Indholdsfortegnelse for April 30, 2025 i Country Life

AS the striking title suggests, ‘The Destruction of the Country House’ exhibition at the V&A Museum, which opened in the winter of 1974/75, aimed to draw attention to the scale of demolitions of historic houses in Britain over the previous 50 years. Its polemic struck home. The shocking display captured the popular imagination and had a significant impact on wider public perceptions and policy. In the process, a much more positive framework for the preservation of historic houses in Britain was established. The timing of the exhibition was excellent. 1975 had been designated European Architectural Heritage Year, emphasising the importance of the ‘built heritage’. There was also a new Labour Government that—despite talk of ‘wealth taxes’—introduced the Finance Act of 1976. This made it possible to set up charitable trusts…

Pargetter WE’RE among the last of the traditional pargetters,’ says Bill Sargent, whose grandfather, father, uncles, brothers and cousins were all in the trade. Hailing from Essex, he cut his teeth apprenticed in London, before transferring to Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk to work with his grandfather and ‘two old boys’, learning decorative freehand plaster-work. ‘I was 21, they were in their seventies. They’d trained in the Arts-and-Crafts tradition and I was greatly influenced by that.’ Since setting up on his own in 1971, Mr Sargent has worked on every major pargetting job in East Anglia, as well as in manor houses and cottages across the country. Using only traditional materials, he does everything from restoring plaster walls and decorative modelling to new Jacobean-style overmantels and ceilings. He’s proud to…

IN 1997, after it had spent 35 years in institutional use, the Earl and Countess of Derby began to restore Knowsley Hall, which stands only 11 miles from the centre of Liverpool. This ambitious project has variously involved the reversal of the physical effects of office conversion, the repair of the fabric and the representation of the outstanding associated collection (‘A home reborn’, October 30, 2024). The State Dining Room, shown here, is one of the main rooms that were the initial focus of their attention. This spectacular interior was completed before 1822 by John Foster Jnr of Liverpool, who trained in the office of Sir Jeffry Wyatville, a favourite architect of George IV. The fireplaces and chandelier survive from the original interior, but the room was extensively redecorated in…

THE spectacular Marble Saloon, designed for Earl Temple in the 1770s and completed for his nephew, the 1st Marquess of Buckingham, is the centrepiece of Stowe, one of the largest Classical country houses ever created. In 1923, following the sale of its contents, Stowe was saved from demolition by becoming a school. In 1989, its park was taken over by the National Trust and, in 1990, the Stowe House Fund was launched. When it became apparent that the school could not undertake the gargantuan task of restoring the building within its charitable remit, the Stowe House Preservation Trust (SHPT) was formed in 1997. Its stated purpose is to restore and preserve Stowe for the benefit of the nation and the public. Since then, the SHPT has been involved in the…

TOTTY LOWTHER has a background in film sets, so it’s perhaps not surprising that she was taken with the possibilities of using digital printing to create large-scale, dramatic, panoramic wallpapers. ‘A bit of theatre has always been a huge part of my work as a set decorator,’ she explains. She works with anything from an 18th-century watercolour to scraps of silk for inspiration. Designs can be scaled up to cover vast expanses and produced in different colours and substrates from grasscloth to faux silk. ‘The possibilities are not only exciting, they are also endless’ Mrs Lowther is developing a new mural featuring the interiors of a Damascene palace in all its faded grandeur, inspired by the photographer Tim Beddow’s series of limited-edition prints taken from his book Damascus: Hidden Treasures…

THE season is well and truly upon us—and it’s a long one. Those billowing yellow clouds put out by the yews were the first visible sign of the tree-pollen campaign that lasts from March into mid May. Grass pollens take up the cause into June and weeds sustain it through to September’s end. In the UK an estimated 13 million people are susceptible to pollen and combatting hay fever—allergic rhinitis caused by pollen, or pollinosis—is an industry. Yet all the floral world wants to do is procreate. ‘Pollens have a unique DNA, proving vital in criminal investigations’ Protected by a sporopollenin coating to resist solar radiation and drying out, every tiny grain of pollen contains two male gametes, each providing an element necessary for fertilisation when a compatible female stigma…

