to William Rufus, the Conqueror’s successor, a patron of grandiose buildings, including Westmin-ster Hall in London. The keep would have made a logical partner to the great cathedral, begun in 1096, a pairing that mutually reinforced their power as symbols of secular and spiritual authority. Their kinship is also suggested by their shared use of blind arcading to ornament entire external surfaces of wall. In the case of the keep, this hugely expensive finish was restored in 1827–39 (Fig 1). After Rufus’s death in a hunting accident in 1100, it was completed under his successor, Henry I.

Given their scale, it was common for Norman keeps to be completed over relatively long periods of time. Changes of plan were a natu-ral consequence of such prolonged building works and several are apparent at Norwich. These, combined with the demolition of much of the interior, have greatly complicated ana-lysis of the final Norman form of the building. Although from the outside the keep looks splendidly complete, evidence of its interior plan is limited to a few part-surviving footings and the openings and scars of lost masonry on the outer walls. Consequently, some elements of the plan remain a matter for debate.

We do know, however, that the building was divided vertically into a very tall basement, a principal floor housing the grandest rooms, and a second mezzanine floor extending over some areas. Above this was the roof, with two ridges fitted in snugly below the battlements. In plan, the interior was split by a spine wall rising through the full height of the building. The only entrance was incorporated within a small subsidiary tower termed a forebuilding that forms a porch to the keep. It housed an ornate vestibule or waiting room at first- floor level and was originally — and is now again — approached by a long stair, defended by gates and probably a drawbridge (if so, the earliest known in England).

The keep doorway enclosed within this vestibule is surrounded by elaborate carved decoration. It is here that we encounter the first product of the recent re-presentation and among its most impressive, one of eight new doors, of solid oak, covered in painted leather and magnificent tinned ironwork modelled on ones in Norfolk churches (Fig 4). The carpentry is by Coulson of Cambridge; the metalwork by James Spedding of Holkham Forge.

Through the doorway we enter the great hall, the most important room in any medieval house, a place for ceremony, entertainment, dining and dispensing justice. The effect from the threshold is, indeed, dazzling (Fig 2), if a little too literally, thanks to a battery of spotlights. To readers who knew the castle before these works, seeing the hall as a coherent space is a revelation; previously, the main entrance to the keep opened onto a balcony or gallery that offered confusing views down through the original floor level (Fig 3).

Not only the reinstated volume of the hall, but the decoration and contents are products of the re-presentation. On one side of the room, a virtue is made of the 1890s neo-Norman arcade. Against it stand two painted and gilded thrones on a dais. Their regal status is enhanced by embroidered hangings in a plausible 12th-century style, depicting the Triumph of Good over Evil and the Judgement of Solomon. These are the result, as are other textiles here, of an astonishing 35,000 volunteer hours of work and based on carefully sought-out contemporary precedents. Ahead, the far end of the space is partitioned off by bright curtains with a balustraded gallery above (although, in the 12th century, this was probably the site of a timber wall). At hourly intervals, the lights of the hall dim and a lively and informative six-minute son et lumière is projected on the Norman walls, alternately telling the story of the keep and the city.

The hall leads, as it must have done origin-ally, through the spine wall, to the chamber — a smaller, more intimate room. As currently interpreted, it is the royal bedroom (Fig 5). Here, the visitor is confronted by a Norman elevation with high windows above a wall fireplace with carved capitals and, formerly, a semi-circular stone-built hood. Contrary to what is often asserted, the fireplace was a perfectly familiar feature of grand domestic interiors even in the 11th century. Worth inspecting, however, is the — surely doomed — attempt to ventilate it: there are three holes in the wall behind the hearth and another tier of vents above, a reminder of the astonishing discomfort of Norman interiors, however palatial.

Next to the fireplace and more modern in feel is a built-in wash basin, draining via a lion-headed spout on the outside, and in the opposite corner is handy access to the well. Contrasting starkly with the bare Norman stonework, the other walls — modern insertions — are decorated in more conventional 12th-century form with fictive stonework: a white ground with the joints painted in red. Dominating the room is a re-creation of a royal bed, backed by a splendid hanging. The most engaging feature of the room, however, is a 64½ft-long embroidery, telling in the style, technique, language and materials of the Bayeux Tapestry the story of the foundation of the castle and of Countess Emma. Its crea-tion, a heroic 27,000-hour effort by volunteers, is explained via a digital touch screen.

A side door leads to the chapel, complete with a miniature apse cunningly contrived in a corner turret of the keep. It’s important to acknowledge that the original form of this room is not fully understood and the present arrangement with asymmetric, blue-painted thrones (Fig 7) is not wholly convincing. Here, too, the re-created walls are lined out to resemble masonry and painted with fictive draperies. The east window frames a stained- glass Virgin and Child based on a rare 11th-century original in Augsburg, Germany. In these three first-floor rooms — hall, chamber and chapel — we have the three key components of a medieval great house and here formal re-presentation ends.

More treats await, however, starting with the other first-floor spaces. The original arrangement of the castle’s corners remains uncertain. Each was formerly spanned by a diagonal arch in the basement below, implying a series of triangular rooms, a unique configuration. Only one of these rooms had a clear purpose, a small ‘finishing’ kitchen, served by the huge fireplace improvised in what had been intended, before a change of plan, as a spiral stair. Nearby, however, hard against the west well, is a rank of 16 latrines (two visible, with four to a cubicle), ‘brought to life’ by all-too authentic noises and gossiping in Latin and Old French.

Upstairs, the part-reproduced mezzanine level offers minimal interpretation, but displays other architectural features and gives commanding views over the hall and chamber. Above that, reached by a stair and lift, are the roof and battlements and extensive views over the city and beyond. Deep down in the basement, meanwhile, the mood shifts to the display and explanation of the building’s structural history and mysteries (Fig 6). Here, too, is the splendid The Gallery of Medieval Life, an inspired partnership with the British Museum, offering a sparkling display of nearly 1,000 objects from the 12th to the 16th centuries.

The rebirth of the keep must be hailed first of all as a titanic achievement of nerve, civil engineering and project management. It is bold, too, in conservation terms, not least in punching two new entrances through the Norman walls, even if, in one case, the masonry turned out to be a 19th-century rebuild. Although informed by other evocations of 12th-century interiors — notably Dover keep in Kent (Country Life, March 24, 2010) and other shells of castle buildings made accessible (most recently Clifford’s Tower, York), the Norwich project faced further challenges, too.

Among these was the principle that everything reachable must be touchable and that the main spaces should be available for corporate hire; resulting compromises include the rather less-than-regal trestle tables and benches in the hall, doubling up as they have to as play desks for happy hordes of children. Stubbornly tricky questions about the origi-nal building cannot have helped and have led to some puzzling answers: was, for example, the royal bedchamber really overlooked from above on all four sides? Fixing the re-display in the early 12th century, for which the evidence is far less abundant than later was courageous, too. Pedants will quibble with some results, such as over-narrow lines of the false-ashlaring.

All is well served by the interpretation scheme, refreshingly discreet, even-handedly informative about people, history and the castle. It is provided by a combination of panels, touch screens, the son et lumière and sound. Most remarkable to many, however, is the accessibility of the whole experience: ‘intellectually’, as the parent of a disabled son has stated, ‘the curators have really taken time to think about the needs of the whole community’ and the ingenious basement to roof-top lifts do, as claimed on site, make it the ‘most accessible keep in England’. Henry I might not recognise every detail, but with more than 200,000 visitors since August last year, as well as winning the Museums + Heritage Awards prize for best Restoration or Conservation Project and being shortlisted for the Museum of the Year Award, it is unquestionably a success. Hats off to all concerned.

Norwich Castle is open to visitors — see more details.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Nicholas Howard stands in the Tapestry Drawing Room at Castle Howard, an interior refurnished as part of an ambitious wider renewal of this great Baroque house unveiled this year.

The room, which was reduced to a shell by a destructive fire in 1940, has been rehung with Vanderbank tapestries of The Four Seasons made in 1706. They were specially purchased from the factory in Soho, London, for this space and survived the blaze.

The cornice, dado and fireplace, by contrast, are new creations designed by Francis Terry.

Inset within the overmantel of the new fireplace is The Judgement of Paris by Marco Ricci, who was born in the Veneto, Italy. He came to England with Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, who is credited with the original decoration of the great domed hall for its builder Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle. The overriding majority of his work is still intact.

Ricci also worked for the Earl and this painting was returned to Castle Howard after its sale in 1991. It now felicitously serves to link the new work with the personalities of the original build.

‘When I look at this painting,’ says Howard, ‘it seems to epitomise our intentions for the room: it is at one and the same time both old and new, yet you can’t see the join.’

Castle Howard is open to visitors — see their website for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

'It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then,' said Alice to the Caterpillar during her Adventures in Wonderland. And so, too, would it be useless in trying to re-create the magnificent gardens at Cowley Manor, Gloucestershire, as they were when Country Life published an article on them in 1906.

Lewis Carroll was said to have gained inspiration for his famous tale of transitioning from childhood to adolescence while staying at the nearby Cowley Rectory. During his time in the Cotswold idyll, he was permitted to wander through the high-Victorian, heavily-manicured gardens of Cowley Manor. Their fantastical scale and exoticism were believed to have fed into the author’s imaginary world that he later created.

Situated to the south front of the lofty manor house, the impressive terraced gardens — said to be based on the Villa Borghese in Rome — tumbled down to a lake fed by two of seven springs said to be the source of the River Thames. Another source fed the dramatic water cascades, which saw pure spring water gush from the mouths of lions, past stone eagles and into another ornamental lake in the pleasure grounds.

By 1906, when Country Life paid a visit, the vast property was in the possession of a man who, along with his brother, had made their fortune from selling spring water. Well, spring water mixed with malted wheat and dried milk.

The drink was originally called Diastoid, which, frankly, sounded dire. Wisely, the decision was taken to use the family name instead, and James and William’s beverage launched first in Racine, Wisconsin, USA, and then in Slough, UK. It was a huge success. Their surname? Horlick.

The Horlicks had been born in Ruardean, some 26 miles west of Cowley Manor. They had both moved to the USA to make their fortune, with James returning to England in 1890 in search of a property in which to invest some of his new-found wealth.

James Horlick bought Cowley Manor in 1895, vastly extending the square house on the site built by James Hutchinson in 1850.

By the time Horlick had finished, his new country seat included a 65 feet by 40 feet ballroom, 31 bed and dressing rooms, six bathrooms and, by the 20th century, electric light powered by the property’s ever-present water. But Horlick’s main passion was the outdoors.

By 1906, he had planted a pheonomenal 700,000 trees on his land and the surrounding area. Roses were, according to the article of 1906, 'everywhere to be seen', and his statue-festooned terraces were ornamented in the distinctly dated (by that time) Victorian style of potted shrubs and seasonal annuals.

The grounds were graced by all manner of exotic creatures. Imported parrots, macaws and Australian swans were among the collection of non-native birds to be found in the grounds. And grazing majestically in the distance from his magnificent water gardens was Horlick’s prize herd of English Shorthorn cattle.

Despite all this magnificence, Horlick decided to sell in 1911, with adverts appearing in Country Life marketing the house, pleasure gardens, village, woodlands and the local George Hotel at Birdlip all to go as one lot.

The newly-knighted Sir James Horlick then retreated to the south coast, renting at first the famous West Dean house and gardens, before eventually ending up at Kidbrooke Park.

Cowley didn’t sell, so, by 1915, he took the decision to rent his Cotswold home out. It was leased to Mrs Enriqueta Angela Scully until 1929. In 1921, Sir James died.

The property was inherited by one of his sons, Sir Ernest, who had to take legal action against Scully in 1927, where she was found guilty of not keeping the ornamental lakes and boat house clear of mud. Ordered to pay £300 (just shy of £17,000 in 2026) to make good the lakes and a further £20 (£1,122) for the deterioration of the fishing water, she relinquished her tenancy.

In 1928, Cowley Manor was put back on the market for the 'sacrificial price' of £14,500 (£813,714.89), eventually heading to and being withdrawn from an auction after it only garnered bids amounting to £7,500. There was talk of demolition.

In March 1929, however, it was bought by a local man for an undisclosed sum. From there, it changed hands once more before going into service as first a school, then a care home for the remainder of the 20th century.

Cowley Manor’s formal Victorian gardens have long-since disappeared, but the house and grounds are once more thriving in the form of a throughly modern luxury hotel. And Sir James Horlick’s ornamental lakes remain a very good spot by which to enjoy a drink accompanied by a good book.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

One of the wonderful things about Britain is the wealth of beautiful and remarkable historic places that are distributed across the country, sometimes in ostensibly unlikely settings. One such, on the southern shores of the River Mersey among the quiet suburbs of the Wirral, is Port Sunlight, an oasis of greenery and Arts-and-Crafts beauty featured in Country Life in May 2018. At its heart is a long formal axis with gardens framed by trees and at the north end is a low neo-Classical building of pale stone: the Lady Lever Art Gallery. Village and gallery are among the legacies of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme (1851–1925), one of the greatest businessmen in British history and also one of the greatest collectors.

Lever was born into a middle-class family in Bolton, Lancashire, the son of a successful wholesale grocer. The values of Congregationalist Christianity, self-help, hard work, free trade and Gladstonian liberalism shaped his life and his astonishingly successful career. He left school at 15 to join the family business, became a partner at 21 and married a Bolton woman, Elizabeth Ellen Hulme, at 22.

In his thirties, Lever specialised in soap manufacture, concentrating on marketing and developing a brand, Sunlight Soap (1884). He studied his customers and modern American marketing methods with great care. Lever Brothers was duly formed (James Darcy Lever was a semi-invalid and a sleeping partner) and bought a factory in Warrington (1885). Production soared from 10 tons of soap a week to 450. In 1888, Lever bought a 56-acre site in the Wirral, of which 24 acres were allotted to a new factory and 32 to a planned village for the workforce; the village expanded to cover 140 acres. In the same year, he rented Thornton Manor at Thornton Hough, four miles away, buying it outright in 1891. The house was grandly extended in Jacobean style and numerous other residences followed, including Roynton Cottage at Rivington in the Lanca-shire moors (1900); the Hill at Hampstead, London (1904); and Lews Castle, Stornoway, when Lever bought the island of Lewis (1918).

Lever always pointed to a pair of Derby biscuit porcelain figures of a shepherd and shepherdess, bought in about 1877–80 for his home in Wigan, as the foundation of his collection. However, the demands of business came first until the 1890s, when he began to buy paintings, furniture and ceramics on a large scale. His first major purchases were genre pictures that could be used in advertising, such as The New Frock by William Powell Frith. It is evident, however, that Lever genuinely loved art and came to have great knowledge and firm opinions about it.

If his art acquisitions grew in the 1890s, they increased exponentially in the 1900s. Lever Brothers was growing spectacularly in these decades and, by 1914, Lever’s personal fortune was estimated at £3 million. The scope of his interests broadened to embrace sculpture, furniture, embroidery and ceramics, with his friendship with James Orrock, a watercolour painter and dealer who campaigned for the recognition of British art, a major influence. On three occasions, Lever bought Orrock’s whole collection, including about 450 oil paintings, 240 watercolours and more than 1,000 works by Orrock himself. Orrock’s judgement seems to have been patchy, however, and relatively few of these remain in the gallery.

By this time, Lever was thinking of his collecting as being for public benefit, as well as his own. In 1902, he presented a fine historic house, Hall i’ th’ Wood, to the town of Bolton, with historic furniture and objects. In the same year, he mounted an exhibition of paintings at Hulme Hall, a canteen for the factory girls at Port Sunlight. In 1911, he opened a museum in Rivington Hall, a Georgian house on his estate north of Bolton, and a permanent display at Hulme Hall. By this time, his thoughts were tending towards establishing a major public gallery. That same year, he was granted a baronetcy, becoming Sir William Lever.

Events in 1913 prompted a new initiative. In May, Lever bought several major Victorian paintings from the collection of Australian mining magnate George McCulloch. The pictures were too large for Hulme Hall, which was already full, so, on June 24, he instructed his architects, William and Segar Owen of Warrington, to prepare designs for a new art gallery and library at Port Sunlight. A month later, on July 24, his wife, Elizabeth, Lady Lever, died and a new foundation was established later that year to commemorate her. An active public figure in the Wirral, she was a notable traveller, circumnavigating the globe twice and visiting Europe, Africa, America and Australia. In 1913, she was elected one of the first female Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society. In 1917, Lever was raised to the peerage as 1st Viscount Leverhulme. His title incorporated his wife’s family name, but Elizabeth herself never held it. Hence, the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

Work began on the new building in 1914, but was delayed by the outbreak of war. The early stages of Port Sunlight in the 1890s had a picturesque quality with winding roads, but, in 1910, a revised masterplan had introduced a more formal quality with a grand central axis; it seemed natural to site the gallery at its north-west end. The gallery was completed in 1922 and opened on December 16 by Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Beatrice.

William and Segar Owen’s may have been an obscure Warrington firm, but the gallery is a masterpiece. Earlier public buildings at Port Sunlight were in picturesque styles, but Lord Leverhulme suggested that this new one should be Classical (Fig 3). He had travelled in America and his grand new art gallery has a sophisticated Beaux-Arts quality, similar to the great Classical public buildings that were rising in the US at this time. The building is free-standing and rectangular, 364ft long, and perfectly symmetrical. It is contructed of reinforced concrete and faced with finely detailed Portland stone.

There are entrances with recessed Ionic porticos on all four sides, although only that on the west side is now used. Otherwise, the smooth stone-faced façades are largely blank, for the galleries are one storey high and top-lit. They are raised up on a high basement, which houses the shop, restaurant, offices and stores. Curiously, the restaurant is dressed in neo-Tudor fashion with timber-frame walls. The main interiors upstairs were beautifully finished with features such as mosaic floors, bronze sliding doors and linings of polished limestone in the lobbies.

Over 35 years or so, Lord Leverhulme bought 20,000 works of art, probably more than any other individual in British history. His interests were broad, but with a strong focus on British art. Many of the museum’s objects were selected from his existing collections, but a lot were specifically bought for it. In several areas, including ancient sculpture, Chinese art and Wedgwood, the gallery’s collections were acquired or developed to broaden its scope as a public institution. There is a strong sense that Leverhulme was personally responsible for these decisions, rather than a curator or adviser.

The interior is arranged around a long, galleried H-shaped hall (Fig 1). This introduces the visitor to two of the gallery’s main strengths: Victorian and Edwardian paintings, which embody high technical standards and tell stories, and fine British furniture. Magnificent works by Millais, Burne-Jones, Holman Hunt, Sargent and others line the walls. One end is filled by Frederic, Lord Leighton’s The Daphnephoria (1874–76) a spectacular vision of ancient Greece that was one of the McCulloch purchases. An adjacent ‘history gallery’ provides an excellent introduction.

Lord Leverhulme loved the decorative arts and he was a bold and innovative collector. The Lady Lever Gallery has one of the finest groups of Georgian furniture in existence, with works by cabinetmakers from Thomas Chippendale and William Vile to John Cobb and Ince & Mayhew. Two long galleries to either side of the entrance hall present a spectacular array of cabinets, commodes, tables and chairs. The galleries house a superbly preserved set of Mortlake tapestries, too, The Story of Hero and Leander (1660s).

At either end of the central hall, there are large transverse galleries, with mid- to late-Georgian paintings and furniture. British portraits are another of the gallery’s strengths, with fine examples by Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney and others. Beyond these rooms, behind the north and south porticos, are beautiful domed rotundas that house sculpture (Fig 2). The one to the north has European sculpture from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, centred on the unabashedly erotic Salammbo (1899), by French sculptor Maurice Ferrary (Fig 5). Lord Leverhulme loved the contemporary ‘New Sculpture’ and bought works by artists such as Edward Onslow Ford and William Goscombe John, who were also personal friends. The south rotunda houses ancient Greek and Roman works, many of which were acquired in 1917 at the sale of the collection originally formed by Thomas Hope.

Another innovative aspect of the gallery, again made at Lord Leverhulme’s behest, was the inclusion of several ‘period rooms’, which were early examples of this genre. Three are lined with historic panelling that provides a setting for furniture, paintings and a range of objets d’art, including the Stowe State Bed from the Buckinghamshire house, a Rococo marvel of 1756–57 (Fig 6). The Adam Room, a neo-Classical vision in blue and white, was designed by furniture historian Percy Macquoid and made by White Allom & Co (Fig 7). Finally, the Napoleon Room has fine Empire furniture and paintings that commemorate Lord Leverhulme’s admiration for the French emperor and the art of his court.

Lord Leverhulme’s love of Wedgwood china led him to purchase Lord Tweedmouth’s impressive collection in 1905 — and add to it. As a result, the Lady Lever Gallery has one of the finest collections in existence. One of the gallery’s running themes is an appreciation of craft skill of all kinds; standing in the Wedgwood rooms, it is striking to reflect that these neo-Classical works of art, as beautiful and refined as anything produced in Europe at the time, were all designed and made by working-class people in Staffordshire. Leverhulme also had a long-standing interest in Oriental ceramics, buying examples in bulk and at a very high level of quality. His collecting initially focused on the Kangxi period (1662–1722), but, after the decision to establish the Lady Lever Gallery, he broadened the scope of his purchases to include carved hardstones, cloisonné enamels, Ming dynasty ceramics and other objects.

The galleries were all designed to be top-lit and the long central hall remains so. Other rooms, however, have had their top-lighting blocked, with mixed results. A few galleries, notably those housing the Wedgwood and Chinese collections, as well as one room of 18th-century British art (Fig 4), have been modernised with new display cases. In general, however, the gallery has been managed with an admirably light touch by its curators: in some ways, it remains a period piece, with a strong and appealing character of its own.

Lord Leverhulme kept adding to the museum collection until his death, on May 7, 1925. Thousands of his employees and their families filed past his coffin as it lay in state in the gallery, below The Daphnephoria. After his death, much of the private collection was sold, in sales that lasted 46 days. His descendants lived at Thornton Manor until the death of the 3rd Viscount Leverhulme in 2000. In 2001, the remaining collections there were sold by Christie’s for almost £10 million, still the record for a British house sale. Happily, several works from the collection were acquired for the Lady Lever Art Gallery at the event.

Lord Leverhulme has several memorials. Lever Brothers merged with the Dutch manufacturer Margarine Unie in 1930 to form Unilever. The company now trades in more than 190 countries and is valued at £108 billion. The Leverhulme Trust, founded under its namesake’s will, is one of Britain’s foremost cultural foundations, supporting scholarship and education across a very wide field, representing his success in business and his vast philanthropy. Port Sunlight and the Lady Lever Art Gallery are more personal memorials, expressive of his Victorian idealism and love of art. The latter was merged with the Walker Art Gallery and another four museums to form National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, now National Museums Liverpool, in 1986, in recognition of the scale and quality of their holdings.

Port Sunlight may seem remote, but it is easily reachable from nearby Liverpool or Chester and it is an uplifting place to visit. Arriving at the village is like stepping into another world. At its heart is this serene Classical building with its extraordinary collections, so rich and varied that it feels like a national gallery for a small nation.

Find out more about Lady Lever Gallery at the Liverpool Museums website.

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Miranda Rock pens the newly restored golden gates within the gatehouse arch at Burghley House, Lincolnshire. The gates were designed by the celebrated French blacksmith Jean Tijou, active in England from about 1689–1720.

Little is known about Tijou’s background, but he was involved in some of the most prestigious building projects of the period, including St Paul’s Cathedral in London and Chatsworth in Derbyshire. His garden screen at the royal palace of Hampton Court, Surrey, cost the fabulous sum of £755 — that's around £140,000 adjusted for inflation, according to the Bank of England, but to the ordinary man it would have been even more. That cost is equivalent to almost 40 years of toil by the average worker, who in 1700 typically earned less than £20 a year.

Tijou’s work in the French taste brought about a transformation in the character of architectural ironwork in England, introducing to it the dense patterns, monograms, heraldic imagery and flowing foliage decoration seen here.

He published the design of Burghley’s gates in A new booke of drawings (1693). The ironwork was originally gilded by René Cousin, who also worked on the interiors of the house for John Cecil, 5th Earl of Exeter. In the Second World War, the gates were badly damaged by a bomb that fell nearby and were last repaired in the 1990s.

This most recent restoration was undertaken by specialist North Yorkshire firm Topp & Co, aiming to return the gates to their original form​ and make them structurally sound. They have been dismantled, cleaned and had missing elements pieced in using traditional techniques.

Visit the Burghley website to find out more about visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

John Robartes, the 4th Earl of Radnor, was not a fashionable man.

He lived at Radnor House, in between Horace Walpole's (Horatio Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford) Gothic wonder that is Strawberry Hill and Alexander Pope's Villa on a highly desirable stretch of the River Thames in Twickenham. In the Georgian era, the then village west of London was very fashionable and the place to see, be seen in and, ideally, live.

Lord Radnor remodelled the riverside building in 1745 in an ornate Gothic style, which drew mild mockery from Walpole. The British politician nicknamed the neighbouring property Mabland — a reference to the overly ornamented and tacky public gardens in London's Marylebone. Rumour has it that he was also upset that someone had built in the Gothic style before he'd had a chance to bring Strawberry Hill to life.

