As the world slowly gets back to normal, here are some things to look out for.
Buy something beautiful, benefit the NHS
Vaughan Designs are among the companies supporting NHS Charities Together in Christie’s ‘Let there be light’ auction.
Christie’s is running an online auction called ‘Let There Be Light’ between now and 6am on July 14, featuring beautiful and exotic lighting from across the centuries — and benefitting charity.
The auction is billed as ‘an intriguing walk through history and a demonstration of the key role of lighting across periods and regions’, with everything from chandeliers and candlesticks to lanterns and wall lights. Among the highlights are Russian and Swedish crystal and gilt-bronze chandeliers and an elegant pair of Louis XV and Louis XVI ormolu candlesticks.
Not all of the lots are quite so old, however, and Vaughan, Colefax & Fowler, Soane, Robert Kime and Jamb are generously donating a percentage of the proceeds from their lots to NHS Charities Together .
Take a look at the lots up for sale in the Let Their Be Light listings at christies.com
Join the Kew
Dahlia ‘Bishop of Llandaff’ and Heliotropium arborescens ‘Marine’ in front of the Palm House at Kew Gardens, London.
The re-opening of has now extended to the famous glasshouses at Kew Gardens, as of July 4. The Palm House, Temperate House, Waterlily House and the Princess of Wales Conservatory will all be opened, as will The Hive, the much-loved installation that recreates life inside a beehive. Limited routes and one-way systems will ensure visitors and staff remain safe.
‘Given many holiday plans are on hold, we want to offer visitors a chance to experience the next best thing; to discover the beauty and diversity of the earth’s flora, including some of my favourite spots at Kew such as the exquisitely fragrant Rose Garden and the Agius Evolution Garden,’ said Kew’s Richard Barley.
The latest information and full details on safety measures put in place can be found on kew.org.
Walking by a canal or river? Pick up a bit of litter while you’re there
The Canal and River Trust is asking for people to spare a few minutes to carry out a short litter pick while walking at their local canal or river.
A hugely successful campaign earlier this year had seen volunteers give more than 10,000 hours a month to pick up plastic and other litter, cutting it by 30% — but due to coronavirus, all volunteer activity has been suspended. Yet people are walking outside more than ever, so The Trust is calling on all waterside visitors to help out and make sure that those environmental gains don’t get lost.
Find our more at canalrivertrust.org.
Keep an eye out for Bog Asphodel on your walk
Hurry to your nearest peat bog, damp heath or moor, where the golden spires of bog asphodel illuminate their surroundings like little amber traffic lights from now until September. With pyramidal clusters of star-shaped flowers and flattened leaf fans, the county flower of Ross is most common in the North and West, but legend says it originated at Rogie Falls in the Highlands, cropping up after the Virgin Mary lost her golden girdle there.
Bog Asphodel (Narthecium ossifragum) growing in profusion near Ingleborough, Yorkshire Dales.
Known as ‘maiden’s hair’ thanks to its use as a 17th-century hair dye (and saffron substitute), the Latin ossifragum means ‘bone breaker’: once blamed for bone conditions in livestock — a problem actually caused by poor pasture — bog asphodel is, indeed, toxic.
Country Life’s ‘On Your Walk’ flower-spotting column appears in the Town & Country Notebook section of the magazine every Wednesday
Drink beer, do good
Even great, successful pubs such as The Ebrington Arms will need our support.
It sounds flippant, but it’s a serious issue for a big industry: a worrying story about the plight of Britain’s hop growers caused us to sit up and start fretting about British pubs, brewers and hop growers this week.
It’s a particular shame since the industry has been hit just as better times seemed in sight. Figures released before lockdown showed that pub openings were, for the first time since the smoking ban, outnumbering closings across Britain.
With the weather brightening and re-opening (in one form or other) fairly imminent, those who value their local watering hole — be it irresistible country pub or swish modern bar — really do need to patronise it to keep it going.
In that light it’s very cheering to see one of the new breed of hugely successful smaller brewers, Camden Town Brewery, doing their bit to help. They’ve launched a limited-edition beer called ‘To The Pub American Pale Ale’, from which all proceeds will be used to help their plan to provide free kegs to pubs when they re-open.
