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Clive and John have both been to Stansted Park, outside Chichester, though at different times. Clive remembers it from the time he helped the owner Eric Bessborough revise a book in the 1980s, whereas John’s connection is more recent. They both find it an astonishing example of an economic revival, apparently inspired by the Covid years when the public was desperate for open space. As a result, the house and park are beautifully maintained, while estate buildings have been well developed as a retail experience.
Stansted has a long and colourful history, which ushers a glittering array of characters onto the stage. Owners have ranged from kings to wine merchants, Dukes to the remarkable Lewis Way, who made it a seminary for converted Jews who were supposed to go out to the Holy Land and spread Christianity. This enterprise was not successful but the poet John Keats attended the dedication of the chapel, made from a fragment of a Tudor building. The main house was destroyed by fire in 1900 and rebuilt by a member of the Blomfield dynasty. In the 1920s it was bought by the 9th Earl of Bessborough, a Governor General of Canada, who furnished it with the contents of the family’s Irish country house, Bessborough House, in County Kilkenny, which had been removed before Bessborough was burnt during the Troubles. Today, Stansted still looks out over a well-treed landscape with avenues created during the Baroque period.
Few country houses have such a varied history or have been so happily revived. Clive and John are enchanted.

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John has been to Cambridge to see the castle, the mound of which still survives. Although a graduate of Peterhouse and now a Visiting Professor of Architecture, associated with the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at Downing College, Clive comes new to this early history but many stories of more recent times. Together the pair mull over the development of this remarkable city, famous for one of the most beautiful ensembles of buildings in England.
The castle reminds those who might have forgotten – or never knew – how important this fenland settlement was to William the Conqueror in the Norman period. Scholars arrived from Oxford in the 13th century, to establish what became the university. It rose to glory under the patronage of Henry VII, his mother Lady Margaret Beauford and his son Henry VIII. King’s College Chapel was finished in this era; Trinity College, St John’s College and Christ’s College were all founded. It is not only the buildings that give Cambridge its character but the open landscape of the Backs, one of the triumphs of the Picturesque.
Today Cambridge is a boom town, thanks to the knowledge economy associated with the university’s record in scientific and mathematical research. There has been rapid growth in housing, served by two new railway stations, Cambridge North and Cambridge South. Can the qualities for which Clive and John love the place survive the pressure?

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Clive is writing a book for Yale University Press on the Story of the American Country House. John indulges him by discussing an introductory overview of the subject, with which Clive has been engaged since Yale published his The American Country House in 1990. Here is a rich and colourful theme, celebrating a sometimes spectacular architectural tradition shaped by remarkable individuals.
There are numerous reasons people in Colonial American and the developing United States wanted houses outside the city. Rural simplicity expressed a godlier life; country air was good for the health; the drama of the American landscape appealed to the Romantic imagination. By 1900 there was a school of highly sophisticated architects who could serve any need. While some American country houses bore a resemblance to their cousins across the Atlantic, they were, in the early 20th century, built for a different purpose, which was recreation and sport. There was little sense that these were dynastic seats. As soon as fashion changed or money ran out, owners moved on. Hundreds of country houses on Long Island, for example, were demolished after the Great Crash in the 1920s.

Clive and John consider these and other aspects of the subject, in the light of the renaissance of country house building that can be seen in many parts of the US today.