Radnor’s miniature battlements framed the sprawling gardens, which ran all the way down to the river's bank. In the middle, Lord Radnor constructed a double-storey, Chinese-inspired summerhouse. He drew further ire from his neighbours by choosing to decorate the house's insides in a jumble of classically-inspired styles. There was a Baroque ceiling on the ground floor, by French artist Jean Francois Clermont, a Rococo-style one in the dining room and a bay window in the Teddington Room decorated with some interesting decorative plasterwork.

It was in these richly-decorated rooms that Lord Radnor desperately sought the company of the cream of London society. However, he wasn't the best of hosts.

In 1749, actor David Garrick, who lived in nearby Hampton, wrote: 'My Lord Radnor plagu’d our hearts to dine with him, we at last agreed (for we hate to dine from home) & he had invited the Parson’s Wife to meet Mrs. Garrick—but such a Dinner so dress’d & so serv’d up in unscour’d Pewter, we never Saw; the Wine was worse, but made somewhat better by the dead flies, in Short, we were soon both sick & unsatisfy’d; & we rattled the one horse chair home as fast as we could, where we recruited our Spirits again, with a clean Cloth, two roasted Pigeons, and the best currant Pye in ye Kingdom, the county of York excepted.'

Radnor died in 1757 and the curious house passed through the hands of multiple owners until, in 1903, it was purchased by Twickenham Borough Council. They had little interest in the house, and wanted, instead, to open up the garden to the public.

By 1937, the house — sad, unloved and used only occasionally as an office — was in a state of disrepair. Rain had made its way through the roof, damaging some of the painted ceilings, and the threat of demolition reared its ugly head.

At the last moment, it was recognised by someone as a building worthy of redemption.

Queen Mary declared Radnor’s retreat to be 'unique among the small houses of England', and was an early donor to a campaign to raise £1,000 towards the cost of repairs. Imagine how proud Lord Radnor would have been to see a member of the Royal Family declaring his home so fashionable.

Country Life rallied to the cause, publishing unusually hurried and ill-composed photographs of the interiors to illustrate the desperate need for further donations. The council happily handed the house over to the newly-formed Radnor House Preservation Society.

By early 1939, enough money had been raised to begin the preservation works, but Radnor House was not to have the Cinderella-style, fairytale ending it deserved.

A year after the works began, on the 10th day of The Blitz, the house was eviscerated by one of the thousands of bombs dropped on the British capital.

Today, a school stands on the site of the stricken house; its neighbour, Strawberry Hill, remains in fine fettle. And Radnor Gardens are, still, a public park for everyone to enjoy.

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A few miles south of North Berwick, an outcrop of volcanic stone forms a series of dramatic cliffs within the gently rolling farmland of East Lothian. The picturesque qualities of the heughs, as this wooded ridge is known, have been exploited since the 18th century, but, in the mid 19th century, the landscape that forms the wider setting of Balgone House (Fig 1) was transformed. Two lakes and a carriage drive were made to create a highly scenic approach. The new drive ran for more than a mile from a baronial-style gate lodge, proceeding under the public road and along the lake at the foot of the cliffs, before arriving at the house from the north via a cutting through the escarpment. The policies were enhanced with walks and rides and an avenue planted to form a vista to the distant cone of North Berwick Law.

Given the ambition of these developments, Balgone House itself — home of Alan and Fidelity Dean — comes as a surprise. Rather than being rebuilt to a grand Victorian scheme, it was merely enlarged piecemeal with a hotch-potch of ungainly extensions, behind which the earlier house survived.

The present owners, Alan and Fidelity Dean, bought the property in 1989 and, with the help of their son, the Edinburgh architect Marcus Dean, set about lovingly reviving the derelict mansion, stripping back the Victorian excrescences to recover the house that had evolved from a 16th-century tower. The estate had not been entailed until 1852, before which its buildings were sparsely documented, so much of what can be ascertained about the house has come to light only as a result of this restoration.

The earliest reference to Balgone is a charter of 1565 confirming a gift of lands by Robert Lauder of Bass to his wife, Elizabeth Hay. Their son George inherited after his brother was murdered in 1579, but he fell into debt and the property passed through various hands, during which time it’s unlikely that any major works were implemented. In 1641, the lands of Craig and Balgone were incorporated into the free barony of Bass, ‘with the tower and manor place of Ballowgoun as the principal place for receiving sasine’, suggesting that by now the tower had a hall range and was a substantial residence.

In 1654, John Sempill, Writer to the Signet, acquired Balgone and it was separated from other lands to create a new barony (a Scottish title adhering to property rather than person). Inherited by Sempill’s young daughter Marion in 1662, it transferred to her husband, George Suttie, on their marriage in 1677. Suttie was a merchant burgess of Edinburgh with strong trading links to the Low Countries. A firm Royalist, he was granted one of the last baro-netcies of Nova Scotia by Queen Anne in 1702.

The late 1670s, when he was newly married and resident in Edinburgh, would seem a favourable time to have embarked on improving Balgone and the tax paid on hearths suggests development at this period — by 1691, the house had 10. An indication of the scale of the house in 1715 is given in an antenuptial contract drawn up between James, the future 2nd Baronet, and Elizabeth Dalrymple, daughter of Sir Hew Dalrymple, Lord President of the Court of Session. By its terms, Suttie resigned his lands and baronies to his son, but was allocated ‘a dining room and two bedchambers and offices thereto belonging, being the three rooms lying in the south end of the third storrie with the hail furnishings’.

An estate survey of 1739 includes a sketch of the ‘mansionhouse’, depicting a long, rectangular building of uniform height, with a lower wing at right angles and the old stair tower projecting at the inner angle. Soon after this date, George, the 3rd Baronet, demolished the wing and remodelled the main range to create a symmetrical, nine-bay house with an enfilade of principal rooms on the first floor, the old tower subsumed into the south end. The stair tower was refashioned from circu-lar to square, with a polygonal upper stage, and a mirror image of it built to create a pair of ornamentally balustraded projections flanking the central three bays. That they contain spiral stairs, and that the low, bolection-moulded doorway could be late 17th century, is typical of Balgone’s idiosyncratic blend of the Scots vernacular with Classicism.

No date is recorded for the remodelling, but in 1749, when stationed in Gibraltar, George asked for leave to arrange the fitting of a new roof to his house, ‘which otherwise will fall down’. It’s likely that his concern related to Balgone, where the big, square roof timbers are 18th century and the south gable was clearly refashioned following demolition of the wing. A few years later, George married Agnes Grant, which would have provided further impetus for his improvements.

Agnes was the middle daughter of William Grant, the Lord Advocate, who had bought the neighbouring Prestongrange estate in 1746 and took that name when he became a Lord of Session and Justiciary in 1754. Her younger sister, Jean, was married to Robert Dundas of nearby Arniston, one of William Adam’s finest houses. Balgone’s remodelling may have been modest by comparison — probably the work of a mason or wright — yet, although it stopped short of a pedimented frontage, it updated the house with a tripartite arrangement, the central block being flanked by pavilions on quadrant links enclosing a forecourt. The influence of Classical formality extended to the setting, where a tree-lined avenue was formed, leading to a semi-circular plantation on the cliff edge.

By 1798, the house had three extensions to the rear. Now reinstated, this east elevation is described by Jane Geddes in the Lothian volume of the ‘Buildings of Scotland’ (2024) as resembling ‘an ominous advancing naval flotilla… projecting in an E-plan from a vast expanse of naturally coloured rose-pink harling’ (Fig 3). The southernmost of these full-height extensions is vaulted on the ground and first floors, suggesting an offshoot contemporary with the tower house, a typical arrangement for accommodating closets and small chambers. The other two are 1740s, their gables crowstepped in a nod to the earlier jamb. The middle projection included a new staircase, its Adam-style plaster ceiling belonging to a second Georgian phase of about 1780–1800 (Fig 2). At about this time, the principal floor acquired larger, more elegant sash windows and some cornices were adapted with more delicate ornament. A carved marble chimneypiece was installed in the drawing room; it was reinstated by the Deans after they found it in a barn (Fig 5).

Much of the earlier Georgian detail survives, demonstrating how late the old-fashioned Scots-vernacular style lingered on in windows with thick astragals, timber cornices and architraves with chunky egg-and-dart and rope mouldings. A corner fireplace with an ogival overmantel is in the late-17th-century manner of William Bruce (Fig 7).

A chamber in the south-east jamb presents a particular puzzle. Lined with gilt-edged shelves converted into cupboards with locks, it possibly served as a muniments room, although the fireplace flanked by fluted pilasters suggests a grander use. The timber fittings have been modified, but are clearly contemporary with the 1740s detail of the adjacent room. When reinstated following conservation, the doors and panelling could be fitted only after the shelves had been replaced, yet one of the shelves is dated 1793. The original dimensions exactly fit the slightly narrower, vaulted room below, suggesting that the fittings have been moved up a floor. The panelled chamber (Fig 6) became a dressing room to the former Oak Bedroom, with a close stool in the window embrasure and six ‘old musquets,’ three pistols and three swords kept here.

More conventional furnishings equipped the principal rooms, with an inventory of 1836 listing mahogany chairs, tables and sideboards, a pianoforte, several games tables, Turkey and Brussels carpets and chintz curtains. By this date, James, the 4th Baronet, had implemented the first of the Victorian additions — a T-shaped block abutting the central stair jamb, containing four grandly scaled rooms over two floors.

The 4th Baronet had inherited Preston-grange from his aunt in 1818, consequently changing his name to Grant-Suttie. He continued to live at Balgone and Prestongrange passed to his son, George, in 1829, on his marriage to Harriet, daughter of the 7th Earl of Wemyss. A moderniser and improver, George commissioned William Henry Playfair to remodel that house and revived the Prestongrange colliery. After Harriet’s death in 1858, he moved back to Balgone and began to invest large sums in the estate.

Mercifully, much of what he did to the house proved reversible. Instead of sweeping away the Georgian front and interiors, he simply pushed out the central three bays at ground and first-floor level with a balustraded infill between the stair-towers. The new loggia proved too draughty and was converted to an outer hall; above it, the drawing room extension featured three large plate-glass windows that jarred with the existing 12-pane sashes.

On the east front, the spaces between the three wings had been infilled piecemeal with a complex arrangement of service and circulation spaces. The north wing now disappeared behind a huge crowstepped extension, conceived by Playfair as a first-floor dining room over a servants’ parlour and bachelors’ rooms. Playfair died in 1857 and the work was executed a few years later by his principal clerk, James Anderson Hamilton, who also designed two elaborate gate lodges. The grey hammered rubble contrasted harshly with the harled finishes. Nor did the extension stop with the dining room, but, in an odd piece of planning, wrapped round the north-east corner of the old house with a baronial-style stair-tower and encased the north end with a narrow range.

Balgone’s Victorian heyday came to an abrupt end in 1878, when the 6th Baronet died only four months after his father. The 7th Baronet was an absentee invalid with no heir so, after a period of letting, Balgone became home to his uncle and cousins, latterly Hilda and Ethel Grant-Suttie, who lived here without electricity well into the 1960s, housing goats and chickens in some of the rooms.

By the time the Deans bought Balgone from the 8th Baronet, the lead had been stolen, pigeons roosted in the dining-room pendants and dry rot was rampant. Their restoration combined careful research and conservation practice with resourcefulness and creativity. They returned the kitchen to the original tower, where an arched recess with a massive chimney and a spiral staircase rise through the thickness of the east wall (Fig 4). In the process of removing the Victorian wings and stripping off failed harling and internal linings, the Deans uncovered crucial information about the early structure. A defaced bolection moulding emerged on the south stair-tower, revealing the origi-nal main doorway. Other blocked-up openings provided evidence for the lost wing.

It was when they were creating a library in the ante-room off the drawing room that they uncovered Balgone’s most intriguing feature: a huge fireplace with moulded shafts and foliate capitals, bearing a close resemblance to a 15th-century one at Affleck Castle, Angus. Two successive smaller fireplaces had been inserted, but these were removed and the stonework, which was in a precarious state, consolidated. The structure has clearly never been moved, suggesting that this part of the north range is late medieval.

Reusing dismantled materials and rescuing crown glass and parquet flooring from Edinburgh skips, the Deans recaptured Balgone’s 18th-century form and character in a way that feels comfortable and unpretentious. They did much of the decoration themselves and the house is filled with paintings by Mrs Dean, a graduate of theatre design from the Central School, London. On the south side, they created a small walled potager and they replanned the abandoned main garden with hedges and topiary centred around the vista to North Berwick Law.

The impressive restoration of this complex house has thrown up all sorts of intriguing details that pose as many questions as they answer. It has revealed Balgone House to be a fascinating palimpsest that reflects the changing tastes and demands of one family over more than 300 years.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In May 1977, the contents of Mentmore Towers, Buckinghamshire, were sold up over nine days for the staggering sum of £6.4 million. It was dubbed the sale of the century and came at the end of a sustained — but ultimately unsuccessful — campaign to save the house in its entirety as a branch of the V&A Museum.

Mentmore Towers was built in 1851–54 for Baron Mayer de Rothschild by Sir Joseph Paxton of Crystal Palace fame. His design was inspired by the great Elizabethan house at Wollaton, Nottinghamshire, and incorporated the latest technology, including a central-heating system, running hot water and plate glass. The quality and richness of the contents were proverbial. In the words of a Country Life leader at the time of the sale, Mentmore ‘was conceived as a treasure-house of objects that would evoke… all the richness of 16th-century Venice, 17th-century Flanders and 18th-century France’.

The property eventually passed to the Baron’s daughter, Hannah, and by her marriage in 1878 to the Earls of Roseberry. It was the death of the 6th Earl in 1974 that prompted the sale.

Unwelcome as it was, the sale dealt with the contents. The house, with its fixtures, including such objects as a fireplace reputedly from Rubens’s house in Antwerp, was sold in 1977 for £220,000 to the Maharishi Foundation, for use as its headquarters. Then, in 1997, it was offered for sale again and, since 1999, it has been the property of Mentmore Towers Ltd.

Permission was given for a scheme to convert it into a hotel and conference centre, but this never came to fruition. Since that time, the fabric has steadily deteriorated and, despite some emergency repairs, this Grade I-listed building has been on the Buildings at Risk Register since 2009. As early as 2013, it was described as being of the highest priority and as being ‘at immediate risk of rapid deterioration or loss of fabric’. Repairs to the roof were agreed in 2016, but the work was again never completed.

Athena was pleased to hear, therefore, that just over a month ago, on August 4, the local planning authority, Buckinghamshire Council, served a repairs notice on the property. It gives the owner two months to show that the necessary repairs are in prospect and, if not, leaves open the possibility that Mentmore Towers could be compulsorily purchased.

With so many other more immediate responsibilities, councils are often nervous of repairs notices. Indeed, as a tool they threaten so many complications and costs that it’s questionable how useful they are. Buckinghamshire Council should be particularly congratulated, therefore, on taking a stand in this case.

Mentmore Towers is an astonishing building capable of modern use and there is no good reason why it should be allowed to fall down as it waits for a purpose.

This feature originally appeared in the September 9, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The White Tower, London, begun by William the Conqueror in the 1070s and completed in about 1102. This prodigy building has given the whole castle its familiar name as the Tower of London. When it was begun, there was no English precedent for a masonry tower on this scale, so the design was probably copied from the lost tower of Dukes of Normandy in Rouen. Castles were a new building type introduced by the Normans.

The chapter house of St Augustine’s Abbey, Bristol, now the cathedral. The Augustinian monastery here was generously patronised by the future Henry II in the 1150s. This opulent interior illustrates the growing richness of Romanesque architecture in the 12th century.

Richmond Castle, North Yorkshire, was integrally planned with a new town by Alan Rufus, a kinsman of William the Conqueror. In the foreground are the ruins of Scolland’s Hall, probably built in the 1080s and one of the earliest secular buildings in stone to sur-ive in England. Sockets for a lost timber gallery that ran along the face of the building are clearly visible. In the background is the great tower or keep of the castle, probably dating to about 1160.

The interior of the keep of Castle Hedingham, Essex, probably begun in 1142 after its builder, Aubrey de Vere, was offered the title of Earl of Oxford. Such castle towers were a statement of status. This richly decorated room, warmed by a large fire and with encircling galleries, was presumably intended for grand ceremonial use. The arch spanning the interior is one of the largest to survive from Norman England.

The monumental nave of Gloucester Abbey, now the cathedral. The church was completely rebuilt by the first Norman abbot from 1089 and was probably finished in the 1120s. It was common for ambitious building projects to span several decades. The tops of the walls were remodelled when the vault was added in the 1240s.

The tower of Castor, Cambridgeshire, built in the early 12th century. A monastery was founded on this Roman site in about 664 by Kyneburgha, a daughter of King Penda of Mercia. As rebuilt by the Normans, it served as a parish church. The parapet and spire are later additions.

The crossing of St Alban’s Abbey, Hertfordshire, now the cathedral. Rebuilt from 1077, it used materials from the neighbouring Roman ruins of Verulamium, outside which, by tradition, St Alban was martyred. The Normans promoted many extant saints’ cults.

The interior of the Chapel of St John in the Tower of London, one of the earliest Norman interiors to survive substantially intact in England. It exemplifies the monumental austerity of early Norman architecture. With arches and stone vaults, it also illustrates the debt of Norman masons to Roman example (hence the use of the term Romanesque to describe the style of the buildings that they created). The interior was probably enlivened with wall paintings.

The huge piers of Durham Cathedral, rebuilt from 1093. Their decoration with abstract patterns was widely copied. Composed of standard elements set in regular courses, they are evidence of the Normans’ ability to quarry and fashion stone at scale.

This feature originally appeared in the September 2 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Charlotte Anne Fletcher was just 12 years old when she inherited her family's business. Her early years were split between London and the more tranquil surrounds of Peel Hall (not to be confused with Kenyon Peel Hall, in the same Lancashire village) — a new-build property, reportedly designed by Charles Barry for her grandfather, Matthew Fletcher.

The Fletchers’ wealth came from coal and it was this 'black gold' that Charlotte inherited following the untimely deaths of her mother, Anne, in February 1857, and her father, Jacob Fletcher Fletcher, two months later.

In 1870, after her guardians released her inheritance, Charlotte spent some of her mammoth wealth on Park Hall, a beautiful Elizabethan house on the edge of the market town of Oswestry, in Shropshire. A Latin motto was inscribed above the front door: 'Quod tibi fieri non vis Alteri feccris', or, 'Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourself'.

In 1866, 20-year-old Charlotte had married the Hon Robert Wellington Stapleton-Cotton. Though she bore him two children, the marriage was far from a happy one and Charlotte petitioned for divorce in 1879, citing abandonment. The case was reported in the national press. Evidence included an astonishing, three-year-old letter from Stapleton-Cotton:

‘I have behaved to you as badly as a man could do, and by the time you receive this I shall be far away with another woman. You may blame me, but you must own that we were never suited to each other. Forget me if you can, and think of me as never having belonged to you. It will be no use in to make us go back, as nothing will ever make us retract from the step we have taken. If you can be kind to my brother and sister as regards to the allowance they have had from me, I implore you to do so.’

A divorce was granted, though it appears that Charlotte was left to pick up the costs. It was to be one of the best decisions of her life.

In 1886, she remarried. This time, happily, to Major Alfred Wynne Corrie of Itchen Abbas, Hampshire. By this time, Charlotte was so respected for her charitable deeds that the Mayor of Oswestry presented the happy couple with a diamond star, on behalf of the town.

It was a great union. The couple set up home in Park Hall, managing to modernise it (including installing a lift in 1910), without compromising any of its historic charm. Wynne Corrie went on to become Mayor of Oswestry, a Deputy Lieutenant and Justice of the Peace, dedicating his life to the service of his new community.

In 1903, they invited Country Life to visit Park Hall. The writer was enchanted, describing it as ‘commodious and comfortable’, and a ‘mansion of very excellent and original character’. Photographs from the article, reproduced here, show intricate and detailed woodwork and carvings throughout the principal rooms.

Nine years later, the couple celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary at home.

On June 18, 1913, Charlotte was in the lift, heading downstairs for dinner, when its rope snapped. She died two days later from shock and her injuries.

Alfred put Park Hall up for sale a year later, by which time the First World War was looming large. It failed to sell and so, like others, he offered his land to the military for training purposes. He then volunteered for service and served as an honorary Major in the Volunteer Defence Force for the duration of the war.

In the ensuing years, Park Hall’s land became a temporary home to thousands and thousands of men — including the poet Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) — as they perfected the terrifying art of trench warfare. It eventually housed a sizeable prisoner of war camp.

Months after the hostilities had finally ceased, another disaster struck. On December 27, 1918, a fire took hold in the chapel. It quickly spread through the wooden hall, consuming the entire building in hours.

Wynne Corrie died four months later. He had remarried in 1916, but was laid to rest with Charlotte in his childhood home of Itchen Abbas.

In August 1919, the Government announced that it had purchased Park Hall’s land for an undisclosed sum from the executors of Wynne Corrie’s estate. The plan was to use it as a training ground for demobilised soldiers who wanted to become market gardeners, but nothing came to fruition. Instead, an existing hospital continued to operate; during the Second World War it was used as a military camp and, after that, by troops on National Service.

The land has finally found a semblance of peace in the 21st century, as a new estate of 110 houses. And Park Hall’s former farm is now an adventure park where children can interact with the animals, drive small tractors and run around in trenches as they are taught the history of the land on which they stand.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

At the age of nearly 90, Quinlan Terry has decided to retire. This is a major event in the history of British architecture since the Second World War. Terry, a symbol of the enduring power of tradition, is widely revered for his knowledge of Classicism and load-bearing construction, for which he has earnt a dedicated following of admirers both in this country and the USA.

Beautifully crafted, often from well-chosen stone or handmade brick, his buildings may look even better after half a century of weathering than when first unveiled. Equally, he has been the lightning rod for architects of a different persuasion, the Modernists who felt threatened by a resurgence of tried-and-tested styles associated with The King. They became particularly incensed whenever Terry expanded his range beyond the country house, his acknowledged forte, and into the commercial areas that they regarded as their preserve. The triumph of Richmond Riverside, a range of office buildings next to Richmond Bridge in west London, in a Picturesque medley of historically inspired façades (Fig 8), showed that there was an alternative to the ugly monolithic blocks being offered by most conventional practitioners.

Mr Terry has also designed college buildings in Cambridge, a cathedral for Brentwood, Essex (Fig 5), and a small hospital at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, London SW3 (Fig 6). He never designed a classical airport, but some challenges must be left to his successors in the movement to revive Classical architecture, which he did so much to foster.

Born on July 24, 1937, Mr Terry grew up in Hampstead, the son of a lawyer father and an artist mother who were close friends of the Modernist architect Ernö Goldfinger; during the Second World War, the Terrys and Goldfinger were evacuated together to the house that Berthold Lubetkin built for himself at Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire. They met an even more famous Modernist, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, when he came to receive the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) gold medal.

Acutely sensitive to the horrors of comprehensive redevelopment that took place as he was growing up, the young Quinlan reacted against his parents’ liberalism. After Bryanston in Dorset, where he excelled at art, he enrolled at the Architectural Association (AA), which did not prove to be a spiritual home — the tutors for his fourth and fifth years were prominent Brutalists.

His despair at the state of the world was expressed in a linocut ironically entitled The House of Joy, depicting a ruined chapel adorned with Biblical quotations on the theme of desolation and decay. It was at the AA, however, that he met the young Polish girl, Christine de Ruttié, descended from one of Napoleon’s generals, whom he married. His happy family and deep Christian faith became the rocks on which his life was built (Fig 3).

That life would not be based in London. In 1962, he drove his 1929 open-topped Alvis to Constable Country on the Essex/Suffolk border (trouble with the car meant that he arrived untypically late) for an interview at the Dedham office of Raymond Erith. Erith himself had left the capital in the 1930s.

Although he had been commissioned to restore the most famous Georgian townhouses in Britain — Nos 10, 11 and 12 Downing Street — after the Second World War, Erith’s practice was restricted both by its rural location and his dedication to Classicism. Previously, Mr Terry’s rebellion against the Modernist orthodoxy had taken an Arts-and-Crafts form, but in Classicism he found an answer to his spiritual need for order and human scale. Erith accepted him, effectively as a pupil.

The firm survived on a diet of bathroom extensions, leaking roofs and smoking chimneys, and might not have kept going at all had Erith not had a private income, but the experience acquired during the 1960s and 1970s gave Mr Terry an intimate understanding of traditional construction and building materials.

He had enough free time to decorate the family home — a converted farmworker’s cottage, aptly called Winter-floods — in trompe-l’oeil. Although he became Erith’s partner in 1966, work was so slack that he could leave for Rome in 1968 on a scholarship, where he drew monuments from the ancient world to the Baroque. The Roman Sketchbook that he assembled would be the foundation stone of his later career.

During his absence, a ray of hope shone into the old timber-frame building, once used as a rural telephone exchange, that was the Erith and Terry office. Sir Thomas Pilking-ton had enquired about rebuilding his Victorian country house, Kings Walden Bury in Hertfordshire. By the standard of Erith’s previous commissions, often exquisite, but usually small, the new building was to be on an unprecedented scale — so much so that Erith urged his colleague to keep a notebook of the creation of what then seemed might be the last hurrah of the country house.

This he did, creating a visual diary of the greatest elegance, accompanied by a doom-laden text; he also made a linocut, which is a masterpiece of its genre. After the completion of Kings Walden Bury in 1971, the office was kept afloat by another remarkable commission — an enormous temple for the Bahá’í faith’ in Tehran, Iran. This project did not survive the fall of the Peacock throne in 1979, but for several years provided the mainstay of Erith and Terry after Erith’s death in 1973.