Camden is giving away 260,000 pints of the beer to pubs across the country so they can get more cash in the till for every pint sold. Until the doors do open, ‘To The Pub American Pale Ale’ will be for sale from June 26 via Ocado, Whole Foods and the Camden Town Brewery shop. And if American Pale Ale isn’t your cup of Hogsback TEA? Make a point of drinking something else to help instead. Knock it back and think of England. (Or Scotland, Wales, or Ireland.)
Cheese Rolling: The Movie
This time of year would normally see hundreds of people heading to the Gloucestershire village of Brockworth to watch the utterly bonkers cheese rolling competition. With the event cancelled, Chris Thomas’s award-winning short film is as close as we’ll get:
Join the New Land Army and save the British harvest from disaster
Women workers at Sandringham, as pictured in Country Life in November 1916.
We’ve written in Things To Do before now about the new Land Army to save the British harvest from rotting in the fields under lockdown — and while efforts have been fractured and confusing up until now, an official pickforbritain.org.uk website is now up and running.
It has backing from the government, farmers’ unions and even Prince Charles.
Find out how to get involved in Pick For Britain here.
When will National Trust properties re-open to visitors?
The National Trust was forced to close all of its properties during lockdown — inside and out — but now things are moving again.
The organisation has opened its spaces and gardens with a new online booking system, and with the latest measures announced on Tuesday will be keeping members and would-be visitors updated on the website.
Since starting to reopen our gardens and parklands on 3 June, we’ve also been working on plans to reopen our houses.
We’re continuing to closely follow government guidance, and we’re now considering the updated easing of restrictions in England announced on Tuesday 23 June, and how this affects the opening of our houses.
As with our gardens and parklands, any reopening of our houses will need to be phased and gradual, and visitors will need to book. We’re also exploring a number of ways to maintain social distancing within our houses.
We will be piloting plans at a small number of properties first before extending opening further. Details about our houses reopening will be published as soon as possible.
The safety of our staff, volunteers, visitors and local communities remains our priority, and we are very grateful to our members and supporters for helping us work through these plans, and for their continued loyal support.
Many of the National Trust’s wilder spaces, where they have neither gates nor charges, have been open to walkers doing their daily exercise throughout, and most car parks at those venues are already open.
The luxury brands making PPE for our carers
The likes of Barbour, Stewart Parvin and Emma Willis are normally associated with top-end clothes, but in these troubled times they’re doing their bit to help out the national effort by making protective equipment (PPE) for our health services.
Barbour is closing in on its target to make 50,000 items of PPE in its South Shields factory, with Dame Margaret Barbour saying: ‘The factory, where we normally make our classic wax jackets, is no stranger to adaptation. During both World Wars, we [made] military garments to assist the war effort. We are pleased to once again be able to make a difference and, this time, to support the NHS.’
Dame Margaret Barbour photographed at Jarrow Hall, South Tyneside. Photo: John Millar/Country Life Picture Library.
Even some of Savile Row’s finest have been joining in, with Huntsman and Cad & The Dandy joining forces to sew scrubs, with staff producing and donating up to 100 sets a day, with more than 1,000 orders having been submitted already. Cloth merchant Dugdale Bros & Co has chipped in, too, providing the tailors with six rolls of fabric to meet demand.
Seamstresses at Stewart Parvin, The Queen’s couturier, are producing scrubs for Frimley Park Hospital and Gloucestershire-based Emma Willis, favourite of Benedict Cumberbatch, Daniel Craig and The Prince of Wales, is making luxurious gowns in Swiss-cotton fabric — ‘we’ll keep going until we fulfil the need,’ the designer says.
It’s not just the clothes makers who are helping with PPE: Vimana Private Jets has switched from ferrying footballers and movie stars around in order to use its luxury fleet of aircraft to transport 1,000 tonnes of medical equipment to international destinations requiring assistance. ‘We will continue to work with governments and NGOs worldwide to assist in any way we can, for as long as is needed,’ says company boss Ameerh Nayan.
Watch an opera
Every Friday, the Royal Opera House premieres a full-length version of one of their operas or ballets on their YouTube channel — part of their #OurHouseToYourHouse initiative to encourage people to stay at home and entertain them during the lockdown.
The series started with a narrated version of Peter & The Wolf danced by the pupils of the Royal Ballet School — perfect for children as well as adults. For die-hard opera fans, the following Friday brought the 2009 staging of Handel’s great pastoral opera, Acis and Galatea, conducted by Christopher Hogwood.