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IN 1974, the then Architectural Editor of COUNTRY LIFE, John Cornforth, published a report simply titled Country Houses in Britain: Can they survive? The answer he gave to his own question in 130 pages of detailed analysis was that they could not. Hard on the heels of this assessment—and in some points informed by its analysis—there opened at the V&A Museum ‘The Destruction of the Country House, 1875–1975’. This exhibition was a polemic aimed at highlighting the sheer number of these buildings that had been—and were still being—lost. At that time, it seemed almost certain that the combination of the cost of maintenance, a decline in domestic service and punitive taxation would soon consign the remainder…

Save St Peter’s I ENJOYED your article on St Mary’s (‘The power and the glory’, April 16). We are pleased to have our own Midlands jewel of a chapel here at Steane in Northamptonshire. Since 1752, we have held six Evensong services a year at St Peter’s. As there is no electricity, we rely on the light and warm summer evenings to hold our services, with our organist bravely pumping the harmonium for our hymnody. Many have enjoyed joining us for these services of song and prayer amid the rolling parkland of Steane Park. However, due to worries about the roof and the pressure on funds to run both the chapel and the parish church of Most Holy Trinity in Hinton-in-the-Hedges, this may be the last year in which we…

THERE’S no point in being a cabinet minister if you don’t make a difference and do things that only you would have done. Therefore, when, almost by accident, John Major moved me from Agriculture to the Environment, I realised I had been given a great opportunity. From the first, I had been captivated by buildings. Brought up in a Victorian Gothic complex of church, school and a gaunt, cold vicarage, my earliest travels from home were by bus to a stop still called Jezreels after the huge, half-finished ruin designed by a Victorian sect to reach towards Heaven. Then school: worshipping every day in the Norman cathedral and being taught in the gracious Georgian confines of Satis House, Kent, overlooked by the powerful walls of Rochester Castle. Going up to…

ON January 27, 1344, a certain Thomas of Heton sought a licence from Edward III to ‘fortify and battlement his manor of Chevelyngham with stone and lime and to make the same a castle or fortalice to be held by him and his heirs without impediment’. Remarkably, the original copy of this royal licence is kept at Chillingham Castle today. The property subsequently passed into the possession of the Grey family, who regularised the building as a quad-rangle in the early 17th century. The castle then came into the hands of the Earls of Tankerville by marriage in 1695, who developed it further. From 1933, following the death of the 7th Earl of Tankerville and the sale of its contents, Chillingham was left empty for nearly half a century. The…

THE question of how best to juggle commercial enterprise and still preserve the magic is nothing new for country-house owners, as the minutes of a meeting held 60 years ago at Chats-worth, Derbyshire, demonstrate. Necessary work on roofing, drainage and Joseph Paxton’s greenhouses was estimated to cost up to £10,000 a year (nearly £200,000 now), yet those present agreed that the provision of a café to raise more money from visitors would be a jarring presence and encourage litter. Chatsworth’s then chatelaine, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, recorded in her book Counting My Chickens: ‘The idea was that it was unfair and greedy to expect people to part with more money than the entrance fee (five shillings). It only dawned on me slowly that people actually wanted to take something away…

OVER the past 100 years, country houses have faced many threats, not least in the post-Second World War period when many needed remedial work after the depredations inflicted by requisition. Soon, another blow came in the form of death duties, which hit 75%, in some instances 80%, leaving havoc in their wake. Today, the challenges remain, but a combination of new technology, materials, pragmatism and time-honoured crafts-manship is securing their future. ‘Conserving the past and meeting modern energy demands appear at odds’ It wasn’t always so, says Bruce Hodgson, founder of furniture- and kitchen-makers Artichoke (www.artichoke.co.uk). The problem, he says, was not only decay, but also the way it was addressed. ‘The challenge is the damage done in less enlightened times—the 1970s comes to mind.’ Philippa Thorp, founder of her…