Although Terry built his subsequent career on that of his mentor, he and Erith were fundamentally different personalities. Worshipping Sir John Soane, Erith was a rationalist whose spare style, although Classical, was suited to its time: he dreamt that it might be possible to combine Modernism and Classicism, although the idea never took root. Terry, by contrast, loathed Modernism, the structural failings of which were illustrated by the partial collapse of Ronan Point, a 22-storey block in east London, two months after it was opened, causing the death of five people.

By temperament, he was drawn to ornament more than austerity. He excelled in the design of finials, urns, fountains and free-standing columns, often with self-imposed complications. This meant that he was ideally positioned to take advantage of the new mood of confidence among private clients that characterised the 1980s, gung-ho individuals who wanted to demonstrate the triumph of free enterprise in stone.

Alistair (later Lord) McAlpine, Margaret Thatcher’s treasurer of the Conservative Party, commissioned numerous follies for his garden at West Green House, Hampshire, leased from the National Trust, including a nymphaeum and an elliptical gadrooned urn with spiral flutes that took Terry a whole month to draw out. For Michael and Anne (later Lord and Lady) Heseltine at Thenford, Northamptonshire, he designed a Mannerist orangery-cum-swimming-pool pavilion in contrasting colours of stone, marmalade Horton for the walls and oat-coloured Clipsham for the columns, pilasters and dressings.

A handful of clients pioneered the revival of the country house (Fig 2). They usually trod carefully, unsure of how long the boom times would last. Building a new country house was likely to excite comment. People with big ideas scaled them back, trimming the dimensions of rooms to an extent that they regretted when they came to live in the finished home.

Externally, these compact buildings can betray Mr Terry’s frustration as an architect, as they may be too small for the architectural exuberance that they support. Flamboyant façades may be the prelude to quite basic plan types, dominated by an overlarge staircase hall: they did not always suit families wanting a big live-in kitchen. A client who wanted, for example, an old rectory to be refaced might be rewarded with a dazzling Baroque façade, composed of a superimposed order of banded columns, walls and niches of knapped flint, and a skyline of extravagantly shaped urns, which could stand as a piece of sculpture by itself. This is what happened at Fawley House, near Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire.

As time went on, some owners were able to commission on a bigger scale and Terry now had a canvas appropriate to his architectural ideas. From 1994, the master was joined by his son Francis: for the decade after 2004, the firm became Quinlan and Francis Terry, a partnership that dissolved when Terry Jnr left to found his own practice, Francis Terry and Associates, in 2016. These years saw the construction of a castle on Brecqhou, in the Channel Islands, for Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, built around four sides of an internal courtyard (Fig 9). Sir David arrived with a sketchplan whose essentials were thereafter followed, creating what the late Prof David Watkin described as ‘the largest house built in Britain for at least two centuries’ after its completion in 1996.

This was followed, in 2000–02, by Lord and Lady Rothermere’s Ferne Park in Wiltshire, (Fig 1); when the main block — reduced from the original scheme — proved too small, cuboid wings with Venetian windows were added in 2011–12. In its sublime parkland setting, Ferne is the very ideal of a country house, handsomely proportioned, crafted from lightly mottled Chilmark stone, and detailed with exceptional refinement (Coun-try Life, May 5 and 12, 2010).

The firm did not rest on its laurels. After Ferne came Kilboy in Co Tipperary, Ireland, previously thought of as a ‘lost’ Irish house (it appeared in Country Life on September 7, 2016). It rose again in splendour, thanks to Shane Ryan, son of the founder of Ryanair, Tony Ryan. Kilboy is remarkable for its rich plasterwork and central hall with its sweeping staircase, lit by a coffered dome (Fig 7).

Although country houses occupied the bulk of Mr Terry’s working life, he did not confine himself to rich private clients. Richmond Riverside was designed for a developer who needed planning permission for a site near Richmond Bridge, London TW9. Proposals for a Modernist monolith had, thankfully, been turned down. In its stead, Mr Terry created a kind of architectural caprice, comprising a terrace of separate offices, each with its own façade, Palladian, Regency or Venetian.

Critics have scoffed, but, opened in 1988 by the Queen, it proved an instant hit with the public, the lawns that front the terrace now packed with cheerful crowds during the summer. Tourist guides can be heard to describe it as a precious survival from the 18th century, a mistake Terry regards as a badge of honour.

In 2010, work started on Queen Mother Square at Poundbury, Dorset, where no fewer than nine of the buildings were designed by Quinlan and Francis Terry, in a public space conceived by Léon Krier (Fig 10) . Arguably, the concept is too grand for its role as the centre of what is not a new town, but an urban extension to Dorchester, but it is undoubtedly splendid. Even the local supermarket (a branch of Waitrose) is a dream of propriety. One of his more recent small buildings is the jewel-like Tudor library tower (Fig 4) that arises for Sir Nicholas and Lady Coleridge’s Worcestershire house.

As Terry transitions from being — as some have termed him — ‘The King’s favourite architect’ to squire of Higham Hall, the Suffolk house in the manner of Soane where he and his family have lived since 1980, he can look back on a long career of personal achievement and much battle against the forces of Modernism.

Softly spoken and immaculately tailored, Terry may seem an unlikely controversialist, happier in the well-crafted arcadia of his home life than in the media, yet it was he above all others who kept the flame of Classicism alive through several dark and blusterous decades. This was a service to Western civilisation, given the centrality of the Classical tradition. His office continues under Roger Barrell. As he relaxes in his garden beside the Brenta, as Suffolk’s River Brett is sometimes called in this Palladio-loving household, we wish him a long and peaceful retirement.

This feature originally appeared in the August 5, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Charles Berkeley stands next to the splendid French late-Gothic arch that dominates the courtyard of Berkeley Castle. Incredibly, this iconic castle — built shortly after the Norman Conquest, and the site of King Edward II's notoriously gruesome murder — has been in the ownership of the Berkeley family since the 12th century.

Both the arch and the inset doorway, richly carved with figures of angels, saints and apostles, were among the imported fixtures and fittings installed during the wholesale restoration of the neglected castle in the 1920s by Randal, 8th Earl of Berkeley.

A chemist educated in France, the Earl aimed to restore the neglected castle to its medieval state, reversing changes to the fabric, but also to modernise its facilities. The work was undertaken by the London firm Keeble, which specialised in the sale of historic interiors and the restoration of houses.

It’s difficult to be certain where the arch came from, but it dates to about 1500 and was possibly supplied by Parisian antique dealer Bacri Frères in 1923. Certainly, he sold a doorcase to the Earl that was supposedly associated with Anne de Bretagne, wife of Charles VIII of France.

The door was cut down to fit the arch and may be from Brittany or Normandy. To confuse matters, the achievement has been re-carved with the Berkeley Arms.

‘It’s my favourite doorway here,’ says Berkeley, ‘very much in keeping with the 8th Earl’s stylish additions to the castle.'

Berkeley Castle is open to visitors — see the website for details.

This feature originally appeared in the August 26, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

If you’ve ever owned or been owned by a cat you’ll know that they like to loll in the most inconvenient places (on top of laptop keyboards in the middle of a high-pressure meeting, for example) and refuse to move until they, and only they, are ready.

The same feline stubbornness was rumoured to have greeted Victorian visitors to the country estate of Murray Edward Gordon Finch-Hatton, 12th Earl of Winchilsea and 7th Earl of Nottingham.

In the drawing room, guests would often be greeted by the Earl’s pet lion lounging on the sofa — he picked it up while touring Egypt. Anyone for tea? Or should that be does anyone want to be the tea?

Haverholme Priory was consecrated in 1139 as a rare Gilbertine monastery — a uniquely English medieval order which allowed nuns and canons to commune under the same roof. In 1164, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket was said to have sought refuge at the property after falling out with Henry II for the umpteenth time.

It took six more years for the then King to rid himself of Becket, and six more Henry's until Haverholme Priory's life as a monastic retreat came to an equally abrupt end.

In 1539, when Henry VIII forced the Gilbertines to relinquish the land they’d drained and tended and made habitable for four centuries, Haverholme was first handed to Lord Clinton and then to a succession of different families.

When Country Life was invited to pay a visit in the early years of the more genteel Edwardian era, the house had been in the possession of the Finch-Hatton’s — or the Earls of Winchilsea and Nottingham — since 1831.

This family was responsible for a series of huge renovations, including extensions constructed with local Ancaster stone. Now a 30-bedroom, four reception room mansion with a wrap-around terrace, Haverholme also boasted 70 cottages, small farms, a pub and 800 acres of woodland and a heronry.

The lion wasn't even the weirdest bit. In the garden, an array of presumably, Gilbertine monk’s coffins studded the lawn. And it is reported that, from time to time, the ghostly footsteps of monks and nuns could still be heard on the chipped stone terraces.

The lion-owning 12th Earl died aged 47 in 1898 (the big cat was, at some point, gifted to a zoological society), just two years after he inaugurated the first-ever London to Brighton car run. He had also, to his great credit, formed the National Agricultural Union which campaigned for better rights for all agricultural workers. His widow, Lady Edith, remained at Haverholme.

He was succeeded by his brother-in-law, Henry Stormont Finch Hatton, the father of Denys Finch-Hatton of Out of Africa fame, and Haverholme's last owner.

By 1921, the post-war depression had put a massive strain on the family's finances, so the 13th Earl took the decision to sell the priory in order to preserve some of his other ventures. Unsurprisingly, Haverholme lingered on the market. In fact, it lingered on it for a very long time.

Five years later, the Earl had to sell off the estate in individual lots — the priory sold to a demolition company.

On November 13 of the same year, Country Life broke the news that all of the estate's deer had been culled, the woods felled and the heronry — heron's nest on the same site, every year — destroyed.

The conservatory was sold for £23 (£1,747 in 2026), a porch fetched £28 (£1,529) and the tower clock, which ended up in St Edith’s Church in nearby Anwick, made £25 (£1,365). Adverts for the 'CHEAP' Ancaster stone balustrades and Tudor chimneys appeared inside the magazine.

In 1927, a 52-year-old woman, Edith Fernie, was killed by a train at a level crossing. She was in the process of building herself a new home at Woodhall in Lincolnshire and was hoping to use a large quantity of Haverholme's Ancaster stone and ornamental gate. Rumour has it the now spare stone was used to fill in some holes in Liverpool's Docks.

A very small, ruined portion of the priory still stands in a field to this day.

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At about 2pm on August 25, 1769, two Irish MPs, James Agar and Henry Flood, rivals for the control of the parliamentary borough of Callan, Co Kilkenny, met to fight a duel at Dunmore Park just north of the city of Kilkenny. Having discharged his pistol first and missed, Agar called out to his opponent: ‘Fire, you scoundrel.’ Flood shot him dead, the bullet — according to newspaper reports — piercing his left breast. This encounter between two well-known figures became notorious and seems to have encouraged the practice of duelling in Ireland, which remained common well into the 19th century. For present purposes, however, it also introduces both the social circle that created Dangan Cottage and the political context that shaped it.

Flood’s second for this bloody encounter was Gervase Parker Bushe, then High Sheriff of Kilkenny. The previous year, in February 1768, Bushe had married Mary, the real focus of our story and to whom we will return. She was the daughter of the Recorder of Dublin and the sister of a young man then training for the bar, Henry Grattan. Flood, Bushe and Henry Grattan, in other words, were well known to one another.

They all came of prosperous Protestant stock and, to different degrees, were politically active by the mid 1760s in the Irish Patriot cause. This sought the reform of the Irish parliament in Dublin and to secure recognition of the political integrity and interests of Ireland. Their cause responded to the American and French Revolutions and was overthrown by the events of the 1798 Rebellion in Ireland and the Act of Union that followed in 1801.

Flood and Grattan both went on to enjoy considerable celebrity as Patriot leaders and fell out in the 1780s. Bushe had a more understated career, but only marginally so. A decade after the duel, he stood for election as MP for Kilkenny against James Agar’s son and, although he lost the vote, successfully overturned the result. He was then appointed a commissioner for Revenue on a generous salary and became more sympathetic to the Government.

A visit to France in 1789 made him sceptical of the Revolution and in 1790, as a founder member of the Royal Irish Academy, he produced an acclaimed paper estimating Ireland’s population as ‘above 4,040,000’. His calculation was based on Hearth Tax returns, for which he was responsible. Bushe died in 1793 at the family seat of Kilfane House, two miles north of Thomastown, Co Kilkenny.

Soon after this, in about 1795, one of the Bushes’ nine children, a daughter, Harriet, married John Power (later Sir John Power, 1st Baronet of Kilfane). The couple rented, then bought the Bushe family seat, which they rebuilt in 1798.

Part of Kilfane’s appeal doubtless lay in its proximity to Kilkenny, a bustling and fashionable centre of late-18th-century social life in Ireland akin to Bath in England. Its wide society suited John, who was an obsessive huntsman, so much so that, in 1797, he purchased a pack of hounds and established the Kilkenny Hunt Club, the first venture of its kind in Ireland. His twin brother Richard, who divided his time between Kilfane and Dublin, shared in this venture. He combined it, however, with another passion: acting.

Richard’s interest took formal expression in The Private Theatre in Kilkenny, which he ran with great success from 1802–19. Its extensive repertoire, played by actors of social standing in front of audiences of their peers, however, had a pre-history in country-house performances around the city. The anonymously published The Private Theatre of Kilkenny (1825), which records the history of this initiative, notes that Henry Flood, Gervaise Bushe and Henry Grattan were all involved in amateur plays from 1774. It adds that Flood and Grattan appeared together as Macbeth and Macduff in Shakespeare’s ‘Scottish Tragedy’, roles that anticipated their subsequent political rivalry.

All these details matter because they indirectly illuminate the lives of two women whose interests and activities — which are almost impossible to trace in the historical record — created Dangan Cottage as we see it today. The first of these was Mary Bushe, who must have moved out of Kilfane House soon after her husband’s death in 1793 and taken up permanent residence at Dangan, about two miles south of Thomastown on the banks of the River Nore.

In the course of her married life, she was presumably party to much political discussion and must have struggled to deal with the tensions that surfaced between her brother and husband. As a widow, however, she surely remained in touch with the roaring social life of Kilfane House, presided over by the second woman who concerns us, her daughter Harriet (from 1836, Lady Power).

Neither mother nor daughter seems to have appeared on stage, although Harriet may have composed a prologue to a play in 1802. Both were also necessarily marginal to John’s enthusiasm for hunting, predominantly a male pastime. It’s tempting, therefore, to infer that their interest was directed in a completely different direction and explains the appearance of new landscape gardens in the newly fashionable Romantic aesthetic at both Dangan and Kilfane during the 1790s.

Which garden had precedence is impossible to determine, but each must have informed the other. It seems likely, as a matter of shifting tastes between generations, that the Romantic sensibility would have been picked up by the daughter and passed on to the mother. Whatever the case, work at Kilfane presumably got under way in about 1798, when the house was rebuilt. Here, the new landscape garden — recently restored and now known as Kilfane Glen — had as its centrepiece an artificial waterfall and cottage orné.

Nothing is securely known about the corresponding work at Dangan. A house certainly existed here in 1786, when The Post-Chaise Companion described it as ‘the seat of Miss Hewetson’ (a statement repeated in later editions even after it had changed hands). It’s not clear what this house looked like, but much of it is probably fossilised within the present building.

Dangan is laid out on an irregular plan (Fig 1) with four radiating wings, respectively a main block containing reception rooms and a bedroom — now the entrance hall (Fig 4) — a bedroom range, and a kitchen and service block, portions of which may incorporate the remains of a medieval tower built by Odo Archdekin in the 13th century. Mrs Bushe cosmetically recast the main domestic range with a thatched roof and verandah (Fig 5). Grilled windows fringed with stained glass were installed and although the whole was pointedly renamed a ‘cottage’, it was effectively a villa on an intimate scale.

At the same time, she transformed its setting. A Gothic arch was constructed to screen the property from the road (Fig 2), which was reputedly diverted away from the building to create what became locally known as Madame Bushe’s Corner. If the 1839–40 Ordnance Survey map accurately records her planting, the surrounding garden was laid out in two parts with a small formal grid of borders to the north and east and a naturalised landscape with walks dropping south to the river. This gave the house views over the river and the ruined medieval tower of Grennan Castle on the far bank, a perfect Romantic eye-catcher. There was also a thatched hermitage supported on tree trunks with a moss house beneath and a ‘rustic bridge’ crossing to an island.

The result, although diminutive in scale, clearly attracted attention and in The Irish Tourist (1815), Anthony Atkinson speaks of the ‘celebrated cottage of Dangan, the seat of Mrs. Bushe, a little object, which the traveller notwithstanding one defect, which may be corrected, will certainly find worth visiting’. The defect in question was ‘the border of a young plantation on the lawn, which in a line parallel with the river, partially intercepts the view… shutting out the grandeur of nature’.

It seems a bold observation, given that Mrs Bushe was a subscriber to the book, although Atkinson acknowledges ‘the evident elegance of the place’. He thought the ‘moss-house… composed of an elevated and a subterranean apartment, exceeded, in point of beauty and variety, every thing of that kind which I had seen in the progress of my travels’. He pompously concludes: ‘Praise, when you can — But when you must — condemn.’

Mrs Bushe died a year later, in 1816, and by 1821 Dangan Cottage was occupied by a certain Mr Joseph Greene, possibly a lawyer. By September 1826, it was being advertised to ‘sportsmen’ for let or sale with 14 acres of land in the Dublin Evening Post. ‘The premises have been much improved of late,’ readers were assured, with ‘good stabling and [a] coach-house.’ The property, it continued, was ‘within two miles of Mr Power’s fox hounds’ and ‘beautifully situated on the banks of the River Nore’. Thereafter, for the next century, the house passed through the hands of numerous different owners and tenants, many of their names preserved in local newspaper notices and administrative documents.

In 1831, for example, it was the home of one Charlotte Mary Scott and in April 1849, a Mrs Bermingham. On April 8, 1863, a Mr Tate ‘late Master in the Royal Naval School, New Cross London, and in King Edward VI’s School, Marlborough’ ran an advertisement in the Wexford Constitution offering places at ‘Dangan Cottage, Thomastown’ for ‘the sons of gentlemen preparing for the Colleges, the Public Schools, or the Mercantile profession, and requiring tuition in the Classics, the Mathematics, the French and English Languages and Drawing’. He promised ‘moderate’ terms. It was probably then that the house was re-roofed in slate, shorn of its rustic verandah and re-fenestrated with a series of bow windows.

By 1870, Dangan was up for let again, unfurnished, but — according to advertisements — newly painted and papered and, on October 9, 1875, its entire contents were offered for sale. There was an S. W. Davis in occupation in 1879, a William Percival in 1888 and, by 1896, it was the home of the local doctor, Patrick Murphy and his wife, Georgina. Dr Murphy died in 1932 and his wife in 1948, after which the entire contents were again auctioned and the house sold for £3,000. In 1968, it was purchased by Lord William and Lady Beresford, who removed the Victorian bow windows.

When the present owner bought the house in 2013, it required extensive renovation, including the replacement of the roof and the renewal of services. The fabric was repaired making use of architectural salvage, including doors, shutters and chimneypieces, to preserve and enhance its historic character. Mr Moore went on to furnish the main interiors — an enfilade of Tapestry Room (Fig 8), library (Fig 3) and drawing room (Fig 6) — in a similar spirit, with many items from Irish country houses. Portraits, paintings, ceramics and furniture came from places such as Russborough, Co Wicklow, Carton, Co Kildare, and Headfort, Co Meath, to name but a few. There are other items, too that have caught his discerning eye, notably Aubusson and Flemish tapestries, as well as late-18th-century French toile fragments that now dress a bed (Fig 7). It looks like a collection assembled over many generations.

Meanwhile, Mr Moore has worked to restore the garden and its buildings. In 2017, a new rustic bridge was constructed, inspired by the Chinoiserie designs of 20th-century garden designer Russell Page. There are plans to restore the moss house and the verandah, surviving iron elements from which have been rediscovered. What has been achieved so far promises well for these endeavours; in country-house terms, Dangan Cottage has become again, as Atkinson acknowledged in 1815, a little object certainly worth visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The late 17th century witnessed a fashion for deeply moulded plasterwork decoration incorporating festoons of naturalistic flowers and foliage, treatment echoed in the contemporary sculpture of Grinling Gibbons. Inspiration for all this work came from Dutch art of the period, including still lifes. Few places show this work off better than the spectacular decorative plaster ceilings at Thirlestane Castle.

Thirlestane Castle was transformed in the 1670s by the Duke of Lauderdale, then the effective Regent of Scotland. His work to the castle was undertaken by the mason Robert Mylne and the architect Sir William Bruce, both of whom were concurrently employed by Lauderdale in the renovation of the royal palace at Holyrood, Edinburgh.

The ceiling of this room — formerly the dining chamber, and now part of the drawing room — is one in a series in the first-floor chambers at Thirlestane created by George Dunsterfield, a member of the London Company of Plaisterers, who came to Scotland at government expense in October 1673 to work at Holyrood.

This example, notionally supported at each corner on the backs of eagles, was completed by January 1676.

The brilliant white finish of plaster ceilings was ideal for reflecting light into rooms. Here, the detailing is lightly picked out in gold — and the other rooms show similar levels of workmanship.

Edward Maitland-Carew — whose family has been here since the 13th century — stands beneath this magnificent work and marvels.

‘These ceilings are wonderful works of craftsmanship,' he says, 'and, with their rich detailing, bring these rooms to life.’

Thirlestane Castle is open to visitors, and regularly hosts weddings, events and film shoots — see the website for more details.

This feature originally appeared in the August 19, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The only surprise about Methley Hall’s demise is that it didn't come sooner. Demolished in 1963, the writing had been firmly etched on the wall of the West Yorkshire property since at least the Victorian era. 

Methley Hall was purchased by John Savile in 1588. His descendants who go on to become the the Earls of Mexborough.

Despite being extensively remodelled by Anthony Salvin in the 1830’s, the property was regularly left unoccupied and fell into a state of considerable disrepair. However, it was to be offered a brief reprieve from one of industrial Victorian Yorkshire’s greatest figures. 

Titus Salt — the Bradford mill owner, politician and renowned philanthropist who created the Victorian model village of Saltaire — moved into the hall on a vastly reduced rent in 1858.

Salt, with all his entrepreneurial vigour and connections, took on the task of repairing the dilapidated mansion, enlisting architects, joiners and craftsmen. The roof was made sound, the gardens made more pleasurable and the rooms were redecorated. The deer park was fenced with smart new iron railings to keep the aforementioned gardens clear of ruminating bucks and does.

According to a census, Salt had moved back to his beloved Bradford by 1871.

Country Life’s 1907 architecture feature on the lofty pile was far from optimistic about its situation. It opened: 'Methley… is a great house in a park, caught, to its misfortune, by a net of railways that make for Leeds, Dewsbury and Wakefield. All the discomfort of Yorkshire prosperity is at hand; the drift of smoke comes down the air from far-distant chimneys, collieries throw up their dark mounds and the water of the Calder flows inkily foul from the washing of shoddy [a recycled wool product].'

This far-from bucolic scene was worsened by what was going on underground. Somewhere underneath the hall's castellated towers, miners were toiling day in, day out to bring precious coal to the surface of the Savile Mine. 

In 1916, the 5th Earl died. The 6th owned the more practical and pastoral Arden Hall in Hawnby, North York Moors, and did not move in. Instead, it was used to entertain visiting royalty and for shooting parties.

It must have been kept in a fairly good state because, in 1935, newspaper reports indicate that Queen Mary popped in for tea, following a visit to an antique shop in Pontefract where she was much amused by a clock that chimed God Save the King.

Four years later, Methley Hall was, like so many other great houses, requisitioned for the war. By the time it was returned to the Mexboroughs, it was in a bad state.

In 1949, it was reported that the Ministry of Fuel and Power were to begin open-cast mining in Methley Park. It was hoped that the 60-room, 15th-century mansion could be bought and repurposed as a school or hospital, but just nine years later, mining activity had made it all the way up the park and to the front door.

Suffering from considerable subsidence, dry rot and, to add insult to injury, the theft of lead from the roof, a decision was reluctantly made to bring the grande dame down.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

On August 10, 1783, the vast forecourt of Curraghmore was the scene of a family tragedy. The 12-year-old son and heir to George, Earl of Tyrone, was killed — according to Joseph Hansard in his History, Topography and Antiquities of the County and City of Waterford (1869) — ‘whilst attempting to jump with a spirited horse, a low wooden paling, which at that time ran across the entrance to the courtyard’. The family was devastated and on a hillside above the house began — but never finished — a memorial that was clearly intended to take the form of a monumental Irish monastic ruin with a commanding round tower and incorporating the medieval west window of Waterford Cathedral.

One cruel irony of this terrible accident was that it occurred at a moment when the family was enjoying enormous public success. The parents of the Earl — Marcus Beresford and Catherine de la Poer, whose transformative alterations to Curraghmore from the 1720s were described last week — had produced a large family of three sons and six daughters.

This is the second in a two-part series on Curraghmore — read the first part here.

Collectively, by marriage and ambition, they established themselves at the heart of the Anglo-Irish political establishment, then at the height of its prosperity, independence and confidence.

One telling reflection of their dynastic assurance is a large family portrait by John Astley of about 1760, modelled on van Dyck’s celebrated depiction of the Herberts at Wilton, Wiltshire, that hangs in the entrance hall of the house.