Coming up next for a bit of light relief is Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte, which premieres on April 10 (online, that is — the original recording is from 2010, with Thomas Hengelbrock as a conductor, with Maria Bengtsson as Fiordiligi, Jurgita Adamonytė as Dorabella and Pavol Breslik and Stéphane Degout as Ferrando and Guglielmo, respectively.
The performances remain available to watch on the Royal Opera House’s YouTube channel well after they have been first screened. And there’s another major plus: unless you consistently managed to nab top stall seats at ROH, you’ll have never enjoyed a better view.
Learn something new — including the secrets of happiness
Whether you are interested in particle physics or Buddhism and modern psychology, a wide range of courses and lectures is available online — mostly for free. Digital course provider Coursera has hundreds of options from some of the world’s leading universities and educational institutions, including Yale’s famous ‘happiness course’, or ‘The Science of Well-Being’, as it’s officially known. The course, created by by Professor Laurie Santos, was wildly popular among undergraduates at Yale before going online (over 30 million people have tried it) and seems a perfect tonic for the times.
Yale is far from the only big-name university sharing knowledge like this. London colleges including Imperial, the University of London, the University of Edinburgh, as well as American giants like Yale, Princeton and Stanford. The vast majority is free unless you want a certificate of completion.
If you’d rather explore a specific topic in depth — say, for example, the wines of California, watercolour techniques or the history of Steppes warriors — The Great Courses Plus bring you experts from the National Geographic, the Smithsonian Institute and the History Channel. Their options have a slight American bend and require payment — but they are well-regarded courses and the first 14 days are free.
For those who’d rather learn through books than watch videos or listen to lectures, the Internet Archive has made available their library of 1.4 million books across the world for free. This is a temporary measure, in place until the end of June, to make up for the fact that people cannot access their local libraries. However, you may want to note that the Authors’ Guild object to this as some books are still in-copyright, so you might prefer to stick to downloading only the older, public domain material.
Tour some of the great gardens of Britain — and the world
Many of the finest gardens in Britain are at their apogee right now, which makes it a terrible shame that they’re closed to visitors. Some, however, offer a way of enjoying their sights and sounds (if not their smells) from the comfort of your own living room. Waddesdon Manor has an extensive online garden tour with audio commentary from their experts, while the RHS offers lovely virtual tours of spots such as Wisley.
Of course, if you’re visiting from your armchair you need not be constrained by the borders of Britain. The New York Botanical Garden has some great virtual tour videos; though though they are, understandably, produced as jazzily as you might expect from our friends across the pond. Gardener’s World it ain’t.
Sing along to a West End musical
Ever felt the urge to sing along with the actors at a West End musical? Now you can belt out your favourite songs at leisure because there will be no other audience except you (and perhaps your family and pets, so make sure they don’t object). Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber and Universal have teamed up to stream a full-length classic by the musicals maestro every Friday. Each show stays live for 48 hours, giving people the opportunity to watch it at the weekend.
The first was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and coming up is Jesus Christ Superstar. But perhaps the greatest screening of all will be By Jeeves, the one Lloyd Webber musical that flopped and is therefore virtually impossible to catch in a theatre. ‘I’m very very fond of it, and so will you,’ says Lord Lloyd Webber. Performances are available on the newly launched The Show Must Go On channel on YouTube.
Take part in Birdwatch
The RSPB is currently running a ‘Breakfast Birdwatch’, taking place between 8-9am weekdays — a time when many of us would have been commuting to work, doing the school run, or otherwise unable to enjoy nature.
The organisation’s nature reserves are closed, but they’re encouraging people to share pictures, videos and questions regarding birds spotted either in the garden, from the window or while out for your daily exercise. There’s a Facebook and Twitter page with a hashtag, #BreakfastBirdwatch, which will help them, share and respond to your messages.
It's time for another #BreakfastBirdwatch! Settle down with a cuppa between 8-9am, and let us know what you're spotting in the comments! 👇
Posted by RSPB Love Nature on Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Enjoy the greatest art in history
While getting out to the nation’s art galleries isn’t an option at the moment, many of them have superb online tours so that you can ‘visit’ from home — by which we mean your computer, tablet or phone.