THE garden writer Arthur Hellyer is often quoted for his observation that the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is ‘the richest spotting ground in the whole world for new, forgotten or neglected plants’. Hellyer’s remark was made in the 1980s, but can be applied to every decade of the show’s existence. Although it is now the gardens that grab the headlines, the spotlight the show turns on the plants themselves is, perhaps, its most enduring legacy. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Scottish plant hunter George Forrest collected tens of thousands of plant specimens and seeds. Among these was an evergreen shrub from Yunnan that became known as Pieris formosa var. forrestii and was presented at Chelsea in 1924. Sporting scented cream panicles and bright-red shoots, the excitement it…

THE May-pole is up,/Now give me the cup;/I’ll drink to the garlands around it;’ rejoices Robert Herrick. ‘But first unto those/Whose hands did compose/The glory of flowers that crown’d it.’ Few sights are more convivial than a maypole dance, a traditional celebration of the start of summer. Yet, in 1644, about the time of Herrick’s poem, the libations he mentions, coupled with much raucous frolicking around the pole, saw the activity banned by a Parliament that deemed it ‘a heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’. Some 3,000 years before English Puritans took issue with this 17th-century equivalent of a drunken conga, Germanic and Scandic tribes were enacting a maypole dance around a post or tree trunk, in the belief, perhaps, that circles helped banish ill fortune. Some sources…

JORGE MARIO BERGOGLIO brought his own fresh insight to almost all that he did. The world was his parish and he spoke directly to it. Popes communicate officially by encyclicals—carefully honed letters brought together with the help of the best minds in the Vatican. Usually, more than two-thirds is written by these experts and the Pope moulds the rest. Yet, when Pope Francis produced his historic encyclical, Laudato Si, in 2015, the position was reversed. The experts checked and confirmed accuracy and completeness, but Pope Francis wrote most of it. That is why it reads as a personal testament. It’s clearly not a compilation, but a plea from the heart. Pope Francis loved the natural world and rejoiced in the whole of creation. For him, it was God-given, offered in…

CONSTANCE SPRY, who became the most sought-after flower arranger for London Society, originally studied hygiene and nursing in Ireland, was a lecturer for the Irish Woman’s National Health Association and worked as a secretary of the Dublin Red Cross during the First World War. Following an ill-fated marriage, she relocated to London in 1921 to become a headmistress and took up flower arranging as a hobby. Unconfined by formal training, Spry (1886–1960) combined classic flowers with moss, twigs and hedgerow flowers and introduced orchids and magnolias, all loosely arranged at different heights and angles—a marked departure from the compact uniformity of Victorian bouquets. She was soon in demand for parties. The first formal commission came in 1927 from Sidney Bernstein, owner of Grenada Cinemas, who wanted weekly arrangements for his…

IN 2014, following the death of her mother at the age of 102, Lady Chichester inherited this fine 1740s Palladian house. She descends from the Chandos-Pole family, which can trace its connections with the estate back to the Middle Ages. At the time of her inheritance, the fabric of the building was visibly failing and the hall ceiling was sagging as the result of the movement of a structural steel inserted during the course of 20th-century repairs. In 2017–20, under the direction of Peregrine Bryant Architects, the whole building underwent a far-reaching renovation (‘A most welcome return’, March 9, 2022). The roof was renewed, fire partitions and insulation inserted and the services throughout replaced. As well as respecting the most important interiors—which include a fine saloon with paintings by Joseph…

WHEN George Harrison bought the 30-acre estate of Friar Park in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, in 1970, he found the famous historic gardens in an almighty mess: glasshouses were glassless, the grand lakes silted up and full of rubbish and the famous topiary garden had knitted together, forming an impenetrable thicket. The demise of Sir Frank Crisp’s masterwork—created in the late 1890s and once cared for by 45 gardeners—was emblematic of the entropy that had set in following the two World Wars: all over the country, gardens suffered. ‘People who had never had a big garden didn’t know what to do with it. The garden designer was born’ There was no longer the money to pay for the gardeners and, in so many cases, the men had been lost on the battlefield…