When the Earl inherited Curraghmore in 1763, he confronted substantial family debts, which he partly satisfied by his marriage to the wealthy heiress Elizabeth Monck in April 1769. As the letterist Mary Delany observed, there was ‘no beauty between them but very good fortune’. Recent research by William Fraher shows that the Earl almost immediately turned his attention to remodelling the house and not in a way that answered his father-in-law’s prudent sense of economy. A letter dated January 25, 1772, shows the Earl in detailed correspondence with the 24-year-old architect James Wyatt about the decoration of different rooms in the house.

This letter is remarkable in part because it pre-dates by two days the event that properly launched Wyatt’s career, the opening of the Pantheon on Oxford Street, London (‘the most beautiful edifice in England’, wrote the dazzled Horace Walpole).

That in turn raises the question of how the patron and architect were introduced. Perhaps they met in Rome, where Wyatt trained. No less remarkable, it establishes Curraghmore as the first of Wyatt’s numerous Irish country-house commissions and already fully formed by his Italian experience in the elegant neo-Classical detailing that had catapulted his rival, Robert Adam, to architectural celebrity in the 1760s.

To his English clients, Wyatt was a brilliant, but exasperating figure, expensive and chaotic. In Ireland, however, which he only visited once in 1785, he worked in partnership with professionals who proved much more reliable. Using the rapidly improving links with England, he was not only able to communicate through the medium of drawings, but send out materials such as Coade stone, manufactured to his designs in Lambeth, London. The result was a series of Irish buildings of superlative quality, including his masterpiece Castle Coole, Co Fermanagh (which he never saw).

Wyatt’s executant architect at Curraghmore was Thomas Penrose, a Quaker from Waterford who, early in his career, had ambitions as a landscape painter. He completely transformed the interior of the house and its main reception rooms within the existing shell of the building. Work continued for a decade and a visitor, Daniel Beaufort, in 1779, described the building as ‘modernised, not quite finished’. Wyatt’s external changes included incorporating the attic level of the house as a third full storey. He must also have inserted the broad tripartite front door and fan light in the medieval castle tower shown in views of about 1800. A Coade stone armorial and stag of St Hubert — the family crest — were also installed above.

From the barrel-vaulted outer hall in the basement of the castle tower, a flight of steps rises to a top-lit corridor that extends to the main staircase hall (Fig 3). Its volume was slightly expanded into the central courtyard of the house to accommodate a single, sweeping stair to the bedrooms above. All the polite rooms are arranged at ground level around three sides of this space. They preserve a rich collection of family paintings and furniture. Some were sympathetically, but extensively restored after a serious fire in 1903.

The grandest interior, on account of its sheer scale, is the dining room (or ‘Eating Room’, as it is termed in the 1772 letter to Wyatt), presumably created by knocking earlier spaces together (Fig 2). Set amid delicate plasterwork around the walls are images of the Olympian gods. In the ceiling are images of the seasons by a different hand, possibly Antonio Zucchi or his wife, Angelica Kauffman. Scarcely less magnificent is the Blue Drawing Room (Fig 5) in the centre of the garden front. Its spectacular ceiling incorporates lunette paintings of Classical gods by Zucchi and tromp l’oeil roundels by the Flemish artist Pieter de Gree (Fig 6).

As Wyatt’s changes to Curraghmore drew to a close, the family basked in success. In 1780, one of the Earl’s younger brothers, William Beresford, who had entered into the church, secured his first episcopal appointment. The following year, the second son, John, who was closely involved in the Georgian rebuilding of Dublin, succeeded in getting work to the city Customs House designed by James Gandon under way. Finally, on February 5, 1783, the Earl attended the splendid celebrations of the newly established chivalric Order of St Patrick in Dublin Castle as one of its 15 founding Knights. Six months later, he was mourning the death of his eldest son.

Whatever the private griefs of the family, the Earl’s good fortune otherwise persisted. He was created Baron Tyrone of Haverfordwest in 1786, a title that brought with it a seat in the English House of Lords, and then Marquess of Waterford in 1789. Between these two events, in December 1787, Prince William Henry (later William IV), came to Curraghmore on an impromptu tour of southern Ireland and was entertained with a ball. The diarist Dorothea Herbert, who lived in neighbouring Carrick-on-Suir, gives a giddy account of the event in her Retrospections of an outcast, praising the newly completed interiors of the house. A fall of snow that night left several carriages stuck in the woods afterwards. Of those returning from the ball, she wrote ‘some lost their shoes, some their caps, and not a few their hearts’.

In 1800, the title passed to the eldest surviving son of 1st Marquess, Henry, who soon afterwards married Susanna Hussey, an heiress of the Seaton Delaval estate in Northumberland. Their eldest son, another Henry, who inherited the title in 1826, was notorious for his wild exploits and practical jokes. They included stealing the birching block from Eton College, where he was educated (it sits in the stair hall of Curraghmore), and literally painting Melton Mowbray red one night with his drunken friends. His greatest obsession, however, was with horses and he hunted long, hard and often.

The repeated judgement of early-19th-century visitors to Curraghmore was that the setting was stupendous (Fig 4), but the house ugly. Presumably, it was to rectify this that, in 1833, the architect Daniel Robertson was invited to draw up proposals for recasting Curraghmore as a sprawling, Tudor Gothic mansion. The plan came to nothing, but, in reflection of Lord Waterford’s driving passion, a vast riding school was constructed beside the entrance court by 1835. It was briefly transformed into a ballroom in 1865 and has clearly been remodelled since.

In 1839, Lord Waterford met his future wife, Louisa, at the famous revival of medieval chivalry undertaken by an exclusive and aristocratic Tory circle of the young and beautiful, the Eglinton Tournament. She was one of two remarkable daughters of Charles Stuart, Baron Stuart de Rothesay, a diplomat and from 1831 creator of Highliffe Castle, Dorset. Her sister, Charlotte, married George, Lord Canning, the last Governor-General and first Viceroy of India. Both were remarkable figures, well travelled, highly articulate and accomplished amateur artists. They were also devoted to each other.

Contrary to almost universal expectation, Louisa’s marriage was settled and happy. She toyed with transforming Curraghmore into an Italian Renaissance palazzo, the newly popular style of the moment, and employed the architect William Burn for the purpose. All was set for the work to begin when Lord Waterford was killed in a widely reported hunting accident. She retired as a widow to Ford Castle, Northumberland, where she famously turned her artistic talents to the decoration of the village school (Country Life, January 15, 2014). The estate now passed to her brother-in-law, a clergyman, and then, in 1866, to John Henry, the 5th Marquess, who — according to a plaque attached to the exterior — ‘restored and renovated’ Curraghmore ‘in the year 1874 at a cost of £25,000’.

His far-reaching work included the creation of a new wing on the garden front, the modernisation of services, the addition of balustrades to the external parapets and the re-fenestration of the building with plate glass windows. He also refronted the tower entrance and added a pediment to the garden façade (Fig 1). The architect was Samuel Ussher Roberts and a report in The Clonmel Chronicle of August 24, 1872, adds that the ‘old-fashioned rough-casting of the entire pile has given place to a coating of the finest Portland cement’. The main contractors involved were from Dublin.

The 5th Marquess had eloped with his first wife, a divorcée, Florence Grosvenor Rowley. She died in childbirth in 1873 and is memorialised in Clonegam Church in a striking top-lit memorial by the sculptor Joseph Boehm (Fig 7). Boehm also added a replacement sculpture of St Hubert’s stag above the front door. More changes to the house followed the succession of Henry, 6th Marquess, in 1895, including the addition of several new chimney pieces commissioned from Mrs Kennedy’s Stone Works in Waterford. Much more significant, however, were the repairs that followed the fire in 1903 that burnt out the top floor of the house.

The 19th-century development of Curraghmore took place against a steadily gathering tide of social unrest in Waterford and Ireland as whole. In 1798, the house was placed under guard and in 1848 cannons and guns were stolen from the property. At this time, the architect William Tinsley, who otherwise developed buildings around the estate, helped fortify the property. During the Great Famine, the Marquess and Viscount set up soup kitchens on their estates, avoiding the deprivation and violence witnessed in some areas, but tensions over tenants’ rights built steadily and the Land Acts from 1870 to 1903 gradually reduced the value of the estate. In 1881, the then Marquess sold the hounds of the Curraghmore Hunt in disgust after several meets were violently interrupted.

The property miraculously survived the house burnings of the Irish civil war in the 1920s and the 20th century was not otherwise an easy one. Nevertheless, it has now emerged into happier times. Curraghmore remains one of the very few great Irish houses still in the hands of its owning family and with its collections intact. For readers of Country Life it is additionally intriguing as the family home of Mark Girouard’s mother, Lady Blanche. After her tragic early death in 1940, Dr Girouard spent regular holidays here and with his aunt at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. These experiences laid the foundations for his interest in architectural history. He wrote up Curraghmore for Country Life in three articles on February 7, 14 and 21, 1963.

The estate is presently in the care of Henry, 9th Marquess and his wife, Amanda, who took responsibility for it in 2015. Their most recent project has been the restoration of the roof, undertaken with the financial support of The Apollo Foundation and overseen by the architect David Sheehan. Other initiatives include the launch of Curraghmore Whiskey by their son, Richard de la Poer Beresford, Earl of Tyrone. As this article appears, the estate is being used for the All Together Now Festival, now in its seventh year, evidence of the ongoing and vibrant development of Curraghmore in the 21st century.

See the Curraghmore House and Gardens website for more details, and to arrange a tour.

Acknowledgements: William Fraher, John Martin Robinson, David Sheehan and Julian Walton

This feature originally appeared in the July 29, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

A row over the future direction of the charred remains of the Mackintosh building at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is almost as ferocious as the two fires that all but destroyed it in 2014 and 2018.

In July, the GSA, the Mack’s custodian, revealed that it couldn’t afford to pursue a faithful rebuild of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh masterpiece. It reasoned that the full reinstatement cost of £265 million — the ‘equivalent to five times the GSA’s annual turnover’ — would compromise its financial stability and that it could not contemplate such a project on its own.

Given that the current reservicing of Buckingham Palace is estimated to cost £370 million, the sum needed for the reconstruction of the Mackintosh Building is well within the sort of budgets demanded by major work on historic buildings of this importance (repairing Notre Dame cost about £726 million).

Ann Priest, chair of governors, also stated that the GSA had already ‘demonstrated that its ability to operate — and indeed thrive — is not dependent on the Mackintosh Building’. But, the GSA is responsible for its condition as the custodian of a Category A listed building.

Architectural historians, architects, heritage bodies and members of the public, many frustrated by years of inaction, hit back at the the GSA’s announcement that it couldn’t currently afford a faithful rebuild, with the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society (CRM Society) going as far as to advocate that the GSA transfers its custodial responsibilities and the reconstruction to a newly formed independent body of heritage building experts. Its director Matthew Williams stated: ‘The society… is in the best position to galvanise support and bring together under one banner those who want the Mackintosh building restored to its rightful place as Scotland’s finest 20th-century building.’

The Victorian Society’s director James Hughes said that the GSA’s plans should serve as a call to action: ‘Glasgow School of Art has acknowledged that a project of this scale cannot be delivered alone. We hope this becomes the catalyst for a national — even international — partnership to secure the faithful reinstatement of one of the defining works of modern architecture.’ Paul Sweeney, the Labour MSP for Glasgow, argues that it should be placed into ‘the custody of a new joint venture vehicle, a restoration corporation, to pull everyone together’

Prof Alan Dunlop of the eponymous architectural practice called the proposals ‘utterly soulless’; ‘catastrophic’ was the verdict of architect and former Glasgow School of Art lecturer Gordon Gibb; and Malcolm Fraser of Livingstone Architects wrote: ‘The idea of the Mack “partially rebuilt” in some modern, shoddy way is an obscenity.’ Fraser, together with GSA professor Johnny Rodger, has launched a campaign, Rebuild the Mack, and, on their new online platform, they have contrasted the situation with the swift rebuilding of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris: ‘The comparison… shames us, as France’s most cherished building burnt one year after our second fire, but is now gloriously rebuilt, yet the Mack still stands as four gaunt walls round a sepulchral void.’

They are also in the process of pulling together a consortia that already includes trusts, academics and architects and more than 6,000 signed-up supporters. ‘We believe that the GSA should relinquish ownership, responsibility, optimism and care, plus the amount they settled on from insurers and other relevant sums, to a Mack trust formed with the CRM Society at its core, but as a Special Project Vehicle, with the best advice from Scottish heritage trusts and other building professionals,’ Fraser told Country Life, adding that, following discussions with the CRM Society, a partnership with this body is the obvious next step. A petition to ‘fully and faithfully’ restore the Mack has been launched by Glasgow-based architect Ruairidh Moir, who seeks 100,000 signatures.

A GSA spokesperson told Country Life: ‘The GSA remains committed to exploring every opportunity for the Mackintosh building to be rebuilt. We have begun conversations with stakeholders about potential partnerships and these discussions are ongoing.’

Architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh is best remembered for the GSA, which took shape when John Honeyman & Keppie, a firm he joined as a draughtsman in 1889, won a design competition for a new building. Completed in 1909, the GSA was admired internationally as one of the greatest achievements of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement. The May 2014 fire severely damaged the west wing and completely destroyed the world-renowned library. A £35 million restoration was all but complete when the second fire ravaged the entire building

This feature originally appeared in the August 12, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

The Gibbs family fortune was made in shipping and banking — and an exclusive concession on extremely profitable Peruvian guano. (Guano is the accumulated nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium-rich waste of seabirds. It is one of the most powerful organic fertilisers in the world and helped to fuel the First World War thanks to its use as an ingredient in gunpowder.)

When his father died, Henry 'Hucks' Gibbs joined the family business. In time, he would take complete control of it and work as the director and then governor of the Bank of England.

Among all of this work, Gibbs did find time to play and indulge his passion for gardening. He certainly had the fertiliser required to adequately feed one.

In 1869, he acquired Aldenham House — an imposing Queen Anne-style, red brick manor house in the commutable district of Elstree, Hertfordshire. The land was flat. Unrelentingly flat. And the soil was heavy with clay. This, however, was no problem for a man with Gibbs’s vision.

He laid out impressive formal gardens and acquired neighbouring parcels of land. One of these included part of the town's High Street which he rerouted away from his home and sunk into a 10-foot cutting so as not to spoil the view from his pleasure grounds.

James Pulham and Sons — the brains behind a form of decorative concrete called Pulhamite — were called in to create a water garden. They used rubble as a base and fashioned small hills out of Pulhamite with waterfalls cascading down them, and Pulhamite old-world-style bridges.

Pulham and Sons and Gibbs were assisted in their endeavours by the latter's son, Vicary, a confirmed bachelor, head gardener Edwin Beckett, a shrubs and trees expert called Arthur J. Sweet, and a team of 58 gardeners.

Together, Hucks, Vicary, Beckett and Sweet amassed a mind-boggling collection of plants that was so vast and so varied that Aldenham was said to rival Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

Vicary — a disqualified MP who would go on to be editor of the first two editions of The Complete Peerage — was an obsessive plant collector, collating rare specimens of trees, shrubs, and flowers from around the world for Beckett, Sweet and the team to tend.

Hucks died in 1907, but his horticultural legacy was secure and the team went on to win numerous awards including RHS Victoria Medal of Honours for Vicary and Sweet, and multiple RHS Chelsea Flower Show medals for Beckett (specifically for his work with vegetables). All three men wrote articles for Country Life and published books on their specialist subjects.

Upon his death in 1932, Vicary had collated more than 10,000 species of trees and shrubs at Aldenham, including more than 200 varieties of oak trees alone. It was truly unique.

In 1933, Vicary’s older brother, Lord Aldenham, rented out the house and it was converted into a club. Auctioneers were called in to dispose of the plants and, very sadly, 60 years of extraordinary horticultural history were brought to a close.

The house was requisitioned by the BBC for the duration of the Second World War. It went on to serve as picturesque backdrop for television shows such as The Saint and The Avengers and an MGM film called The Village of the Damned and was then turned into a school. It is still one today.

The playing fields are surrounded by some impressive specimens of trees, a small reminder of Hucks, Vicary, Beckett and Sweet.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

In a letter of October 1750, the agent of the Earl of Tyrone, Thomas Rogers, described a bizarre visit to Curraghmore by Archbishop George Stone, the Primate of All Ireland. Arriving unannounced, Rogers reported, the Archbishop’s party had ‘forced the lock and bolt of the gate and rode into the front up to the door. Betty the housemaid was opening the windows by lifting up the sashes to air the house, when the Primate alighted at the door and he spoke to her. She said she would go for the key and open the door directly; he said he was in haste and desired her not [to], but to hand him out a chair, which she did and he went into the window with the gentlemen’.

Once inside, the Primate demanded to see ‘the new room… and the new apartment below’. His curiosity satisfied, he was in such a ‘great hurry’ that he ‘went off through the dressing room door and would not suffer the maid to go for the key’. Then, either he, or some in his company, ‘undescreetly rode their horses down the slopes in the fountain garden and all through it and through up to the shell house.... So great was their hurry that they would not give themselves time to walk, but trampled about on horseback and rode off’.

It’s not impossible, given the conflicting political sympathies of the Earl and Primate, that this visit was a calculated affront. Whatever the case, it was also flattering in that the house and its gardens were revealed as objects of outstanding interest. That still holds true today. Curraghmore is set in a spectacular landscape and preserves some of the finest Georgian interiors in Ireland (Fig 3). It also remains in the hands of the family that created it, their local connections stretching back to about 1200, when King John granted one Henry le Poer the barony of Donoyle (now Dunhill), Co Waterford. Henry was one of several Poers — or Powers as the name became — involved in Ireland at the time and whose descendents integrated into local society. So widely and deeply did the family penetrate eastern Waterford that it was known by the 16th century as ‘Powers Country’.

The precise origins of Curraghmore as a family seat are obscure, but, by tradition, the tower fossilised within the present entrance front was built by Richard Power (d. 1483). It was not until 1535, however, that his grandson and namesake was created Baron le Power and Coroghmore. Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland, visited ‘the house that the Lord Power is Baron of’ in 1575 and was pleased with the hospitality he received here. By this date, the late-medieval tower was almost certainly connected to one or more domestic ranges beside it, much like the nearby Ormond Castle, Co Tipperary. Certainly, that was the arrangement implied by the Civil Survey of 1654, which describes the Waterford property as ‘a fayre Castle and a goodly stone house’.

The survey also sheds an interesting light on the setting of Curraghmore, the name of which means ‘the great bog’. It describes the Barony of Upperthird, in which it stands, as possessing ‘coarse, barren, and mountainous soil (for the most part)’. In this bleak landscape — hard to imagine today — the castle enjoyed an orchard, meadow and a ‘fine wood’. The account goes on to note the ‘River Clodeth running within a musket shot thereof on the south, upon which there is a bridge not very far from the said castle’. King John’s Bridge, so called, still remains.

In 1654, Curraghmore was in the possession of John, 5th Baron. He is simply described in the survey as an ‘Irish Papist’, but, crucially, he must also have been what others termed ‘distracted’. His mental incapacity, which lasted until his death in 1666, was seemingly protection from the upheavals of the civil wars. Certainly, the family avoided either committing itself or being dispossessed afterwards. That said, it may have been with an eye to survival that, in the 1650s, John’s son, Richard, married Dorothy, the eldest daughter of Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of Anglesey, who was also his father’s guardian.

Whatever the case, Richard began to engage with English politics and culture. His career prospered following the Restoration and, in May 1673, he attempted to engineer a match between his seven-year-old son, John, and niece (his ward), the 12-year-old Katherine Fitzgerald of Dromana. The union, solemnised by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth Palace, promised to link his own property with the neighbouring Barony of Decies. Two years later, Katherine successfully secured an annulment, asserting that she had been forcibly married. Shortly before this, on October 9, 1673, Richard was created Viscount Decies and Earl of Tyrone.

The fortunes of the new Earl fluctuated wildly. In 1679, he was implicated in the Popish Plot and imprisoned in Dublin Castle and then the gatehouse at Westminster until 1684. Under the Catholic rule of James II, he was made Lord Lieutenant of Co Waterford, raised a regiment of foot and sat as a peer in the Irish Parliament. Then, he was captured by the forces of William III at Cork and taken to the Tower of London, where he died in 1690. He was succeeded in quick succession by his two sons, both Protestants. In 1692, the elder, John, 2nd Earl, successfully restored the family title and lands. He died the following year and became the subject of a celebrated ghost story.

During a discussion on the subject of religion, he made a pact with a kinswoman, Nicola Hamilton, that whoever died first would appear to the other. John died first and accordingly appeared one night, announcing the truth of ‘the revealed religion’, as well as the details of Nicola’s future, including that her son would unite their families. Incredulous, she demanded that the apparition touch her wrist and, for the rest of her life, wore a black ribbon to conceal the scar that this contact with the phantom had caused.

John’s brother, James, 3rd Earl of Tyrone, also failed to produce a son. As a consequence, when he died in 1704, the title became extinct and the patrimony passed to his two-year-old daughter, Catherine. It was, therefore, as a considerable heiress that, in 1717, at the age of 15, she married the wealthy politician Marcus Beresford, the son of Nicola Hamilton in the ghost story. He was created Baron Beresford and Viscount of Tyrone in 1720 and then Earl of Tyrone in 1746.

It was in the context of these complex family affairs that Curraghmore began to assume its modern form. This process began according to a lost inscription in about the year 1700 (an alternative suggested reading of 1707 during Catherine’s minority seems improbable) under the 3rd Earl, who constructed three ranges on a regular U-shaped plan as the core of a new house. These ranges cannibalised parts of the earlier building, including the castle tower that closed the fourth side of its internal courtyard.

An impression of Curraghmore in the early 18th century can be recovered from the combined evidence of four watercolour views by Jonathan Fisher, dating to 1768, and a description by the antiquarian Charles Smith in The Antient and present state of the county of Waterford (1746). It was entered from what is now the garden façade, which was two storeys high and seven window bays wide. The outer pair of windows to each side were projected forward as shallow wings and the central bay was given emphasis with a pedimented doorcase and a sculpture of Minerva. Over the whole structure were high-pitched roofs with dormers set on deeply projecting eaves. This composition is echoed at Beaulieu, Co Louth, which otherwise bears intriguing comparison to Curraghmore.

Inside, the visitor entered a large hall with a stair that divided into two at its first landing. The hall was probably a creation of 1700, but — like the rest of the house — it had clearly been redecorated by 1746. Smith saw it painted with ‘columns, festoons &tc., between which are several landscapes’ as well as a perspectival representation of a dome. He attributes this work, as well as several paintings and a ground floor room ‘entirely painted… in landscape’ with a ‘sleeping Cupid on a marble table’, to Willem van der Hagen, an artist active in Ireland from 1722 until his death before 1745.

As well as producing portraits, landscapes and theatre scenery, Hagen was also contracted in 1728 to supply designs for tapestries in the Irish House of Lords, an obvious point of connection with the Viscount. Indeed, one painting at Curraghmore — of William III’s landing at Carrickfergus — probably relates to this commission. Might Hagen also have helped supply ‘the beautiful tapestry hangings’ Smith saw in ‘an inner chamber’? A fireplace that almost certainly came from these interiors survives recycled as a tomb niche in the nearby Clonegam Church (Fig 6).

By 1746, there were also extensive formal gardens at Curraghmore. ‘The house has the advantage of water on three sides,’ Smith wrote, ‘laid out in large elegant canals and basins… and the banks and terraces are adorned with statues.’ These were fed from the river. There were besides cascades, a ‘greenhouse’ and ‘a shell-house erecting, which when finished, promises to be very curious’. The latter incorporates a sculpture of the Countess (Fig 7) holding a scroll inscribed: ‘In two hundred & sixty one days these shells were put up by the proper hands of the Rt Hon Cathne Countess of Tyrone 1754.’ The date presumably relates to the sculpture rather than the shell work.

On June 1, 1746, there was a serious fire at Curraghmore. According to one report in The General Advertiser, this was caused by ‘the carelessness of a Servant’ and ‘burned down stabling for 40 horses, with granaries, hay-lofts, beds and bedding for most of the servants, a fine mare, several setting dogs, all the saddles, the coach and chair harnesses, besides many other valuable things; but the dwelling-house was not touched’. It must have been this episode that prompted a further transformation of the house, doubtless spurred on by Beresford’s promotion as Earl of Tyrone the following month.

A new set of service buildings and vaulted stables were planned as long, low parallel wings with side gateways (Fig 2). Now lined with horse chestnuts, the effect is reminiscent of a French town square. It is hard to think of any approach to a Georgian house that resembles this. The architect responsible was John Roberts, who was based in Waterford, but had trained in London. His remarkable architectural career also properly began in 1746, when he was commissioned to complete the Bishop’s Palace in Waterford. His patron for this task, Bishop Chenevix, later listed the ‘fine offices he built’ for Lord Tyrone among his works.

The new forecourt reversed the approach to the house (Fig 1), so it must have been in conjunction with its construction that a new front door was punched through the lower floor of the castle tower. What is not clear is whether the spectacular decorative plasterwork in the outer hall within (Fig 4), and the library above (Fig 5), were installed before these changes or as part of them. By extension, whether their magnificent decoration — plausibly attributed to the virtuosi stuccadores Paolo and Filippo Lafranchini, who also worked on the Earl’s Dublin house — relates to Roberts’s work or was completed before 1746.