Top of the list is the National Gallery’s online tour, which uses Google’s street view system to let you wander the halls and enjoy the masterpieces which are currently behind locked doors. They’re not the only ones, however, by any means: even some smaller galleries have similar things, such as Martin Yeoman’s latest show.
Some options go even further. The British museum has a virtual tour can connect to a 3D virtual reality headset, but in the absence of one of those we found it fiddly getting it to work on a normal computer.
Far simpler is Google’s art and culture page, which features more than 500 museums and galleries around the world — including the most famous galleries in cities such as London, New York and Paris — with a number of key works from each.
Walking the dog
Unless you’re showing symptoms or self-isolating, you’re now allowed to leave the house, once a day, for exercise — or as many times as you like in England. Dog owners can, and should, take their dogs with them. If you’re in a household with more than one adult, the Kennel Club’s advice suggests that the adults go at separate times in order that the dog can enjoy more than one bout of exercise.
Those who are self-isolating should either exercise the dog in the garden if they have one, or try to make arrangements for somebody else to exercise their dogs — some dog-walking services are offering to walk the dogs of the vulnerable.
Beyond that, the Kennel Club also has tips on exercising dogs in your home, from playing hide-and-seek to making home-made toys and games.
Those worrying about the health of dogs or any other pets should call their vet — only emergencies are being seen at the moment. A company called FirstVet — www.firstvet.com — is offering free video veterinary consultations until the end of April to help worried owners.
A Dogue de Bordeaux at the recent Crufts dog show at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham — hard to believe this was just a couple of weeks ago. Credit:AFP via Getty Images.
Horse yards are now being locked down across the country, with the horses being looked after by minimal staff. Those who are the sole carers of horses are permitted to carry on looking after them, and walking them if medically necessary, but nothing more — and in particular no riding, for fear of injury that could over-burden the NHS. Our sister publication Horse & Hound has more advice.
Catch up on your reading
About as obvious a suggestion as there could be, of course, and yet we’d be remiss not to mention a few suggestions. The books section of the Country Life website has all sorts of interesting and unusual titles, not least in our recent round-up (which was a huge hit just after Christmas) of seven fascinating books which will change your understanding of the world.
It’s a perfect time for getting to grips with the doorstep-sized tomes which you’ve been putting off. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, recently concluded with The Mirror and the Light, is probably your starter for 10.
Dream about your next house
The property market leapt into a new gear following the general election at the end of last year — not necessarily due to any enthusiasm for the outcome, but mainly because it seemed to have brought some certainty back into what would happen this year.
How wrong we were — things are even crazier now than they were in the worst moments of 2019.
And yet, we know that this disruption won’t be permanent, so if you are thinking of moving in 2020 then there’s no reason not to keep looking for property around the nation. Getting out and about for viewings might be complicated — those in vulnerable categories will of course have to put any such thoughts on hold for a while — but it’s a perfect time to delve into Country Life’s property articles or the the 600,000+ property listings at countrylife.onthemarket.com.
If you want to move but aren’t sure where to head, see our guides to the 50 best places to live near London and where to live in the Cotswolds.
We also have regularly-updated round-ups, hand-picked by our editors to give a flavour of some of the best properties out there.
- Best country houses for sale
- Spectacular Scottish castles for sale
- Thatched cottages for sale
- Beautiful character properties for sale under £400,000
Get out into the garden
For keen gardeners, an enforced stay at home couldn’t have come at a much better time. Winter is at an end and the trees and flowers are set to burst into leaf and colour. It’s an ideal time— and while you should not go to a garden centre, many places will deliver plants by post these days.
We’ve got plenty of tips on the website for the green-fingered as well. Draw inspiration from some of Britain’s best gardens, or take tips from some of the nation’s top gardening experts — including Alan Titchmarsh, who writes regularly for Country Life.
Here are a few of our favourites from recent times:
- Alan Titchmarsh: The ultimate flower for the lazy gardener
- Alan Titchmarsh: Why I had to cut down my decades-old hedge — and how it worked out better than I could have hoped
- Charles Quest-Ritson: The biggest snobbery in gardening is ‘a horticultural sin of omission’
- Mark Diacono: How to enjoy home-grown berries seven months a year
Warnell Hall Gardens, Sebergham, Cumbria Photograph: Val Corbett/©Country Life Picture Library
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