May 2–4 BBC Gardeners’ World Spring Fair, Beaulieu, Hampshire (www.beaulieu.co.uk) May 2–October 19 ‘Austen and Turner: A Country House Encounter’, Harewood House, West Yorkshire (www.harewood.org) May 3–5 Spring Fine Food Market, Burghley, Lincolnshire (www.burghley.co.uk) May 3–5 Hertfordshire Garden Show, Kneb-worth (www.knebworthhouse.com) May 4 Bluebell & Wild Garlic Sunday, Pencarrow, Cornwall (www.pencarrow.co.uk) May 5 Dawn Chorus Birdwatch, Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire (www.doddingtonhall.com) May 7–11 MARS Badminton Horse Trials, Badminton, Gloucestershire (advance tickets only; www.badminton-horse.co.uk) May 8 Old Time Sailors concert, Cambo estate, Fife (www.camboestate.com) May 17–18 Goodwoof, Goodwood, West Sussex (www.goodwood.com) May 25–26 Living Heritage Game and Country Fair, Burghley, Lincolnshire (www.burghley.co.uk) May 24–26 The Queen’s Joust, Leeds Castle, Kent (www.leeds-castle.com) June 4–July 6 The Grange Opera Festival, The Grange, Hampshire (www.thegrangefestival.co.uk) June 5 Twelfth Night, Athelhampton House, Dorset (www.athelhampton.com) June 5 Jazz…

THE Great Dining Room at Wimborne St Giles was originally created by Henry Flitcroft in the 1750s and restored, together with the house, in the course of a far-reaching renewal of the property by the Earl and Countess of Shaftesbury between 2011 and 2015. Most restoration projects need to be illustrated with before and after photographs, but, in this case, the recent history of the building—its neglect and stylish renovation—is summarised in a single image. In 1961, the 9th Earl of Shaftesbury died at the age of 91. His grandson and heir made efforts to make the house suitable for modern family living in the 1970s, demolishing parts of the building and making a sale of some of the contents to help pay for the work. The plan faltered, however,…

WENDY Nicholls joined the interior-decorating firm Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler in 1976, having previously worked for Mann & Fleming and Charles Hammond. Throughout her career, her mantra has always been to create spaces that reflect the owner’s identities. In the case of this set in Albany, the Grade I-listed apartment complex on Piccadilly, London W1, that was converted from a mansion in 1802, the client was ‘very much a client who knew exactly what she liked’. Designed by the French wallpaper manufacturer Dufour, the large-scale panoramic wallpaper was printed from woodblocks with colours finished by hand; it had previously been hung in the client’s property in Paris. ‘We took it down, brought it to London and set about having it re-hung here,’ explains Ms Nicholls. There, she found it…

Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane (Hamish Hamilton, £25) THE idea that a river is alive would probably get short shrift from most Western scientists. It doesn’t meet two essential preconditions of a living organism: a river neither metabolises nor reproduces, nor does it possess DNA that is replicated and transmitted to offspring. Yet water is both central to the origins of all life and an ongoing prerequisite, constituting a high percentage of all organisms, from giant redwood trees to single-cell bacteria. These incontestable facts might not be the same as being alive, but the author’s wish that we think differently about rivers is unassailable. In Britain we know its importance only too well: ‘The simple truth is,’ pronounces water campaigner Feargal Sharkey, ‘that every river in England is dying.’…

Visit Tottering-By-Gently on our website: www.countrylife.co.uk/tottering We are committed to only using magazine paper which is derived from responsibly managed, certified forestry and chlorine-free manufacture. The paper in this magazine was sourced and produced from sustainable managed forests, conforming to strict environmental and socioeconomic standards. All contents © 2025 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future…