The present assumption is that these interiors were the ‘new room’ and ‘apartment below’ that Archbishop Stone was so importunate to see in 1750. Yet the barrel vaulting of the lower chamber is hard to imagine as part of an apartment. Added to which, although Smith comments on the magnificent fireplace of the upper room in 1746, he makes no reference to the plasterwork. Was it added later? Perhaps the Archbishop was actually looking at other rooms? If so, they were soon to be torn out to create a spectacular series of 1770s interiors that we will explore in the next article.

This is the first of two articles on Curraghmore. The second will be published on August 23, 2026.

Visit Curraghmore House website for more information.

This feature originally appeared in the July 22, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

In the vicinity of the Bank of England, No 1 Poultry, clad in alternating bands of pink and cream sandstone, offers a jaunty point of difference to the prevailing air of grey formality. At the junction of two roads, with its corner tower by turns reminiscent of a ship’s prow or a telecommunications mast, the building has divided opinion since its completion in 1998. While some have hailed it as the posthumous masterpiece of its architect James Stirling, The King is alleged to have said it looked ‘like an old 1930s wireless’. Owen Hatherley, author of the compellingly opinionated Modern Buildings In Britain, calls it 'smug and bumptious'.

Others may never forgive it for standing on a site once occupied by several hitherto listed buildings, most famously the neo-Gothic Mappin & Webb building, the demolition of which the Victorian Society campaigned long and hard against. Today, however, No1 Poultry itself is under threat from a major refurbishment. Philip Palumbo, son of Peter Palumbo, the property developer who financed the construction, has said the plans 'meddle to the point of mutilation' with the original structure.

Yet the general lack of interest on the issue beyond architectural circles is telling. No 1 Poultry, in its location, its brash inappropriateness and in its interlocking of the present with the past (a terracotta frieze depicting the processions of the British monarchs that have passed through this part of the City was salvaged from Hawes the Shirtmakers, one of the demolished shops, is incorporated into an exterior elevations, and the clock from the Mappin & Webb building is mounted on the tower) is one of the trophy buildings of the postmodernism.

Despite its late completion, it seems to embody the cocky 1980s — the decade of conspicuous consumption — the high point of postmodernism, a style in which architects borrowed from the past that Modernist architects had so determinedly rejected — columns and capitals, pediments and gables, often exaggerating their proportions, and using vibrant colours that suggested the influence of Pop Art.

Never hugely loved — No 1 Poultry was once voted by Time Out readers as the fifth-worst building in London — today postmodern buildings draw the same yawn-stifling, oh-no-not-you-again disdain dished out to once-zeigeisty pop stars on the way out.

Unlike music careers, however, buildings once lost can never be revived or reassessed. Several of the better postmodern examples are currently in jeopardy. Terry Farrell’s hulking Embankment Place, above Charing Cross Station, is facing a substantial overhaul. The Twentieth Century Society describes new plans for Minster Court, which rises up on a City corner on Mincing Lane like something out of a Gothic fantasy, (sometimes nicknamed 'Munster Court', it served as the headquarters of Cruella de Vil in the film 101 Dalmations) as 'architectural lobotomy'. The proposed 'reimagining' of James Toomey’s St Stephen’s Green Shopping Centre in Dublin — part 19th-century shopping arcade, part Paxtonian glasshouse — has provoked a vigorous preservation campaign by locals, including a scathingly lively Instagram page.

It is not all bad news. John Outram’s Egyptian-inspired Sphinx Hill house in Moulsford, Oxfordshire, was listed at Grade II* two summers ago after fears about the risk of unsympathetic changes when it went into new ownership. Built at the tail end of the last century — thus one of the last postmodern designs — it became the 'youngest' building in the country to be granted statutory protection. Canons House, Bristol, built as the regional headquarters of Lloyds Bank in the late 1980s, with giant columns and a general acknowledgement of the city’s Georgian and neo-Classical built heritage, is getting a major retrofit which has largely received the thumbs up from conservationists.

There is no doubt, however, that as many enter their fourth decade, this is a pivotal moment for postmodern buildings. Oli Marshall of the Twentieth Century Society says that around the age of 30 is when most buildings, irrespective of style, require major maintenance and upgrading of their structures. 'It’s also the point at which they generally become eligible for listing — an inherent friction,' he says. 'It makes them particularly vulnerable to demolition, given it is at these times when buildings are often at the nadir of their fashionability and may be seen as out of date. You can see exactly the same cycle with Brutalist, mid-century modern, Victorian and even Georgian buildings before them. Reviled and swept away, only later are they widely valued.'

He also suggests, however, that postmodern buildings were always a relative rarity, the style flourishing in areas such as London and the affluent south-east more than elsewhere. One of the style’s most persuasive advocates Charles Jencks wrote that postmodern 'was conceived as a minority approach, an oppositional movement, not a ruling style,' losing its way once it became adopted by the corporate mainstream. Its association with the Big Bang and the speculative property boom is probably another reason why the style stirs so little love.

Yet just as not everything about the 1980s merits a curse today, there are plenty of postmodern buildings that continue to add to the richness of the streetscape. You have to be pretty po-faced not to smile at CZWG’s rather zany Cascades apartment building — aka Yuppie Towers — on the Isle of Dogs, or their unashamedly poppy China Wharf, near Tower Bridge. Even Owen Hatherley concedes the 'naff grandeur' of John Outram’s audacious Judge Institute in Cambridge.

Two of Marshall’s postmodern favourites are the Doncaster Dome — 'an Italian palazzo leisure centre' — and Tollcross Fire Station, Edinburgh — 'a homage to Charles Rennie Mackintosh'.

The relentlessly upbeat and referential nature of postmodern buildings means they will never be for the purists. That does not make them any less valuable. Enjoy them while they are still with us.

When looking through Country Life’s incomparable collection of architectural photographs, it is fairly common to spot items that are less than favourable to modern sensibilities.

Fashions, tastes and social norms change. Some will later return to favour. One item of decoration we can all agree should never return to the interior decorators’ arsenal, however, is the guillotine, displayed in a hallway (or any other room for that matter).

Country Life’s photographers and writers visited Weald Hall a remarkable three times in the magazine’s first 15 years, recognising its significance and complexity.

Weald was vast and, depending on which angle you approached it from, looked like an old hunting lodge, ivy-encrusted Tudor mansion or grand Georgian pile.

The original structure was built using Henry VII-era red brick, but the south facade was given a distinctly Georgian makeover at some point in the ensuing years. Think an imposing Ionic-columned portico and double-height entrance hall.

Situated on the outskirts of Brentwood, Essex, the ancient land on which Weald stood had first been documented as a Roman camp.

By the 11th century, it was in the possession of Waltham Abbey and used as a retreat for monks, who, according to a report by Country Life, published in 1897, enjoyed visiting the nuns of Cheshunt.

Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the land, deer park and mansion landed in the lap of Sir Brian Tuke, Henry VIII's friend and 'treasurer to the royal household'. It passed hands several more times, until 1759, when Thomas Tower took possession.

The prominent member of society and MP was one of the first Georgia Trustees, a group of men who pushed through a plan to free up space in English prisons, by deporting the prisoners to the USA, where they were forced to build and defend a new settlement.

The Tower family's main seat was Huntsmoor Park in Buckinghamshire, but, as the second son, Thomas Tower knew he was unlikely to inherit it, so set about finding somewhere suitable to live.

Subsequent Towers inherited the property including Christopher Tower who, in 1778, commissioned Robert Adam to remodel the 'eating room' into something less Tudor, and Victoria-era Towers, voracious collectors all of them, who hung works by Reynolds, van de Velde, and van Dyck on its walls. However, other than that, Weald retained much of its original character.

At some point the aforementioned guillotine arrived on the scene — which local and visitor accounts claim was the same one that separated Marie Antoinette's body from her head. The presence of the bloody instrument is linked to Captain Tower (Christian name unknown) who helped escort Napoleon to his Elba exile in 1814 and acquired various bits of memorabilia on the way.

Weald Hall entered the 20th century in rude health. According to the 1911 Census, Christopher John and his wife Cecilia lived at the Hall with their two sons, Christopher Cecil and Hugh Christopher, and 12 servants.

In April 1913, Christopher Cecil married Dorothy Cynthia Surtees in Eaton Square, London. They received Weald Hall as a wedding present and Christopher John and Cecilia retired to the estate's Dower House. The newlyweds had two children in quick succession: Pamela Sophia in 1914 and Christopher Thomas in 1915.

Unfortunately Christopher Cecil was killed in Flanders on October 2, 1915, aged just 30. His younger brother Hugh, who signed up for the newly-founded Royal Air Corps, was killed a year later over France.

Christopher Thomas wasn't even two years old when he inherited the hall, so it was looked after by a trust and rented out to multiple families, including British motor-racing ace Dick Seaman's.

By the time Christopher Thomas came of age, the Second World War was fast approaching. He celebrated his 21st birthday in 1936 at Weald and was presented with gifts from the church, his tenants and tenant farmers. The local newspaper reported how he 'expressed the pleasure it had given him to visit the old home of his father.' However, he never actually lived in it.

During the Second World War, Weald was given to the military during whose tenure it was badly damaged by fire.

In 1946, Christopher Thomas decided to part with the badly damaged old house he had never really called home. He gave parcels of land to the church and sold the rest. By 1951, Weald Hall had been flattened.

No one knows what happened to the guillotine, but one can only hope it was a victim of the fire. The remaining grounds — Weald Country Park — are now enjoyed by thousands every year.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

In 1732, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, made the six-day coach journey from St Albans in Hertfordshire to Scarborough in North Yorkshire to take the waters. It can’t have been the most comfortable expedition, given the state of the roads and the fact that, at the age of 72, she was suffering from gout and scurvy. Without the benefits of modern medicine, aristocratic health tourists were prepared to travel long distances to seek relief, persuaded by the Georgian physicians who extolled the curative virtues of mineral water.

After six weeks, the Duchess was happily free from scurvy, but in her letters she bemoaned the difficulty of reaching what was then called Scarborough ‘Spaw’, located as it was at the foot of steep cliffs that became inaccessible at high tide. This was to be a perennial problem, yet it also proved to be Scarborough’s unique selling point.

As well as replicating the amusements of inland spas such as Harrogate and Bath, the town could offer the sea for bathing in, looking at and sailing upon. For a while, seawater was drunk as a rival tonic to the spa water. The resort culture that started at Scarborough can arguably be seen as the beginnings of the modern seaside, its progress from a place of health to one of pleasure reflected in the architectural history of the Spa itself.

Four hundred years ago, in 1626 or thereabouts, local woman Thomasin Farrer noticed a ‘russet tincture’ on stones at the base of South Cliff caused by water passing over them. Well educated and well connected, she understood the potential of the iron-rich liquid and, after tasting it, recommended it to her friends. Word spread about the spring’s healing properties.

Townspeople used the water, but so did others from further afield, especially after Dr Robert Wittie of Hull began sending his leisured patients for the cure and published the results in 1660. The first three buildings were in place by 1715, when a drawing by the York artist Francis Place shows them above a wooden staith, an early form of sea wall. One was home to the eccentric first Governor of the Spa, Dicky Dickenson, who held court as master of ceremonies.

The well itself, where the water was served by female attendants, was on the sands marked by a structure like a table tomb in a churchyard. After patients had received their draught, they went to one of the other two buildings, one for ladies, one for gentlemen, to wait for the medicine to take effect. The Duchess of Marlborough complained that to reach the ladies’ room required a ladder and, inside, there were only hard, narrow benches ‘which it is a punishment to sit on’.

It was not long before amenities were improved. Indeed, frequent rebuilding was a necessity, as natural forces conspired against human attempts to civilise the border between land and sea. In 1735, a bad storm destroyed the staith then, in December 1737, a landslip so astonishing it was described by contemporaries as an earthquake caused the cliff to subside on top of the Spa, complete with five cows hitherto grazing peacefully above. Fears that the spring itself had been lost proved unfounded and a letter published immediately afterwards in the London Daily Post assured potential clientele that the rediscovered spring was, in fact, superior to its predecessor (Fig 4).

That same newspaper published details of the new reception rooms in May 1738, now ‘built of Brick with a Chimney at each end, and wainscotted throughout, and the Top instead of being plaister’d is lined with Fir, to prevent any Objection on account of Damp…’

By the early 19th century, the sea wall had become a solid stone structure with a promenade on top, but continuing erosion was such an expensive problem that when private enterprise proposed taking this responsibility from Scarborough Corporation they were glad to accept.

The Scarborough Cliff Bridge Company was established on November 1, 1826, to span the wide chasm that separated the town cliff from that of the Spa, finally giving access to all — or at least those able to pay its tolls. Within a year, four elegant iron arches rested on stone piers in a symbol of Scarborough’s modernity, a catwalk for the fashionable habitués of the Spa. Visiting in 1839, the roving spa reporter Dr Augustus Bozzi Granville confessed to feelings of dizziness when he stepped onto the bridge, but proclaimed himself ‘enchanted with Scarborough’.

The new Gothic Saloon at the Spa (Fig 2) was so freshly built that the interior decoration had yet to be completed. Despite this, Granville’s description of the castellated building in his The Spas of England, and Principal Sea-Bathing Places proved good for business and the promenade hall, originally not much bigger than a tennis court due to budget constraints, had to be doubled in size over the winter of 1845–46. The architect for both builds was Henry Wyatt, son of sculptor Matthew Cotes Wyatt and grandson of James Wyatt, surveyor general to George III and architect of Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.

Perhaps Henry was acknowledging his grandfather’s celebrity as a Gothic designer or perhaps he was referencing Scarborough Castle on the opposite side of the bay. There was certainly a good dose of the Picturesque in his Saloon with its brown, ochry walls, flat roof giving sea views and battlemented turrets with small casement windows to frame visitors’ gaze.

Already, the waters were taking a back seat to pleasure. Puritan locals protested when a band was engaged in 1837, but the impetus was impossible to resist and, in 1856, Sir Joseph Paxton was commissioned to produce an up-to-date Music Hall. Internationally famous for the Crystal Palace and inundated with work from wealthy patrons, including the Duke of Devonshire and the Rothschilds, Paxton’s employment confirmed Scarborough’s Victorian prestige. Although Paxton provided the name, however, it seems his painfully shy son-in-law George Henry Stokes carried out the design work; the Building News stated as much following the death of Stokes in 1874.

The elevations of the new Spa were defined by two floors of full-height round-headed windows with balustraded towers at each corner. Wyatt’s Saloon was converted into a refreshment hall after its now-outmoded turrets were removed. At the same time, the sea wall was extended to create a broad esplanade (Fig 3).

As the act of promenading was key to the Spa experience, a first-floor balcony ran across the front of the music hall and southward to become the roof of a shelter around Paxton’s new outdoor bandstand. The scheme was completed by a three-storey observation tower that offered views over Paxton’s Italian terrace and the newly landscaped cliffside, as well as the waves.

The Music Hall opened in July 1858, its galleried interior lit by novel ‘sun burners’ in a deeply coved ceiling of parian cement. According to the Illustrated London News, finishing touches were entrusted to royal decorator ‘Mr Crace of London’. To assist with acoustics, the walls were lined internally with wood, which caught quickly when fire broke out on September 8, 1876 (Fig 5). After three hours, only the Whitby-stone exterior survived. Having enjoyed a period of relative prosperity, as rail travel encouraged the seaside holiday habit, management took the opportunity to extend their entertainment buildings yet again.

The architectural competition was won by theatre specialists Verity and Hunt of London. Although Wyatt’s Saloon was now demolished, The Architect noted how particular attention was ‘given to preserving as far as possible the old associations of the place, and such features as the balconies and colonnade and a portion of Paxton’s hall were carefully retained’.

Nearly 30,000 tons of earth were moved and massive retaining walls built in order to extend the old music hall to the rear. The new Grand Hall could hold 3,000 people, 1,000 more than before, with an entirely new decorative scheme of grey and gold ‘in Italian Renaissance style’. Although the existing height was little changed, the building’s silhouette gained stature when the corner towers were raised and capped with domes (Fig 1).

An imposing central vestibule formed the new Spa entrance, its staircase leading south to the Grand Hall and north to a new block of similar exterior design that comprised a first-floor theatre, still very much in its original form, and ground-floor buffet, now Farrer’s Bar. There was also a reading and billiards room, conservatory and roof terrace with café. On August 2, 1880, the Lord Mayor of London arrived in his state coach to perform the official opening ceremony.

The next two Spa architects were local-born men who built national reputations. Edwin Cooper (who was later knighted) achieved fame with his Port of London Authority headquarters, whereas Frank Tugwell’s theatre expertise was employed in Harrogate, York and the West End. In 1913, Cooper brought Edwardian Classicism to the Spa, replacing Paxton’s iron bandstand with the domed elliptical structure that stands today (Fig 6). The Sheffield Daily Telegraph described the black and white marble forecourt linking it to the new café and shelter as being ‘in the Continental manner’.

Cooper’s intention of enclosing the space with glazed wings was finally realised in 1954. Tugwell’s contribution was to have been a reconstructed Grand Hall, but following demolition of Paxton’s observation tower in 1923, he was instead commissioned to replace it with a new ballroom and café, which opened in 1925.

By the post-war period, changing holiday expectations were having an impact and, with its hopes pinned on the conference trade, the town council took over Scarborough Spa in 1957. Its modernisation plans were squashed at a public inquiry in 1978, which recommended restoration of the listed Verity and Hunt buildings and adaptation of the ballroom, which assumed its concrete elevation in the 1980s.

The need for novel attractions shaped the Spa’s evolution, but what of the mineral water that started it all? Theakston’s 1840 Guide to Scarborough includes an engraving of the ‘improved’ entrance to the wells, now within the protection of the sea wall and accessed through a Gothic arch at the base of a stone stair.

This open-air arrangement, described by the Spa’s historian Meredith Whittaker as the ‘bearpit’, persisted until 1874, when a bandstand was built on top to give the pumproom a roof and musicians shelter. In 1931, the bandstand was replaced by a cubical concrete kiosk that represented the Spa’s only brush with Modernism. Anyone wishing to take the water could buy it mixed with orange juice, but consumer numbers were vanishingly small; income from the 1961–62 season was a single pound.

A trickle of the once-hyped water still comes out halfway up the steps to the beach at the north end of the Spa, providing free supply to the townspeople, a condition of the Cliff Bridge Company’s lease 200 years ago.

The pumproom itself is hidden beneath a roundabout. As part of the Scarborough 400 celebrations, there is a plan to digitally survey it, so people can see the site that launched the town’s career as the ‘Queen of Watering Places’ and the original British seaside resort.

Scarborough is celebrating its 400th year as a spa with all manner of celebrations — see more details.

This feature originally appeared in the July 15, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Lymore Hall, in the historic county of Montgomeryshire, was a remarkable and rare example of a country house hardly altered from it inception in the 1670s.

Built around an old hunting lodge during the reign of Charles II, the half-timbered, multi-gabled house was commissioned by Edward, 3rd Baron Herbert of Chirbury to replace his ancestral homes of Black Hall — destroyed by fire — and Montgomery Castle — seized and devastated by Cromwell’s Roundheads.

Lord Herbert clearly heeded history's lessons. Recognising the perceived necessity for a swift departure, the new property was said to feature 'hiding places, odd corners and dark passages communicating with unexpected exits.'

Fine oak panelling, oak and elm floors and oak beams held the house together, developing a unique patina and warping with time.

Lymore also sheltered a striking family heirloom: a unique, hand-hewn, Jacobean-era staircase that the Parliamentarians had uncharacteristically left in one piece and salvaged from Montgomery Castle.

Sadly, Lord Herbert died just three years after Lymore was finished. The house first passed to his brother, then to his wife and, later on the Earls of Powis. The aristocratic family already had other, more modern properties to live in, so antiquated Lymore was treated as a very occasional second (but more likely third or forth) home. According to records, the last person to sleep under the grand old building's roof did so in 1886.

Aesthetically speaking, this served Lymore well and it entered the 20th century with the vast majority of its original features still intact. However, its emptiness did not serve its structural qualities quite so fairly.

'Everywhere ceased to be a quite straight line or an exact right angle,' wrote someone in a 1908 article for Country Life, 'for Nature has most engagingly insisted upon modifying man’s over-precise geometry, so that every floor waves and every floor leans.'

Somehow, Lymore survived the First World War, but during a 1921 fundraising fête for the local orthopaedic hospital the floor collapsed, dumping about 30 philanthropists, including the Earl and Countess, into the very old cellars. Mercifully, no one was seriously injured.

After this near catastrophe, Lymore was abandoned for good.

George Charles Herbert, 4th Earl of Powis, did try his hardest to preserve the unique building, but in a letter to County Life, published inside the October 5, 1929, issue, he outlined his reasons for demolishing it.

'SIR,—As I have reluctantly come to the conclusion that it is necessary to demolish the interesting old half-timbered house Lymore… I think that I ought to give the public….the reasons which have compelled me to arrive at this decision.

'...Lymore is scheduled as an ancient monument by H.M. Office of Works, and about two years ago H. M. Office of Works gave me a full report on the condition of the house, when it was found a considerable amount of money would have to be spent upon it to preserve it...

'I offered it on lease for £1 per annum [about £56.51 today] to a tenant who would be prepared to put the house in order either to preserve it as it is or to use it as a residence. I then offered it through H.M. Office of Works to the nation, but it was declined on the ground that the OOW had already undertaken the repair of many castles and buildings as they were able to deal with out of the grant made available to them by Parliament.

'I then advertised the house in this country and America for removal and re-building elsewhere, but without any satisfactory result.'

The letter concluded: 'I have, therefore, reluctantly come to the conclusion that the only thing to do is to sell the panelling, staircase, oak, etc., in the house by lots by auction of October 23rd, and I have obtained the consent of the Office of Works to do this. POWIS'

By 1931, no trace of the building still scarred the landscape. However, as always, small fragments do survive.

In 1931, Packwood House in Warwickshire was being extended. Floorboards from Lymore — presumably not the collapsing ones — were used in the Long Gallery, where they remain to this day.

The Lymore Estate still welcomes scores of walkers who pass the ghost of the house as they traverse Offa’s Dyke

And the ornate staircase? It was moved to its third home — Aldborough Hall, North Yorkshire — where it still elevates the great and the good.

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Selwyn College, founded in 1882, was one of a group of new institutions that quietly transformed both the intellectual and physical landscape of Cambridge in the later 19th century. It was founded as a memorial to the widely admired missionary George Selwyn (1809–78), the first Anglican Bishop of New Zealand (and subsequently the Bishop of Lichfield, where his tile-clad burial chapel is a notable feature of the cathedral). The college was intended to appeal to men from professional and clerical families of more modest means and educate them as missionary priests. This role in the training of clergy echoed the purpose of many of the great medieval foundations of the university. Despite its title, however, it initially had the status of a ‘public hostel’ and only achieved full collegiate status in 1958.

Even at the time of its first foundation, the Anglican Church was in retreat at Cambridge University. Crucial to this process was the Universities Tests Act of 1871, which removed restrictions that prevented non Anglicans — and non-Christians — from either graduating or holding fellowships.

Eventually, Selwyn College evolved away from its Anglican roots, expanding both its academic range and numbers. In the process, albeit maintaining a strong tradition in theology, it has developed by stages into a diverse and mainstream institution within the university. In 1976, it was among the earliest colleges to admit women. For more than a century, it has shared chapel services with next-door Newnham, one of Cambridge’s two remaining women’s colleges. Today, the numbers of men and women at Selwyn are roughly equal and, in 2025, its first female master, Suzanne Raine, was appointed.

The evolving character of the college as an institution is reflected in the layers of its architecture, which have been discussed — together with many unexecuted projects — in Mike Good’s Selwyn Celebrated, 1882–2007. This complements the standard institutional and cultural history of the foundation, Selwyn College: A History (1994) by W. R. Brock and P. H. M. Cooper.

The first college buildings were designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield, a son of the Bishop of London, then at the height of his reputation as one of the leading church architects of his day. His buildings in both Oxford and Cambridge are surprisingly varied in character and materials, ranging from the 1868 Italianate St Barnabas Jericho, Oxford, modelled on the cathedral at Torcello, to brick, neo-Jacobean Master’s Lodge at Emmanuel College, Cambridge (1873–74, demolished in 1963). Architectural style was a matter of great importance and the latter is carefully distinct from Wren’s Kettonstone Chapel and cloister range.

It was perhaps inevitable, however, that Selwyn would be cast in late English Gothic and Tudor idiom. Such ‘collegiate Gothic’ was a mainstay for the design of the educational institutions of the Anglican Church for much of the 19th century, not merely in Oxford and Cambridge, but across the Empire. Blomfield’s stylistic vision strayed into the Stuart period as well, presumably a reflection of his own education at Trinity College, Cambridge. At the same moment from 1875, Newnham was deliberately and pointedly blazing an alternative, non-conformist trail in its adoption of the Queen Anne style of about 1700.

Blomfield’s plans for Selwyn were only partially realised, but he undoubtedly succeeded in setting the character of the college as we see it today. The tall, red-brick entrance range was completed by 1881–82, with a central gatehouse evocative of several older Oxbridge Colleges (Fig 2). A northern range, in very similar style, was completed in 1889. Hall and chapel were first provided in a temporary structure.

Selwyn’s first master — the Revd and Hon Arthur Lyttelton, son of a government minister — occupied an adapted part of the front range with his family, but a new Master’s Lodge, like a large rectory, with a finely detailed porch in a Perpendicular Gothic spirit, was completed by 1884. This was followed next, not, as might be expected, by a new main hall, but by the chapel. This soaring presence, in brick and banded stone, designed by Blomfield, nods to King’s College in its design (Fig 1). It is also placed directly opposite the entrance in a striking departure from the norms of Cambridge collegiate planning; the master’s lodge and hall are usually opposite the entrance and chapels to one side.

The interior of the chapel (Fig 3) has a lofty elegance that echoes the 1889–91 work of G. F. Bodley at Queens’ College; they share the same later English Gothic architecture. The Selwyn Chapel cost £10,700, with £3,000 being given by the College’s senior tutor, the Revd T. H. Orpen. At its consecration, the Cambridge Chronicle of October 18, 1895, noted: ‘Selwyn is not only one of the youngest, but [also] one of the smallest Colleges of the University, and it says much for the generosity and self-denying character of its past and present members that so handsome a Chapel should have been erected.’ The college ran into debt to pay for it, but had the debt cancelled after a gift from Bishop Edmund Hobhouse.

The finely carved oak stalls were added incrementally, reaching their full extent in the early 1950s; the lively carving of the handrests of the early stalls have a series of impish figures, some with heads of leading statesmen of the time, including Lord Salisbury, Lord Morley and Sir William Harcourt. The west window stained glass of Christ enthroned is by Kempe. A sculpture of three figures over the high altar depicting the Ascension, by Karin Jonzen, was commissioned with advice from Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and added in 1958.

Blomfield had hoped that a library would sit on the north side of the chapel, as a pendant to the Master’s Lodge; each linked by a handsome section of brick cloister. This was not realised before Blomfield’s death in 1899, the library being accommodated in the former temporary chapel, until the 1920s. Blomfield had also envisaged a grand new dining hall for the college; instead, the commission for this went in 1908 to Grayson and Ould (principally Edward Ould), who produced a brick-and-stone work of considerable presence in a frank, early-17th-century style (the designs being published in The Builder, November 30, 1907). The ornate stone detail, with a frieze carved with the initials of college officers and major donors, gives an additional liveliness to this early-20th-century addition.

Grayson and Ould was a Liverpool-based practice that made its reputation working on Port Sunlight for Lord Leverhulme and his family, but had designed a substantial new building for Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in the 1890s, which may have provided the spur for the Selwyn commission.

The vast new hall is elevated over the kitchens that served the temporary space (originally, the lawn was also sunken at a lower level). As with the chapel, the hall could be described as a bid for status and reputation, more a statement of aspiration than a measure of the college’s means. Running east-west, it is approached by a fine T-plan stone staircase, which adds a touch of theatre to the whole court. Its fine interior is finished in panelling, some reused from vats at the derelict Magdalene College brewery, and an open timber roof in the Jacobean manner with decorative plasterwork featuring armorial details (Fig 6).

The west end has a handsome pedimented panelled centrepiece of late-17th-century date, originally a reredos designed by Wren’s Office removed from the Anglican church in Rotterdam, which was demolished in 1913. Its presence in the space contributes to a character that echoes that of many Cambridge halls of earlier dates that were repanelled in the late 17th and early to mid 18th century. At the east end is a surprisingly traditional-looking hall screen; the original plan shows that only one arch served as an entrance, the other operating as a kind of service lobby. At the west end of the hall is the old Senior Combination Room, handsomely panelled in oak with a bolection-moulded fireplace to continue the late-17th-century theme.

The next major addition was the 1929–30 library to the north of the front range of Old Court, a much-reduced version of an ambitious neo-Wren design first proposed for the garden site to the north of the Chapel (where Blomfield had intended it); the design was by T. H. Lyon, director of Design at the Cambridge School of Architecture from 1920–36 and the architect of several neo-Georgian and neo-Wren buildings in the city, including the memorable panelled interior of the Chapel of Sidney Sussex, completed in about 1923.

On the west side of Grange Road, the extensive, Modernist Cripps Court of 1968–69 (funded by the Cripps Foundation) hugely extended Selwyn’s accommodation — replacing older houses, but sparing the college’s gardens to the north of the chapel from development. Designs by Sir James Stirling from 1959 had been set aside and the final buildings were by Gordon Woollatt, with some walls of flint and brick. In 1963–64, Sir Stirrat Johnson-Marshall, former chief architect to the Ministry of Education, designed new Modernist combination rooms and Fellow sets at the west end of the hall range with a bay window, facing the Old Court, in a nod to a Tudor spirit.

In more recent years, Ann’s Court — designed by leading modern neo-Classicist practice Demetri Porphyrios Associates — added a new, open three-sided court, in brick and stone, in a style informed by mid- to late-17th-century English Classical tradition. Demetri Porphyrios Associates has also designed significant buildings at Magdalen, Oxford, including the Grove Quadrangle in 1994–99, as well as Whitman College, in a traditional collegiate Gothic style, for Princeton University in the US (completed 2007). The executant architects at Selwyn were CMC Architects.

The first range of Ann’s Court, of three storeys with an attic level, providing accommodation and administrative offices was completed in 2005. A second range, with further student accommodation, followed in 2009. Both buildings were generously funded by a foundation set up by Chris and Ann Dobson. A Selwyn graduate, Dr Dobson had met Ann, a nurse, when at Cambridge and they created a charitable foundation after selling his successful semiconductor equipment business. The last section was completed in 2021, with a new lecture hall with library over. The Quarry Whitehouse Auditorium and Bartlam Library — named after additional benefactors — are located (with their own distinct entrances), in a tall range with a strong presence that stands independently (Fig 4).

Within the court, the auditorium and library building has its own attached tower, rising to a circular bronze lantern suggestive of a Roman lighthouse of the tradition of the Tower of Hercules in Galicia — a new landmark. The executant architects were AMA Architects. Ann’s Court, with its handmade Coleford brick, pedimented dormers and gables, sits well beside the mostly brick Old Court to its south. Its deep brick chimneys echo traditional design and serve modern functions, housing ventilation and extraction vents for student rooms. The two Queen Anne Revival-style villas on the north side of the court, both student accommodation, will be linked by a one-storey building in work yet to be completed.

Consciously traditionalist, Porphyrios’s Ann’s Court has a strong identity of its own that is both reminiscent of the American Ivy League universities and suggestive of institutional confidence. The clean-cut Portland-stone arcades (Fig 5) are especially memorable and evocative of the work of Wren in Cambridge and Oxford, as well as providing shelter from rain and sun. The debate about approaches to additions to historic Cambridge colleges is always a lively one, but Selwyn’s new court, stately and commodious, is a good demonstration of the enduring value of inventive modern Classical design.

Acknowledgements: Peter Fox, Elizabeth Stratton

This feature originally appeared in the July 8, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Most of the grand, stately homes ‘lost’ in the 20th century were victims of war, taxes or fire — and occasionally all three. Warter Priory, however, bucked the trend(s).

Situated in the bucolic Yorkshire Wolds, the property that Country Life arrived to photograph in about 1905 was not actually a priory, but a vastly extended 16th-century house.

'Warter' was said to be an Anglo-Saxon word for 'felons' or 'gallows tree', or, simply, a reference to the abundance of water in the area; the 'Priory' part was a nod to a lost Augustine Priory once situated about a mile away.

In 1878, Josslyn Pennington, 5th Lord Muncaster, sold the priory to Charles Henry Wilson of Wilson's Steam Ship Company.

At the time, Wilson’s leviathan enterprise was responsible for the UK’s largest, and therefore highly profitable, trans-Atlantic cargo fleet. The acquisition was more personal than business-minded: Wilson's family had been tenants on the land for centuries and his grandfather was born on the estate in 1746, later moving to Hull's docks to work as a lighterman. The victorious Charles returned, two generations on, as Lord of the Manor. He wasted no time.

Wilson and his wife, the imposing Florence Wellesley, eldest daughter of a nephew of the Duke of Wellington, got to work greatly extending and enhancing the house. A vast baronial hall clad in impressive, carved wood panels sat behind a new porte-cochere and clock tower — ensuring visitors were awestruck as soon as they arrived. Impressive staircases in oak and carved marble were installed. By the end of the works, Warters boasted about 100 rooms, 30 of which were bedrooms for visiting guests.

Wilson, who was also the Liberal MP for Kingston-upon-Hull, the East Riding’s Justice of the Peace, and Deputy Lieutenant, was a philanthropist who busied himself with many charitable deeds in the area. However, one of these, was the closing of the village pub — the fabulously-named Creeping Kate Inn — on account of his strong belief in abstinence. This belief saw him introduce a bill in Parliament for the closure of all public houses on Sundays.

Wilson died in 1907 leaving his widow to entertain alone. She hosted regular shoots, one of which was attended by Sir Winston Churchill, and reportedly 'terrorised' her estate workers, frequently conducting spot inspections on their cottages.

By 1927, Florence's health was failing and the now deeply-fashionable mansion was put up for sale. Against all the odds, including the fact that she demanded being laid to rest on the estate, Warters sold to the Hon George Vestey, who had made his own fortune in the meat trade.

Unusually for the time, Vestey had the financial means to keep the house in the Victorian manner to which it had become accustomed. To this end, he retained a vast staff to keep his vast mansion, its gardens and estate running like clockwork.

When he died, in 1968, Warters' valuable land was sold to the Marquess and Marchioness of Normanby. The house was surplus to their requirement.

Four years later, a local newspaper reported that it was to be bulldozed and the remains dumped in its own ornamental lake. Initially branded 'fatuous', on May 5, 1972, Country Life wrote about a 4½-hour fire sale of fixtures and fittings: businessman L. W. Hill of Chesterfield bought the Great Hall's oak panelling, the marble staircase, an oak staircase, a marble chimneypiece and a minstrel’s gallery for a £1,515 (about £18,460). Warter Priory was flattened shortly afterwards and, as the newspaper had said would happen, used to fill in the lake.

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When T. E. Lawrence first set eyes on Clouds Hill, Dorset, in 1923, he realised that it would make a good place to hide. Although its name suggests that it sits high up, open to the sky, this humble whitewashed brick cottage is concealed from casual sight. Set in a hollow in the south Dorset heathland and enclosed by pine trees and rhododendron bushes, it possesses a powerful atmosphere of secrecy (Fig 1). Then about to turn 35, Lawrence was living under the assumed name of T. E. Shaw as a private in the Tank Corps, based at Bovington Camp, a mile to the south.

He had sought this obscure anonymity to escape his international celebrity as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (Fig 3), the result of his starring role in the Arab revolt of 1916–18 that had helped the Allied Powers defeat the Ottoman Empire. He hoped also to find peace to complete Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the epic account of his desert campaigns that was to secure his lasting fame.

Lawrence had made his first bid for anonymity in July 1922 by enlisting in the Royal Air Force as an airman under the name John Ross, only to be discharged a year later when his identity was leaked to the press. Arriving at Bovington in March of 1923, he found his initial feelings of pessimism were ‘very much like the wintry heath, of bog and withered plants and stripped trees’ that surrounded the camp.

Yet, as he recognised, this was also the Egdon Heath of Thomas Hardy’s novels. As soon as he arrived, he sought an introduction to Hardy, who lived in Dorchester, 15 miles away, an easy ride on Lawrence’s motorcycle.

Shortly after this, he was shown Clouds Hill, which was being restored from almost total ruin by one of his fellow soldiers. Seeking a refuge from what he called the ‘cat-calling carnality’ of life in barracks — he returned to the RAF in 1925 — Lawrence offered to complete the work at his own expense and rent the cottage. Built in 1808 on the Frampton family’s Moreton estate, perhaps for a forester, the house has only four rooms, two on each floor.

Initially, Lawrence fitted out only the upper floor, for use primarily as a writing room. It was only a daytime retreat as, when not on leave, he had to sleep in camp, where he also ate, and he installed neither running water nor electricity. Lawrence was content with this make-do life because he assumed that he would not need the cottage for long, but, in 1929, he decided to buy it, to form a permanent base in his peripatetic service career.

After Lawrence’s death in a motorcycle accident on the road from Bovington in 1935, the novelist E. M. Forster, who knew the cottage well, wrote that to think of Clouds Hill ‘as T. E.’s home is to get the wrong idea of it. It was rather his pied-à terre, the place where his feet touched the earth for a moment and found rest’. Nonetheless, in his later years there, Lawrence dedicated considerable effort and money to making the cottage suitable for the more settled life he envisaged after retirement from the RAF.

This was not such a departure as Forster’s comment may imply: throughout his life, Lawrence took a great deal of care about his domestic settings. Clouds Hill was the last of four small houses Lawrence helped create in the course of his life and it drew on memories of its predecessors.

Lawrence was the second of five brothers brought up in a large house in Polstead Road, north Oxford. Recognising that their clever, unusual second son needed independence and a place to study, in 1908 his parents had a two-room bungalow built for him in the garden. He draped the walls with blue cloth to block out external noise: ‘it was the most silent place I have ever been in,’ remembered a friend. Lawrence lived there when an undergraduate at Jesus College, Oxford, where he formed a close friendship with a young Welshman, Vyvyan Richards, who shared his enthusiasm for fine books and printing.

In 1910, Richards became a master at Bancroft’s School in Woodford, Essex, near the southern edge of Epping Forest, where he had the use of a wooden hut on Pole Hill, a steep slope set in the forest with a fine view of the London skyline. Intending to install a printing press there, he and Lawrence made plans for replacing it with a house of medieval type that would incorporate beams Lawrence had rescued from a demolished 14th-century hall in Oxford.

These romantic intentions foundered when Lawrence joined a team of British Museum archaeologists excavating at Carchemish, the Hittite citadel on what is now Turkey’s border with Syria. There, he was charged with overseeing the erection of a permanent house on site. Its scale was revealed when the foundations were excavated and conserved in 2013–14: the one-storey building comprised 18 rooms built around a courtyard, with living accommodation, spaces to display findings and a photographic darkroom. The director of the dig, Leonard Woolley, later famous as the excavator of Ur, recalled how the sitting room (Fig 5) was furnished with ‘some good rugs, the best of which Lawrence had bought. He had had made in Aleppo two armchairs of black wood and white leather of whose design he was very proud; he had brought out from home a piece of Morris tapestry to hang on the wall, he had some nice Kutachia pots, and of course books’.

This comfortable life was swept away by the First World War. Although it brought him international celebrity, the Arabian campaign left Lawrence desolate and exhausted and he was greatly cheered when Richards called him back to their former plans. Having gone back to London, Lawrence worked intensively on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as Richards prepared his hut to be the home of the press that would print it. In 1919, with money inherited from his father, Lawrence bought land at Pole Hill, intending to settle there. The original hut, described by him as ‘my house’, was destroyed by fire in 1921, but, with the help of his pupils, Richards rebuilt it with an open veranda, which he called ‘the cloister’, and an outdoor plunge pool.

In another hut on the land, Lawrence stored a pair of elaborately carved teak doors he had bought in Jeddah (Fig 6), perhaps with the intention of incorporating them in the larger house and garden on Pole Hill that he and Richards planned, for which they consulted the architect Herbert Baker. However, these dreams were undermined by Lawrence’s decision that he would take no profits from Seven Pillars of Wisdom and then his enlistment in the RAF.

In 1929, Lawrence sold his land at Pole Hill to the Epping Forest authorities to ensure that it would not be built over, but also to raise funds for improvements to Clouds Hill, which by then he intended would be his permanent home. The Forest authorities moved the hut to their headquarters in Loughton, where — remarkably — it survives.

When Forster paid the first of several visits to Clouds Hill, in June 1924, he was enchanted by its informality and the hospitality that Lawrence gave to favoured soldiers from Bovington camp. The artist Gilbert Spencer, who that year was invited by Lawrence to make a painting of the heathland landscape that is still in the cottage (Fig 7), remembered him in the main upstairs room (Fig 2) correcting proofs of Seven Pillars of Wisdom and listening to a gramophone record of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, as ‘a Company Sergeant Major sat with the poems of Laurence Binyon on his lap’. Lawrence had fitted out the room in his characteristic taste — bare wood and brick, with undyed leather curtains in place of doors, recalling the medieval inspiration of the proposed house at Pole Hill. Forster thought it very ‘brownish’.

Lawrence liked to exaggerate the cottage’s discomfort, writing in 1934 that it ‘is as ugly as my sins, bleak, angular, small, unstable: very like its creator’. In fact, fellow soldiers were impressed by his expensive motorcycle and gramophone and even the food on offer — in the absence of a kitchen, eaten directly out of tins, which made Forster ill — was ameliorated by Fortnum & Mason hampers.

Lawrence loved long, hot baths and, in 1933, he finally arranged for the house to have running water and a boiler. He installed a bathroom in one of the two ground-floor rooms, which was lined with sheet cork of high quality. The other room was fitted out with a fireplace, bookshelves, a large daybed on which he reclined to read (Fig 8) and an armchair of his own design. Its broad arms, designed to support books, give it an Art Deco look.

Lawrence fitted out the two upper rooms like a ship’s cabin, with a bunk bed and porthole window, taken from an old, broken-up battleship. Strikingly, he lined the walls with aluminium foil (Fig 4). Although this had a practical purpose — the room was used for storing food, so needed to be dry and cool — it also evokes the world of interwar glamour associated with an unexpected acquaintance of Lawrence, Stephen Tennant, the epitome of the 1920s ‘bright young things’. In 1927, this fey young aesthete was photographed by Cecil Beaton in his bedroom in London, which he had lined with silver foil. Tennant visited Clouds Hill in the 1930s and it seems likely that Lawrence knew the image, which might, therefore, have inspired his own silver room.

On the far side of the road from the cottage, Lawrence constructed a pool, partly to provide water to douse the heathland fires that occasionally threatened the cottage and partly for use as a plunge bath (as at Pole Hill). To keep fallen leaves out, he constructed a glass canopy over it, large enough to incorporate the two doors from Jeddah that had been in storage in Essex.

A few weeks before Lawrence’s death, Richards stayed at Clouds Hill. Lawrence intended to install a small hand-press in the building over the pool, taking advantage of the fact that its ‘atmosphere would always be damp and good for printing’. He hoped to start in the autumn of 1935 by printing his frank account of life in the RAF ranks, The Mint, and ‘some good but obscure poet’.

Lawrence’s plans for the cottage at the time of his death looked back, therefore, to the life he and Richards had first planned before the war. According to Richards, the intentions for their house in Epping Forest had included a pair of box beds inscribed ‘Meum’ and ‘Tuum’. These sleeping arrangements were replicated at Clouds Hill, in the form described by Lawrence, with ‘two sleeping bags, zip-fastened and labelled in embroidery MEUM and TUUM. When night falls the cottager takes up his bag, unfolds it on the piece of floor he momently prefers, and sleeps’.

Clouds Hill was inherited by Lawrence’s youngest brother, the archaeologist Arnold Lawrence, who in 1937, having removed the books and many of the works of art, donated the cottage to the National Trust. When James Lees-Milne visited in 1945, he was repelled by its setting ‘in the middle of Bovington Heath, which is a blasted waste of desolation, churned feet-deep in mud by a thousand army tanks’ and thought the cottage ‘a pathetic little shoddy place. The visitors have stolen all they could lay their hands on’.

It is a tribute to the careful restoration of the interiors embarked on by the National Trust at the beginning of this century, helped by a photographic survey made after Lawrence’s death, that Clouds Hill is now unrecognisable from that description. Instead, it evokes with almost unnerving immediacy the way its creator’s complex personality was embodied in his places of refuge.

Michael Hall is the author of ‘A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National Trust’ (Bloomsbury, £25)

Visit the National Trust website to find out more about Clouds Hill.

This feature originally appeared in the July 1, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Throughout history, Muntham Court — situated on the South Downs, four miles north of the seaside enclave of Worthing — was a place souls retired to to indulge in their hobbies.

Unusually for a large country estate, Muntham was not passed down through generations of the same family. Instead, different characters would arrive and then depart, leaving a trail of clues as to who they were when they had occupied the land. Neighbouring Cissbury Ring, Britain's second-largest Iron Age fortification, hints at the first occupants.

In the early 1950s, archaeologists working at Muntham uncovered evidence of a sizeable Iron Age settlement and a Roman-era 'village'. Fragments of even-earlier Bronze Age weapons were also found.

Throughout the years, the land was bought and sold by the Munthams (who are presumed to have built the first house on the site), the Cornwallises, the Apsleys, the Shelleys, the Gorings, the Crowes, the Middletons and the Montagues, until, in 18th century, it was purchased by William Frankland.

Frankland, a descendant of Oliver Cromwell and the rumoured inspiration for Jane Austen’s Henry Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, was, it is fair to say, eccentric.

Born in India to the then-governor of Bengal, he amassed a vast fortune in the East India Company. By the age of 40, he determined to venture west, taking three years to travel to England, sometimes (for safety, apparently) disguised as a Turkish messenger, via Baghdad, Jerusalem, Babylon, and Palmyra.

At Muntham Court, the confirmed bachelor dedicated his latter years to scientific research and inventing. He extended the property, filling rooms with all manner of devices he invented. There were whirring textile machines, printing presses, spinning devices and electrical apparatus. And if that wasn’t enough noise, he also fashioned machines to play musical instruments and filled what space was left with timepieces, which presumably chimed on the hour.

When Frankland died in 1805, his vast collection was immediately auctioned off.

Muntham was then sold, and then sold again, until, in 1850, Harriet Thynne (nee Baring), the Dowager Countess of Bath, moved in, after ceding control of Longleat (of stately home safari fame) to her son.

The Dowager Countess recognised the estate's potential, but was far from impressed by its appearance, famously declaring that: 'The upper classes do not live in red brick!' She employed local architect Henry Woodyer who refaced the house with local flint and added Jacobean-style Dutch gables, and, later, a Bath stone extension.

The Dowager Countess was also determined to overhaul the gardens.

Yew trees — long associated with sacred ground — were abundant so she had them fashioned into walls, walks and clipped into symmetrical shapes. She also planted a Judas tree, a species native to southern Europe and East Asia that produces vivid rosy-pink flowers every spring.

Country Life’s photographs of Muntham Court date to 1907, 15 years after the Dowager Countess had died. By then, it was in the possession of Lady Ulrica Thynne, her widowed daughter-in-law. She, in turn, passed the property to her son, Colonel Ulric Oliver Thynne.

Thynne was a much-decorated veteran of the Boer and First World Wars and, by 1922, the standard bearer of His Majesty’s Royal Bodyguard of Gentlemen-at-Arms. He was also, as was common among the gentry of the time, a keen marksman and trophy-hunter. His Muntham contained more than 50 taxidermied animals, including a hippopotamus, which lived in the Billiards Room.

Thynne and his stuffed menagerie stayed at the house until the outbreak of the Second World War when, like so many other large properties, it was requisitioned by the War Office. Unusually, after hostilities ended, he returned, living there until his death in 1957. He was buried in the grounds and the estate was put up for sale.

No attempt was made to sell the house as a home; instead, it was advertised as a possible school, hotel, convalescent home or residential development. Sadly, no one's appetite was whetted.

The house and majority of its land was eventually purchased by Worthing Council who at the time had little regard for antiquity. In 1961, Muntham Court and its gardens were flattened. It's now the site of Worthing Crematorium — where souls still go to retire.

The Judas Tree — reportedly the largest known specimen in Europe — still blossoms every year, but the hippo’s whereabouts are unknown.

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In the beautiful gardens at Plas Brondanw, one feature has special significance. Terminating an avenue of chestnuts is a flaming urn that, as the carved dedication below states, was ‘raised on the ashes of their home by Clough and Amabel Williams-Ellis’ to mark the end of the rebuilding campaign on December 10, 1953, and commemorate the seven local masons and craftsmen to whom restoration was due.

Exactly two years earlier, the couple had awoken to the smell of smoke. Clough found the ground-floor library ablaze and his beloved terrier, Pennant, lying dead on the threshold. The telephone cable was already burnt through and Clough was lucky to escape after the floor gave way beneath him. A messenger ran to the village summoning five fire brigades, but a winter gale fanned the flames until little more than the 3ft thick walls survived. Press reports described the usually dapper architect of Portmeirion, now 68 years old, his face, feet and one hand bandaged, ‘wearing his wife’s spectacles and borrowed clothes,’ resolute that: ‘My house will rise again.’

Williams-Ellis had inherited the Brondanw estate in Gwynedd in 1908, aged 25. As a child, his mother had taught him to appreciate the simple Welsh cottages she liked to sketch and the combined dynastic responsibility and romantic setting of the Williams manor house in the shadow of Snowdon immediately inflamed his antiquarian tendencies. It was some 50 years since Williams-Ellis’s grandfather had left the house on succeeding to Glasfryn in Caernarfonshire. Tenants from the local slate quarries had moved in and, by the early 1900s, seven families inhabited the building.

This period of familial absence neatly coincided with most of the Victorian era, the architectural output of which Williams-Ellis roundly despised. Having, as he put it in his autobiography, ‘never been deflowered by restoration or improvement’, Brondanw was ripe for sympathetic conservation and every spare penny he earnt from clients was channelled towards its gradual resurrection.

Built into the slope of the hillside, the oldest part is the two-storey late-Tudor entrance range (Fig 2). This survived the 1951 fire and maintains its large farmhouse hearth under an impressively wide, but shallow arch of slate. In the 17th century, a grander four-storey cross-wing had been added overlooking the tidal estuary of the Afon Glaslyn, an area subsequently reclaimed by William Madocks for farmland and the building of Porthmadog on the coast. A slate plaque set into the south-west end of Plas Brondanw records the initial and date ‘W. 1660’.

Despite their divergent scale, the two building phases sit harmoniously together within the wider landscape, accessed from an 18th-century forecourt and linked by what Christopher Hussey, in a 1931 Country Life article, called the ‘plentiful slabby stone, blue and purple and brown, that inspired most of [Williams-Ellis’s] operations here’.

The architect’s first building projects at the house were a sturdy gate lodge with fairytale-castle qualities and a rather French-looking orangery that set oeil-de-boeuf win- dows in the local rough stone, both of 1912–14. This external work was partly due to the ongoing tenancies; Williams-Ellis’s own space in the house was initially limited to the lower ground-floor brewhouse vacated by the hasty departure of a notorious salmon poacher. As the second son, inheriting the second estate, Williams-Ellis also lacked money for grand gestures.

Evidence that he did speculate on the possibilities for more ambitious changes comes from a Capriccio for Rebuilding Plas Brondanw, now in the RIBA drawings collection. Here, the vernacular original has largely disappeared in a perspective view that features a Classical pediment over the garden front and polygonal bay windows rising through three floors of the gable end. The 15th-century range has been raised by two storeys and become an infill with a new gabled tower behind it linked to a second cross wing. Certain elements foreshadow nearby Portmeirion, perhaps his most famous creation (Country Life, January 7), but there is also something of the Cambridge colleges Williams-Ellis knew from his brief spell as an undergraduate. The 1913 date is significant, for this was the year he met his future wife, Amabel Strachey.

Keen to demonstrate his suitability as a potential husband, Williams-Ellis had the bravado to exhibit his dream at the Royal Academy, picturing himself next to a veiled woman in the foreground, plans spread out before them. As it turned out, the house was already perfect for his bride-to-be. Amabel later confessed that: ‘It was a good thing that I’d promised to marry Clough before I saw Brondanw, otherwise I could never have been sure it hadn’t been for love of Brondanw, rather than any fancy I had for him, that had made me say yes.’ Immediately after the couple’s Surrey wedding in July 1915, they boarded a train to their Welsh home. As a wedding present from his fellow officers in the Welsh Guards, Williams-Ellis requested a folly. Baffled, they obliged (Fig 1).

After the war, garden improvements continued as the house returned to a single dwelling. Williams-Ellis’s growing architectural practice, the demands of three children and his wife’s work as an author and journalist meant, however, that the family lived mostly in the capital, settling at Romney’s House, Hampstead in 1930 and letting Plas Brondanw to friends. In 1937, Williams-Ellis solved the problem of a bulging west wall in characteristically stylish fashion, adding a belvedere tower that acts as a buttress as well as simultaneously enhancing views from, and of, the house (Fig 5). At its base, arches on three sides span the lower terrace, creating exactly that sensation of a little tunnel Williams-Ellis particularly enjoyed.

When war came again, the family left London for the safety of rural Wales. It was the first time they had permanently inhabited Plas Brondanw and, although they shared it with a string of evacuees, they came to know it more profoundly and, in Clough’s case, to see its faults. In some ways then, the fire presented an opportunity to improve and modernise the interior.

The difficulties were considerable in an era of building licences and continued rationing, but few architects were better trained in using salvage than Williams-Ellis, who kept a store of historic parts at Portmeirion. To reinstate the burnt-out floors, he opted for fire-resistant concrete covered with oak parquet. Unable to source the required steel joists, he scoured redundant slate quarries on the Brondanw estate and repurposed old tramway rails to do the job. Roof timbers and slates came from an old school nearby; 18th-century doors and fire surrounds arrived from a London dealer. The biggest change to the interior was on the attic floor, which became a self-contained flat accessed from the steeply rising ground at the rear via a playful route across a stone arched bridge, roof terrace and loggia.

On the ground and first floors, Williams-Ellis skilfully manipulated sightlines, borrowing light and creating vistas into the landscape that lend a feeling of grandeur to what is really a compact and intimate interior. With barely three bedrooms and three main reception rooms, the connecting spaces are all the more important. In the entrance hall, two short staircases re-use four different designs of timber balusters, a suitably quirky introduction to a house where decorative features from across the eras mix with ease.

One stair descends to the ancient brewhouse, the other leads up to a room in the buttress tower, where windows on three sides frame shifting views of the near garden and far mountains. The neighbouring library (Fig 6) was Williams-Ellis’s studio until his death in 1978. He worked here into his eighties, standing at his drawing board, surrounded by books and a cosy jumble of sofas, armchairs and sidetables. A Classical fireplace speaks to his love of the Georgian style, as do the four fluted pilasters on the gable wall that add status to an otherwise ordinary sash window. Such is the depth of the window reveal that Williams-Ellis used it to conceal extra bookshelves.

Today, Plas Brondanw is open to the public, showcasing the work of the family’s eldest daughter, Susan Williams-Ellis, artist and founder of Portmeirion Pottery. The library curtains are made from her mid-century textile designs and displays of her ceramics and works on paper rotate alongside exhibitions by contemporary artists. Although it is now a gallery, Brondanw retains the informality of a lived-in space, thanks to a combination of curatorial sensitivity and the strength of Williams-Ellis’s architectural personality. His unique stamp is everywhere. In the Tudor kitchen that became the dining room and eventually Amabel’s bedroom, it is most visible in the stepped alcove that juxtaposes a large window with elegant fanlight against the room’s low, beamed ceiling. Set into the green terrazzo floor is a grey marble circle that began life as a tabletop made for Penrhyn Castle.

At the heart of the redesigned home are the staircase hall and upper landing, defined by curves and round-headed arches. Together, they provide a generous, clean space that seems to sit effortlessly within the historic structure. Key to this more open arrangement was the replacement of the original dark oak stair treads with slate, the lower steps arcing round to meet the worn slate of the surviving hall floor (Fig 8).

Reversing the stairs allowed for construction of a new ground-floor cloakroom with an access tunnel that is vintage Williams-Ellis, teasing out the architectural pleasure from a small and functional space. The short passageway has a barrel ceiling, its floor is laid with chequerboard black and white marble, borrowed light coming from a round-headed peep hole in the wall. At the top of the stairs (Fig 7), the bespoke iron balustrade employs a repeat pattern of interlocking ovals with rounded tops and bottoms, the sections separated by uprights that mimic the pair of fluted oak pilasters framing the entrance to the landing. Painted in turquoise and gold, the ironwork matches the iron gates (Fig 3) and garden features visible outside.

The first-floor drawing room opens off another strip of chequerboard marble that runs across the landing to its door, an architectural reminiscence, perhaps, of the picture gallery at Romney’s House Williams-Ellis laid with black and white squares for his studio. As a decorative device, it cleverly establishes a hierarchy of space, marking out the public drawing room from the private bedrooms, dressing room and bathroom. Post-fire, a new Venetian window gave the drawing room greater external emphasis. That it was also a bit of Classical pomp is clear from the flaming plaster urns over the two side windows, the whole internal window nook outlined by fluted oak pilasters with gilded Corinthian capitals (Fig 4).

The use of salvage elsewhere on the first floor was more utilitarian. In the dressing room, surplus doors became a high shelf with a hanging rail fitted to the underside for clothes storage. Structural decoration in the main bedroom was minimal. When one realises that the angle of the window splay on the north-east wall allowed Williams-Ellis to view the peak of Snowdon from his bed it becomes clear that nothing else was really necessary.

For its response to and ongoing conversation with the landscape, Plas Brondanw is a special and beautiful place. The spirit of Williams-Ellis and his love for this corner of north Wales is as alive here as it is in nearby Portmeirion, more subtle certainly, but every bit as delightful.

With special thanks to Rachel Hunt.

Visit the Plas Brondanw to find out more about visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

You might be surprised by the number of tour guides operating in the Polish new town of Nowa Huta, a name which means New Steelworks. However, it makes sense when you realise that 15 million people visit the baroque beauty of nearby Krakow annually and there will always be a few, more adventurous tourists who want to learn stories about Poland’s immediate past.

In addition, Nowa Huta is elegantly designed. From Lenin Square (now called Ronald Reagan Central Square), five treelined boulevards emanate. As you walk them, the standard story which the guides will tell you is that Joseph Stalin himself deliberately located the Lenin Steelworks and the town which serviced it, here, due to the particular bourgeois, anti-Soviet tendencies of Krakow.

In truth the Cursed Soldiers, as the native resistance to the Red Army occupying Poland were known, were more active in rural areas near the Belorussian border. The real reason is more practical. While iron ore was transported all the way from Ukraine, Nowa Huta was near the Upper Silesian coal fields. Even if its symmetrical network of avenues and cross streets are strikingly similar to the plan of Magnitogorsk, an industrial city on the east side of the Ural Mountains, local architects were given enough scope to give the early grander phase of building an architecture with flourishes recognisable to those who have visited Krakow. The tiered façades of the main streets and the ornamental mouldings on the door frames of the mansion blocks make reference to the baroque language of the older city, albeit in concrete and with an extra level of muscularity.

Construction of the pumped-up neo-Classical architectural, ornamental parks and symmetrical plan, which the more intrepid tourist discovers, began in 1949 with Soviet technical assistance while production at the plant began in 1954. The steelworks became one of the largest employers in southern Poland, producing a broad range of steel products used in domestic construction and export. The plant was an expression of socialist might, and shaped Nowa Huta’s urban and social identity, with housing, cultural centres and worker amenities built around it. The Lenin Statue by Marian Konieczny, one of the truly great social realist sculptures, on the Avenue of Roses was removed in 1989 and currently stands in a wild west theme park in Sweden.

Were it not for the singular intervention of a cleric known in his early life in Krakow as Karol Józef Wojtyła, but later when he moved to Rome as Pope John Paull II, Nowa Huta would still be a fascinating and in parts, to outsiders, attractive place; the lines of trees and linear plantings down wide boulevards are particularly striking. Nowa Huta is unique outside Russia as a major expression of Stalin’s proclivity for neo-Classical planning as well as architecture. The reality of Soviet economics kicked in later. The stripped back Modernism found to the north of Nowa Huta tells a story of decline. However, Wojtyła’s influence has created another fascinating layer to the city.

Perhaps understandably no churches were built by the Marxist Leninists in the original iteration of Nowa Huta. However, as Archbishop, Wojtyła began celebrating mass in Nowa Huta from 1959, outdoors, before a wooden cross. It says a lot about Polish Soviet relations that even in this ideal socialist city, there were protests that the authorities were forced to contain rather than suppress. Stalin described the process of making Poland communist, as like ‘putting a saddle on a cow’, with the Catholic Church constantly giving the Poles the strength to buck Soviet imperial dominance. Wojtyła supported the widespread desire for a church to be built in the new town, and, in the face of opposition from the authorities, was finally able to complete one in 1977 against a backdrop of food riots throughout Poland.

Shaped a little like Noah’s Ark and nicknamed as such, The Church of the Mother of God, the Queen of Poland, as it is officially known, owes a huge debt to Le Corbusier’s Notre-Dame-du-Haut Chapel; a primitivist assemblage of curved geometries that speaks to an architecture that both pre-dates and supersedes the linear rational lines of Nova Huta’s plan. Wojtyła gave the local church a stone brought back from the moon by American astronauts that had been given to him: modernity overstepping rationalist Modernism to place man closer to the cosmos.

People’s spiritual and social needs must be part of any urban plan: even if it comes late. The Church of Our Lady of Częstochowa was begun in 1982 close to the site where Wojtyła’s masses took place. It was built from brick, the same material used for the later, post-Stalin apartment blocks, although it is not plastered as they are. The design is ingenious, a series of pitched roofs, receding from the front elevation and growing in height, its façades are lattice windows, creating a series of tree-like crowns on the exterior and a shaded bower within. Nowa Huta may struggle in today’s economic climate, due to the enduring dominance of the steel work as employer, (it is now owned by Arcelor Mittal) but as a place it gets ever more fascinating.

Christopher Hussey’s unusually effusive 1935 Country Life article on the achingly romantic Valewood Farm speaks of childlike wonder.

He describes his first vision of the property: 'Its wavy russet roof is bosomed deep in profuse vegetation, so that one’s first impression is of straying into a Hans Christian Andersen fairy story. One expects curious creatures of doubtful ancestry to peer imploringly or menacingly out of the encircling boscage.'

Valewood Farmhouse was, as the name would suggest, an old farm and associated buildings perched on the edge of the Blackdown Hills on the Surrey/West Sussex borders. Commanding glorious views across the South Downs, the romantic, mid-14th century timber-framed property had over the years been dressed with sandstone and half-hung with rich, red tiles characteristic of this corner of the Weald.

During the majority of the 19th century, it was home to the Mangles family. Captain James Mangles, who had spent a number of years in the Bengal Civil Service and was a keen horticulturalist, returned to this sleepy corner of the countryside after many years abroad, armed with copious samples of rhododendrons. He set about hybridising the plants and establishing them on his lands at Valewood.

At their heart, the Mangles were creatives. They were strongly connected to artists and artisans, counting their neighbours Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) among their closest friends. Their daughter, Alice, married artist William George Daffarn, with his contemporary Helen Allingham painting numerous watercolours of the picturesque property. Another great artisan of the time, and great friend of the family, was Gertrude Jekyll, Country Life’s formidable gardens expert.

An 1866 edition of the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society of London mentions H.A. Mangles winning a unanimous merit for his Rhodeodenron 'Gertrude Jekyll', named in honour of the great garden designer. Jekyll’s influence on the gardens here would continue into the 20th century.

Fast forward to the 1920s, and Alice Daffarn (nee Mangles) had inherited Valewood from her parents. Not wanting to relinquish the idyllic property, but also wanting to remain in London for the foreseeable future, Daffarn set about finding a suitable tenant. She first let it out to Allingham, who had a short tenure, dying at the property in 1926. What followed next was, well, a case of, as the late Queen said, recollections may vary.

After completing his First World War service, and returning to the UK, the Modernist architect Oliver Hill had been searching for respite from his busy London life in the form of a fashionable weekend retreat.

According to a 1928 article in Country Life by fellow architect R. Randal Phillips, after years of fruitless sorties trying to find the right property, Hill had seen….’…through a break in the trees, the chimney and roof of an old house, and, after a brief examination, realised its possibilities.’ It had, according to Randal Phillips, lain abandoned for over eight years, and the garden was described as ‘a swamp’.

This description greatly upset Daffarn, who in all likelihood was already acquainted with Hill and had previously agreed to let it to him. She wrote to the magazine to protest against the description of her family home being in a 'ruinous state' before Hill had 'saved' it. She did, despite this slur on the family property, let him stay. The results of his work in the gardens were spectacular.

Right in the centre of what would have been the old farmyard, Hill constructed a 30ft long, oval bathing pool. It was filled from a natural spring via the mouth of a magnificent jade pottery frog.

Always concerned with the aesthetic, Hill ensured the water was always the perfect shade of azure by occasionally scattering in a (don’t try this at home, kids) few, highly toxic, copper sulphate grains. An adjacent old grain store and byre were transformed into a changing room/sun trap, and cooling loggia respectively. By 1935, the whole scheme was surrounded by a menagerie of beasts, some real, some less so.

In 1928, Hill had been assisted by Jekyll with a naturalistic planting scheme — one of her last — for the gardens. She had even provided plants from her nursery at Munstead Woods. But by the 1935 article, Hill had reportedly gone his own way, largely departing from her scheme, although vast, soft blue swathes of delphiniums, anchusas and Salvia virgata, softened by pink sidalcea and grey foliage — classic Jekyll varigated height and colour combinations — waved joyously by the side of the swimming pool in summer.

Slightly above the pool, a more conventional terrace was laid out. Despite the heavy clay soil, a rose garden tried its best on the lower terraces, although it was noted that between the congested soil and Hill’s beloved peacocks, who were rather overly fond of ingesting the blooms, this garden was not the property’s most prolific.

Passing through the barn, away from the pool, led to a straight, brick path which transported you to a short ha-ha overlooking what today would be called a wildflower meadow. In spring, it bobbed with a profusion of bouncy, white cow parsley.

During his long tenancy at Valewood, Hill’s architectural creativity flourished. During his time at the farm, he designed, among others, the British Art Deco icons the Midland Hotel in Morecombe and the entire Art Deco enclave in Frinton-on-Sea, Essex. The clean, dramatic lines of his work were a far cry from the romanticism and 'organised chaos' of his weekend retreat.

Hill’s tenancy came to an abrupt end at the start of 1948 following the death of Daffarn. So did his gardens at Valewood. By the dawn of the 21st century, while the aged farmhouse spread its roots deeper into the land, very little remained of Hill’s idyllic weekend retreat gardens. The pool was filled in. The jade ceramic frog and porcelain fawns were (hopefully) rehomed.

But there was one happy ending to the fairytale. One echo of the past does continue to flourish in rude health around the lanes in the area. Vast drifts of Capt Mangles’ invasive rhododendrons burst into flower every spring in this corner of the country.

If you wish to see his work in a more contained setting, Leonardslee Gardens, roughly 10 miles to the east of Valewood, inherited the majority of his collection, which puts on a magnificent technicolour display every April-May.

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When Henry VIII died at Whitehall Palace in the early hours of January 28, 1547, the Crown passed to his nine-year-old son, Edward VI, and power to a council of individuals named in his will. Only three days later, the leading figures in the new administration took advantage of their position to reward themselves. Their acknowledged leader, Edward Seymour, uncle to the new King, assumed the titles of Lord Protector of the Realm and Duke of Somerset, as the royal servant, John Dudley, soon to be appointed Lord Great Chamberlain, became Earl of Warwick.

Dudley had been constable of Warwick Castle since 1532, which was then in royal ownership. His choice of this particular title probably reflects both that connection and the exceptional prestige attached to it. As described last week, the earldom was established in 1089, but was linked back yet further through the fictional hero Guy of Warwick to the deep, imagined past. Dudley had earlier adopted his namesake castle of Dudley, Warwickshire, as his seat. Now, he claimed a family connection with the Beauchamps, previous Earls of Warwick, and adopted their heraldic devices of a bear and ragged staff. He also sought to obtain full ownership of the castle and town.

To facilitate this acquisition, he gave a deliberately misleading account of the state of the castle. It was, he claimed, ‘not able to lodge a good baron with his train, for all the one side of the said castle with also the dungeon tower is clearly ruinated and down to the ground’. As constable, however, he had presided over extensive works to the buildings on behalf of the King. These included the reuse in 1538 of a ‘well-tiled’ roof, 60ft long, taken from the recently suppressed Blackfriars in the town, to cover a new kitchen, as well as repairs to the cliff beneath the principal domestic range that ran along the River Avon.

A more disinterested account of the castle in the 1540s is offered by the antiquarian John Leland. It was, he wrote, ‘magnificent and strong… [and] set upon an high rock of stone’ (Fig 4). He also refers to ‘the principal lodgings’ where ‘the King doth much cost in making foundations in the rocks to sustain that side of the castle’. Independent accounts record the delivery of 500 carts of stone to stabilise the cliff. It’s conventional to think of castles as passing out of fashion in the Tudor period, but this investment in Warwick underlines the prestige that some still enjoyed.

Dudley subsequently fell out with the Duke of Somerset and, in turn, became the principal power in the realm. In 1551, he assumed the title of Duke of Northumberland and seems to have set in motion an unsuccessful attempt to assume control of the palatine of Durham and its castle. At the same time, however, he also secured possession of Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, the sister foundation to Warwick. At Kenilworth, he built a massive new stable, its timber framing evoking the emblem of the ragged staff, modelled on its lost 15th-century predecessor at Warwick.

Dudley’s career was famously cut short by his catastrophic attempt to place Lady Jane Grey on the English throne after the death of Edward VI in July 1553. He was executed for his efforts, but his two eldest sons, Ambrose and Robert Dudley, were restored by Queen Mary and, as close political associates, rose to great power in Elizabeth I’s Court. Ambrose, as the elder, acquired the title and castle of Warwick. His more celebrated brother, the Earl of Leicester, a suitor for the Queen’s hand, adopted Kenilworth as his seat, but clearly aspired to his brother’s inheritance, founding the Lord Leycester Hospital in Warwick.

Both brothers hosted Elizabeth I on grand and carefully choreographed visits to their respective castles, Ambrose at Warwick in 1566 and again in 1572. On the latter occasion, the Queen occupied the main medieval domestic range and watched country dancing from her chamber window in the castle courtyard. Her rooms also overlooked the river, a specially created garden and the park, where a mock battle was staged for her benefit.

Ambrose died in 1590, after his brother, and was buried beside him in the Lady Chapel of St Mary’s, Warwick, the mausoleum of the Beauchamp Earls. All his titles became extinct and a depressing survey of the castle taken the same year suggests that the buildings had not been well maintained. One curiosity is mention of two large stone windows that appeared ready to collapse. These may have been ‘compass’ windows — bay windows on complex plans — that projected out over the river below. Similar windows were added by his brother to Kenilworth Castle.

One local landowner, Sir Fulke Greville, saw the ruins as a possible source of building materials to repair his own house of Beauchamp’s Court, Alcester. The castle had, he asserted in 1601, ‘been a common gaol these ten or twelve years; the walls down in many places hard to the ground; the roof open to all weathers… so as in very short time there will be nothing left but a name of Warwick’. Happily, his request for the stone was rejected and, in 1604, his son and namesake, a soldier, writer and courtier, managed to acquire the castle and completely repaired it.

The motive was probably family piety; the younger Fulke inherited the Barony of Brooke and claimed through it connections with the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick. It may have been in preparation for these works that a detailed plan of the castle was drawn up by the architect John Smythson. It shows the main domestic ranges in much their present form running along the edge of the cliff and a central hall with service buildings, screened by a wall, at one end and withdrawing apartments at the other.

The antiquary Sir William Dugdale reported that the repairs cost Lord Brooke more than £20,000 and judged the castle ‘a place not only of great strength, but extraordinary delight, with most pleasant garden walks such as this part of England can scarcely parallel’. Greville was murdered by a manservant in 1628 and buried in the chapter house of St Mary’s Church, Warwick.

Fulke’s adopted heir was a cousin, Robert Greville, 2nd Lord Brooke, a religious and political radical. From January 1642, as the Civil War brewed, he modernised the defences of Warwick Castle, reworking the motte as an artillery fortification. It has been suggested that the iron hooks on the exterior of the gatehouse (Fig 3) are fixings for woolsacks to protect the masonry from shot.

The castle withstood a short Royalist siege in August 1642 and, after the Royalist disaster at Edgehill on October 23, Caesar’s and Guy’s Towers were pressed into use as prisons. Thereafter, Warwick became an important Parliamentarian stronghold. In January 1645, its garrison included 302 soldiers with their officers, 15 mounted scouts, six drummers, two gunners, seven grooms, a surgeon and a vicar. As such, it miraculously survived the Civil War substantially intact, one of a handful of major English castles to do so.

Lord Brooke was killed at the siege of Lichfield on March 2, 1643, shot from the spire of the cathedral. The title passed in sequence to two of his young sons, the eldest, another Robert, 4th Lord Brooke, was one of the peers sent to the Hague to invite Charles II to return. Following the Restoration in 1660, the garrison was disbanded and the castle handed back to him. Soon afterwards, he began improvements to it and, in 1667, a grand Classical stable and coachhouse were built outside the walls, since demolished. Two years later, a laundry was begun beside the main gate and a master carpenter and builder from Warwick, Roger Hurlbut, was contracted to wainscot the Great Hall.

This was the start of the complete renovation of the withdrawing apartments in the most fashionable style. Brooke’s brother, William, was sent to see the new interiors designed by Sir Roger Pratt for Sir Ralph Bankes at Kingston Lacy, Dorset, and these clearly informed the redecoration of the full suite of withdrawing chambers now known as the Red Drawing Room (Fig 5), the Cedar Drawing Room (Fig 2), the Green Drawing Room (Fig 7), the State Bedroom and Boudoir. These rooms were created within the existing shell of the range, which was internally partitioned to accommodate a corridor, now known as the Armory Passage. Final payment for these rooms was made by Robert’s brother, Fulke Greville, 5th Lord Brooke, who succeeded to the title in 1677.

Born after his father’s death in 1642, Fulke lived until 1710 and, on November 4, 1695, loyally welcomed William III to Warwick Castle. Pitch and tar illuminations devised by Nicholas Paris were burnt on Guy’s Tower for the occasion and 100 gallons of punch distributed in an iron cauldron, the supposed porringer of Guy of Warwick. Guy’s relics, proudly presented by the porter, amused the traveller Celia Fiennes, when she visited the castle in 1697. She admired the house and gardens as well as the ‘vast prospect’ from the castle motte. In 1768, this mount was further ornamented with two towers constructed by a local builder Job Collins.

The development of the castle in the 18th century involved a litany of professionals ornamenting and improving the buildings at the direction of successive Grevilles, who, from 1759, were also Earls of Warwick. A common theme of the work is a consciousness of history and the use of Gothic detailing, as in the ceiling of the castle chapel that was being installed in 1748 (Fig 6). Equally thoughtful externally is the battlemented dining room added by Timothy Lightoler in the 1760s in front of the great hall.

Over the same period, the level of the courtyard was raised and the grounds of the castle more clearly defined. In the process, the town was gradually pushed away. By the end of the century, it’s no exaggeration to say that the castle was a nationally admired monument. As a reflection of this, elements from it were widely copied in other buildings such as, in the same county, Edgehill Tower of 1746–67 by Sanderson Miller, or Charleville Castle, Co Offaly in Ireland, from 1800.

A financial crisis in the first decade of the 19th century brought sustained investment in the castle to a close, but improvements were made to receive Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1858. Then, in 1861, the architect Anthony Salvin was employed to begin further changes to the building. He also directed repairs after a devastating fire gutted the private apartments in the medieval service area and hall (Fig 1) in 1871. Salvin’s renewed domestic rooms are an unusually fine survival of their period, their interiors decorated in strikingly different styles. In 1894, on the birthday of the celebrated socialite and beauty, Daisy, Countess of Warwick, the castle was supplied with electric light, still then a novelty.

During the mid 20th century, the costs and complexity of maintaining the castle steadily increased and, in 1978, David Greville — from 1984, 8th Earl of Warwick — reluctantly sold the castle and 100 acres of surrounding landscape to Madame Tussauds for £1.25 million. Major repairs followed the purchase and the interiors began to be presented in what was then a completely novel fashion with lifelike mannequins.

The approach proved hugely successful and, today, there are two displays of this kind, one on the medieval theme of Warwick ‘the Kingmaker’ and the other on an Edwardian weekend house party. Henry VIII also appears with his wives (Fig 8). There are numerous additional exhibitions and displays, as well as a busy round of live events, all of which take advantage of the castle setting. For the 750,000 visitors it now receives each year, Warwick Castle — since 2007 run as part of the Merlin Entertainments group — is a theatre, where fantasy and history meet. The extraordinary thing is that in very different ways, through the figure of Guy of Warwick, it always has been.

Visit the Warwick Castle website to find out more about visiting.

This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Highclere became world-famous in the 2000s as the impossibly grand Hampshire house used as the location for the filming of Downton Abbey. Yet it was a place celebrated long before ITV's film crews turned up to create the classic period drama, not just for its architecture, but also for the treasures that lie within.

The most famous of these are its Egyptian antiquities, collected by the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, excavator of Tutankhamun’s tomb; and its Napoleonic memorabilia, including the Emperor’s chair and desk, personal effects sold from Longwood House on St Helena after his death in 1821.

Today,, though, the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon stand in the Smoking Room at Highclere, an interior redecorated and rehung in the 1990s, in front of a different antique: a table that incorporates decorative panels representing birds and fruits made of ‘hard stone’ or pietra dura.

Making decorative use of stones such as lapis lazuli, onyx, cornelian and sardonyx enjoyed particular popularity in the late 16th century and Ferdinando I de’Medici established a workshop — the Opificio delle Pietre Dure — in Florence in 1588 that became a centre for its subsequent production.

The panels here are thought to date to the 17th century, but were subsequently united in this table, probably in the 19th century. In several cases, the stones actually project from the surface of the panel, giving it real depth.

‘We both love Italy and think the craftsmanship of this table is exceptional,’ says Lord Carnarvon.

‘I love the idea of Nature set into marble, frozen and made eternal. John Keats explores this in his celebrated poem Ode on a Grecian Urn, published in 1819; this table is our urn.’

A version of this feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 24, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Unlike its namesake, Papillon Hall managed to live a lot longer than a brief spell. But, still, it perished far too quickly.

On May 4, 1912, Country Life published a supplement focused on the latest works of Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944). One of the prolific architect’s works under the microscope was his modernisation of Papillon Hall in Lubenham, just outside Market Harborough, Leicestershire.

In the opening years of the 20th century, Lutyens had been called in by Captain Frank Ashton Bellville, heir to the Robinson’s Barley Water and Keen’s mustard fortunes, to greatly extend his octagonal, 17th century, semi-fortified home.

The heart of Bellville’s home, built — and lived in, for some time — by the French architect David Papillon, came with one small, but seemingly potent problem.

According to local legend, Papillon, the person, not the house, had a Spanish mistress who he kept prisoner in the attic after she fell from his favour. The poor woman died in mysterious circumstances sometime around 1715. When Bellville acquired the house, he also took possession of her 'cursed' brocade shoes. Locked behind a grille, legend (and legal documents) had it that if the shoes ever left the house, misfortune would befall its owner.

The original hall was retained at the centre of Lutyens' designs, and an extra storey added to it. There were four new wings, built in the shape of a butterfly, which contained a dining room, billiard room, kitchen and servants' hall. To the south was a sunken pond, dotted with water lilies; to the east, the flower gardens were replanted inside the wings, in the cottage garden style of Lutyen’s great friend, Gertrude Jekyll.

For the duration of the works, the brocade shoes were kept at Bellville’s solicitor's offices.

Reports show that work progressed slowly; contractors pulled out at the last minute and there were numerous accidents and one death. The skeleton of a long-dead woman, presumably Papillon’s mistress, was discovered in a bricked up cavity in the roof. Then, in August 1905, Captain Bellville was badly injured when he was thrown from his jaunting car (a small horse buggy). Against all the odds, he recovered.

However, the shoes were on the move again — this time, to a museum. Soon after, George Rathbone, an electrical engineer, died in a car car crash. He was in Bellville’s car being driven by Bellville’s chauffeur. Sarah Clark, a servant, was accused by later acquitted of infanticide after a dead baby was found in her room. Lastly, Bellville was flung from his polo pony. (Amazingly, he recovered, again, which somewhat disproves the lucky shoes theory.)

Bellville died in 1937, at the age of 68, and Papillon Hall passed to his son, Rupert.

Rupert was described in contemporary news reports as a sportsman, airman and one-time amateur bull fighter. He also fought alongside General Francisco Franco's troops during the Spanish Civil War. In fact, at the moment his father died, he was in Spanish prison.

Rupert reportedly fell into the enemy's hands because he presumed Santander had been taken by the Spanish nationalists, so flew himself and the head of González Byass to the latter's headquarters, to pick up a few cases of celebratory sherry. Upon landing, he discovered a) his error and b) the opposition.

The sherry-seeking Franco fighter was released following a series of heated negotiations and, when he arrived home, set about painting every gate on the estate in the dictator's colours. Then, in 1938, he put it all up for sale. However, it failed to actually sell.

During the Second World War, Papillon Hall hosted the 319th Glider Battalion and the 82nd Airborne Division of the American Army, who, naturally, were not overly worried about building and garden conservation and Lutyens' unique creation fell into a state of seemingly-terminal disrepair.

After the War, the decision was taken to demolish it, but not before Rupert’s wife 'saved' the remaining slipper (Rupert had taken one with him to Spain which explains quite a lot). Today, only small parts of the garden remain; the shoes are on display at the Harborough Museum.

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On June 24, 1348, in the course of a tournament at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, Edward III famously instituted a fellowship of 25 knights under his personal leadership. The Order of the Garter, as it was known, was established at a moment of martial triumph in England. One of the founder members of this new order was Thomas Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who personified the confidence and belligerence of the moment. ‘The Devil Warwick’, as his enemies called him, had fought side by side with Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, at the Battle of Crécy in 1346 and otherwise enjoyed a formidable reputation as a soldier. He was also a great builder and, as the modern visitor encounters it outwardly, Warwick Castle is substantially his creation.

William the Conqueror first founded the castle in 1068 within the defences of a fortified settlement or burgh. The burgh, created in 914 by Æthelflæd of Mercia, occupied a hill top that had been naturally cut back as a cliff on one side by the River Avon. William constructed the castle along the cliff top (Fig 1), from where it commanded a river crossing. According to the Domesday survey of 1086, four houses were demolished to make space for it. William’s castle seems to have taken the conventional form of an artificial mound — termed a motte — and an associated enclosure or bailey. The motte, albeit heavily reworked since the 11th century, still survives and it’s assumed that the bailey followed roughly the line of the later walls. These earthworks were presumably fortified in timber.

Warwick Castle was subsequently granted to a Norman, Henry de Beaumont. The exact date of this grant is uncertain, but it was through Henry’s close connection with the Conqueror’s son and heir, William Rufus, that he was able to constitute a vast patchwork of estates extending across the Midlands, South Wales and Normandy. It helped, too, that, in 1088, he became Earl of Warwick, with exceptional powers within his titular county. The Earl seems to have played a crucial role in securing the succession of Henry I to the throne in 1100 and, in 1118, towards the end of his life, became a monk. At that time he seems to have divided his estates, passing those in England to his eldest son, Roger.

By contemporary assessment, Earl Roger was a failure. Henry I almost immediately compelled him to yield up a very considerable portion of his Warwickshire estates to a royal favourite, Geoffrey de Clinton, who established a rival castle about five miles away at Kenilworth in the same county. The stories of these two great castles remained inextricably linked until the latter was demolished in 1649. During the Civil Wars fought after Henry I’s death in 1135, the Earl was forced to hand over Warwick to a royal garrison. He is described as dying of shock in 1153 after hearing the news that his wife, Gundreda, had tricked Warwick’s garrison into surrendering the castle to the supporters of the future Henry II.

Through the 12th and 13th centuries, the architectural development of Warwick Castle is a near blank. For a building of such importance, this is surprising. Documentary sources reveal the existence of a chapel and, in 1191, a certain Ralph the Mason inspected minor repairs, implying the existence of stone buildings or fortifications. These presumably replaced the original timber structures of the 11th century. It is also asserted by the 15th-century historian of Warwick, John Rous, that, when supporters of Simon de Montfort sallied out of Kenilworth and captured the castle in 1264, they had ‘beaten down the walls from tower to tower’ to render the fortifications useless to Henry III. He goes on to say that the walls of Warwick Castle were substituted by hedges.

In 1268, soon after this event, the Earldom of Warwick was inherited by William Beauchamp. Neither William nor his son, Guy, who succeeded as 10th Earl in 1298, are known to have improved Warwick Castle, although the latter did use it for the brief imprisonment of Edward II’s notorious royal favourite, Piers Gaveston, in 1312. Gaveston, who dubbed the Earl ‘the black dog of Arden’, was famously led from the castle to nearby Blacklow Hill — significantly the property of another inveterate enemy, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster — and executed. Guy died in 1315 and the castle passed to his son, another Thomas. Perhaps the state of the building — hedged and without new buildings — inspired him to transform it so completely.

Thomas was just over a year old when he inherited his father’s estates and was a minor throughout the turbulent events and military humiliations of Edward II’s reign. He secured his estates in 1329, shortly before Edward III — his near contemporary — dramatically seized control of the realm from his mother, Queen Isabella, and her lover, Roger Mortimer, in 1330. His building work at Warwick is not documented, which makes it complicated to date, but its character cannot be properly understood without reference to the King’s enthusiasms and concurrent activities at Windsor.

The Order of the Garter was directly inspired by the example of the Knights of the Round Table, whose fabled exploits enjoyed European popularity in the late Middle Ages. Edward III had previously built a ‘Round Table’ in the Upper Ward at Windsor in 1344 and attended tournaments splendidly dressed in Arthurian persona. Rooting reality in legend was intoxicating and, in Warwick, Thomas had his own chivalric hero to promote. The legend of Guy of Warwick, notionally set in the period of the Danish invasions, became popular in the early 13th century and exists in multiple versions.

According to it, Guy won the hand of Felice, daughter of the Earl of Warwick, by performing daring feats of arms across Europe. Following his marriage and the conception of a child, Reinbrun, however — and, according to some versions, when staring into the heavens from the top of the tallest castle tower — he suddenly realised the vanity of fighting for a woman; he ought to have been fighting for Christ. Leaving the tearful Felice, he set off once again on his adventures until miraculously summoned back to England to vanquish the Danish champion Colbrond. After this duel, he became a hermit outside Warwick and, on his deathbed, sent for the faithful Felice, who immediately followed him to the grave.

Thomas Beauchamp’s enthusiasm for this legend first found expression in the 1330s. Not only did he name two of his sons Guy and Reinbrun, but he was almost certainly the creator of an 8ft-high sculpture of the dead hero carved in the living rock at so-called Guy’s Cliffe (Fig 6), the supposed site of his hermitage close to Blacklow Hill (Country Life, July 21, 2010). Beauchamp’s will in 1369 also makes mention of ‘the coat of mail sometime belonging to that famous Guy of Warwick’, which was bequeathed to his son and namesake. Guy’s legend was assuming reality.

At Warwick Castle, meanwhile, Beauchamp built an entire suite of domestic chambers, with a hall, services and withdrawing chambers in stone along the cliff top (Fig 5). He also constructed the main entrance façade (Fig 2). This comprises a central gatehouse with an outer fortification or barbican (Fig 4) flanked by towers at each outward corner of the castle. The pairing of the towers masks their colossal scale. Both are prodigy buildings, taller than anything comparable of the period in England. Each principal floor within them is vaulted, an astonishing expense, and seems to have served as a self-contained lodging.

The towers have been known since at least 1644 as Caesar’s Tower and Guy’s Tower, names suggestive of deep history. If the names are medieval, the latter could be an architectural evocation of the tower on which the legendary Guy of Warwick experienced his conversion to Christ’s service. Whatever the case, this building has long enjoyed admiration and, as early as the 15th century, inspired copies at Cardiff (another Beauchamp possession) and Raglan Castles. Curiously, the Earl did not build on the motte, the natural focus of the castle. He did, however, create a gateway on an octagonal plan immediately beside it (Fig 3). This highly unusual form suggests a connection with royal building projects in Wales.

Beauchamp might have begun redeveloping Warwick Castle at any time from 1329, but it’s likely that he only acquired the necessary resources a decade or more later. His additions to the castle could also have grown in scale as time went on. Might his appointment as Marshal of England in 1344; or the first formal gathering of the Knights of the Garter on St George’s Day, 1349; or the victory at Poitiers in 1356, at which the Earl fought, have prompted fresh building initiatives? Certainly, despite the striking overall uniformity of the buildings attributed to him, close analysis of the fabric shows that there are minor changes in such details as the moulding of vault ribs. This could suggest a prolonged period of construction and the involvement of different masons.

What can be said with confidence is that a starting date in the mid 1340s would agree with the dating of one building that bears close technical comparison with what seem to be the very earliest additions to Warwick. This is the castle built at nearby Maxstoke by William Clinton, a close companion of Edward III (and a descendant of the builder of Kenilworth), which was licensed by the King in 1345. The designer of Maxstoke clearly knew the character of Warwick well and even created elaborate chimneypots that evoke in miniature its main 14th-century towers.

Both in scale and form, however, the most obvious parallel for Beauchamp’s domestic apartments at Warwick is the outstanding royal building project of the late 14th century. This was the palace begun in the upper ward of Windsor Castle by Edward III in 1359, which was paid for by the proceeds of Poitiers. It incorporated a single coherent frontage comprising a hall, chapel and chamber, raised on a huge vaulted undercroft. Ideas from Windsor also informed rebuilding work at Kenilworth by the King’s brother, John of Gaunt, in the 1370s and, in a neat symmetry, these also relate back to Warwick. In particular, they evoke Beauchamp’s last major architectural project, the construction from 1367 of a suitably magnificent collegiate church at Warwick, now the parish church of St Mary (Country Life, April 16, 2025).

When Beauchamp died in 1369, he was succeeded by his son and namesake. Thomas, 11th Earl of Warwick, certainly finished his father’s work to the collegiate church and he may also have had to complete the castle buildings, because the usually reliable 17th-century antiquarian, William Dugdale, cites a payment of £395 towards Guy’s Tower in a medieval account of 1393/94, now frustratingly lost. The Earl also entered further into his father’s enthusiasm for Guy of Warwick. A sculpture of the hero was carved for the choir of the collegiate church and a suit of tapestries ‘wrought with the arms and story of Guy of Warwick’ hung in the castle in 1399. Guy’s armour, sword and harness are also mentioned in his will. These, and such other imagined relics as Guy’s poringer, can still be seen in the castle today.

The castle continued to evolve through the 15th century. In the 1420s, Richard Beauchamp, 13th Earl of Warwick, another flower of English chivalry, created a huge stable complex outside the walls of the castle strikingly decorated in plaster of Paris. This was later demolished, but something of its scale is apparent in the surviving 16th-century stable at Kenilworth, which seems to be a copy of that at Warwick. The Spy Tower was probably added to the withdrawing apartments in the 1470s by George, Duke of Clarence, who married Isabel Neville, the co-heiress of the Warwick estates (Fig 7). With large windows and access to the roof leads, it offered spectacular views over the neighbouring park.

Warwick subsequently passed to the Duke’s brother, the future Richard III, and thus into royal ownership. Richard entertained ambitious plans for the castle and began a massive artillery tower to reinforce its defences, but construction was cut short by his fall from power in 1485. What remains of this building now forms part of the line of the castle walls (Fig 8). Henry VIII repaired the castle, but it was in the reign of his daughter Elizabeth I that it acquired renewed significance, as we will explore next week.

See more details about visiting the castle at the Warwick Castle website.

This feature originally appeared in the print edition of Country Life on June 10, 2026. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Before he drafted the plans for Charleston, South Carolina, the philosopher John Locke was already thinking about religious tolerance. In his Two Tracts on Government, written from 1660 to 1662 but not published until long after his death, Locke was actually pretty down on the very freedom of conscience he would become canonical for championing. ‘In every commonwealth there must be supreme power,’ he writes in these earlier, rarely discussed works. This reticence to express the values he became famous for is often put down to Locke cutting his cloth to suit the absolutist Stuart kings; his liberal turn came after their fall goes the story. Yet this change also came after he planned a new town in the American colonies.

Locke had joined the staff of the Earl of Shaftesbury in a medical capacity, but once his political skills were noted, he was promoted to private secretary. At the time Shaftesbury was not only Chancellor of the Exchequer, but one of The Lords Proprietors of Carolina; a coterie of colonising landowners with legal privileges emanating from ownership of these apparently virgin lands. Shaftesbury and Locke together drafted a document that offered English settlers inducements consisting of land, religious toleration and limited political representation. (Limits that would prove to be highly problematic towards the end of the 18th century). The plan offered Locke a chance to rationalise society to its purest balance; accepting order and risk to achieve freedom and thereby taking a good bet on some prosperity.

Locke's role as the city planner was not simply legal, but spatial and included the creation of a regional plan across the whole of the Carolinas. Charles Town, as it was called, was allocated 12,000 acres, with a further 12,000-acre area for settlers and the colony’s nobility. Counties and towns would be the administrative units. Locke drew up plans to ensure that riverfront plots were narrow but deep, to ensure that the number of properties were high and access to the water was for the many and not the few. Informal settlements were prohibited. Street grids would exist for even the smallest settlement. Each planned town, from Charles Town down, was ‘to be laid out into large, straight and regular streets, and sufficient room left for a wharf if it be upon a navigable river’.

The settlement became Charleston when the focus of the colony moved slightly down the coast. Its relationship to England is far closer than is generally given credit and not because it was designed by one of the nation’s key philosophers when he was still in a secretarial position. The intent was to prevent overdevelopment that would impede access and prevent overcrowding. The plan for Charleston was written following the Great Fire of 1666, after which a City of London edict established a buffer along much of the Thames in which construction was prohibited. The raised promenade at the tip of the Charleston peninsula is a vestige of it; a corner of the USA that is forever Putney.

It doesn’t take long to wander through Charleston’s old town (or ‘south of Broad’ as it is known) to realise that Charleston for a Brit is legible as an utopian outgrowth of London; much as Welwyn Garden City was 250 years later. After the Great Fire, Sir Christopher Wren’s plan for a more rationalised capital were ignored; and the opportunity to rethink the city was gone, as the government dodged making compulsory land acquisitions and the existing landownership patterns were held over. Charleston was a chance to fulfil this desire for a new intellectual class to create a city from scratch. Although the plan standardised spatially the class system of early colonialism, it was itself based on rationalist principles and writing them down arguably made them easier to attack.

The impact of the London blaze can be sensed in many of the instructions in Locke’s letter, completed in May 1671. Streets should be ‘large, convenient and regular’. The specifications are unsurprisingly hierarchical given that Locke worked for a Lord. Principal streets were to be 80-feet wide, alleys from them 40-feet. Secondary streets were 60 feet, with back streets 30 feet. The street grid would form squares of 600 feet on each side. Lots associated with principal streets were standardized at 75 feet by 280 feet, while those for secondary streets were 60 feet by 285 feet. This mediation in scales is what makes the town so beautiful. Impressive frontages give way to intimate gardens down side streets.

Edinburgh’s New Town is an impressively rigorous piece of Georgian planning. It is however an austere experience living and working in it. The rigidity of the façades, the regularity of the scale: that is until one gets to its edges at Dean Village, the Water of Leith or Carlton Hill and the rhythm relents to meet the topography and the urban grain undulates. This subtlety of texture is built into Charleston, which being away from the centre of political power and filled with entrepreneurial new frontier types who brooked at rule making, was built out in many different ways — albeit according to the plan’s limits. Arrivals from the Caribbean, for example, built houses perpendicular to the street, so cooling breezes could run east to west along exposed verandahs, or piazzas as they are bizarrely called in these parts.

Charleston is a masterpiece of urban give and take. Locke never visited and never embraced his role as planner, so it is impossible to say whether it had any influence on his ideas about tolerance and freedom. Walking through the astonishing variety of Georgian architecture, wedded to the grid, it is very tempting to think that the way in which he reconciled ideas about individual liberty to public order through the ideas of privacy and public space, emerged from how an ideal new town might operate.

When George Devereux De Vere Capell, 7th Earl of Essex inherited Cassiobury House from his grandfather in 1892, it wasn’t, to be totally fair, in the rudest of health. But then, according to reports, neither was its new owner. His predecessors has invested considerably in rebuilding and decorating the family seat and stuffing it full with an impressive art collection, but fortunes had since dwindled.

In the 17th century, the sprawling Tudor pile had sprouted 'new' wings, designed by Hugh May and decorated with early examples of woodcarving by master craftsman Grinling Gibbons in what was believed to be his first major commission.

At the start of the 19th century, James Wyatt was brought in to modernise the property again. Thankfully, he left the majority of May and Gibbons’ work alone, but, externally, he added a somewhat controversial Neo-Gothic exterior and an orangery.

In the early 20th Century, a Country Life writer visited and their article struck a melancholic tone: 'Cassiobury has had its ups and downs, and is one of the too frequent examples that teach us that alteration is not always an improvement.'

When he inherited the house aged 35, Lord Essex was already a widower. His first wife, Ellenor, had died in 1885 at the tragically young age of 25 while in Cannes, leaving behind an infant son, Algernon, and a grieving husband.

Alone and not in the finest of financial positions, Lord Essex was forced into action. In 1893, he sold a myriad of valuable furniture and painting, including three works by J. M. W. Turner. And in December of the same year, he married the insuppressible Adele Beach Grant — an American socialist and vegetarianism activist. The wedding took place at St Margaret’s Church in the Palace of Westminster, and the bride wore a dress decorated with optimistic, silver sun rays. They honeymooned at Cassiobury.

Lady Essex was one of society’s savviest, smartest, roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-on-with-it, so-called 'Dollar Princesses'. Her father made his fortune building railroads, but it would appear that this was not just a marriage of convenience — they actually liked each other.

This attachment to one another would come in handy when it became apparent that Lord Essex had inherited his family's passion, and total lack of skill, for playing cards, and Grant's father did one bad deal too many.

Lady Essex was not one to sit and bemoan her ill fortune and in a 1901 Rocky Mountain News article, titled 'The Poorest Countess', the writer describes how 'with pluck and enterprise this charming noblewoman has set to work to earn her living.’

The article went on to explain that Lady Essex was the brains behind a company that leased, furnished and let London apartments and had made a 'snug sum', concluding 'the poorest countess in Great Britain' is 'the happiest also.'

In 1902, at the Coronation of Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark, Lady Essex was widely admired for her Russian-style Cartier tiara, reportedly fashioned from recycled diamonds from her family’s collection.

In 1904, Lady Essex announced that she was a vegetarian and began hosting fitness classes. The classes, which were held in fashionable Carlton House Terrace, comprised lifting and throwing exercises, and the swinging around of another exotic American import — the pumpkin.

By 1909, Lord and Lady Essex had rented out Cassiobury and auctioned off a few more artworks. Large swathes of parkland had also been sold to Watford Council for development purposes. And then the First World War hit. The grounds were quickly turned into a billeting area and, eventually, a Red Cross Hospital. Before the War's end, Lord Essex was hit by a taxi, suffered severe bruising and shock and, eight months later, was dead from an suspected heart attack.

Algernon took on the family title and Cassiobury, but was suffering from injuries sustained fighting at the front. In 1920, the 8th Earl made the decision to sell the house, but its poor condition made it impossible for him to find a buyer.

Further tragedy struck in late July 1922, when Adele, Dowager Countess of Essex, was discovered dead in her bath, also, seemingly, from a heart attack. Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of Balfour, and Sir Winston Churchill attended the remarkable woman’s memorial service.

A few weeks later, it was announced that Cassiobury had been purchased by a syndicate who set about the stripping it, Grinling Gibbons and all. Little remained by 1927.

Two parts made their way back to the Dowager Countess's native New York: a large consignment of Tudor bricks and a magnificent staircase, later attributed to Edward Pearce, which is now on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's (The Met) English Gallery.

And, finally, the magnificent Essex Tiara — it is still rented out, on occasion, by Cartier. Clementine Churchill wore it to the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, and more recently, in 2016, it adorned the head of pop princess Rihanna on the cover of W magazine. Like the sun rays on Adele’s wedding dress, her legacy still shines bright like a diamond.

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