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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.

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When the German Prince Puckler Muskau visited England in 1826, he told his divorced wife that it would take her ‘at least 420 years to see all the parks of England, of which there are undoubtedly at least 100,000, for they swarm in every direction.’ One of the most splendid was that at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The garden was accompanied by an equally important country house, if not palace. John has just been there and describes this extraordinary creation, the product of many generations.

What we see today is largely a product of the 18th-century owner Lord Cobham and his descendants. It was Cobham who employed ‘Capability’ Brown to turn Stowe into (to quote the poet Alexander Pope) ‘as near an approach to Elysium as English soil and climate will permit.’ Sir John Vanbrugh, William Kent and Robert Adam were among the many architects who worked on the house. Through marriage the family became Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos. But their princely extravagance hit the buffers in 1848 when a Great Sale of the contents was held. Not even this could not keep the debts at bay indefinitely and much of the rest of the property was sold after the First World War. The park came into the ownership of the National Trust and the house became a school. Since 1977, the Stowe House Preservation Trust has been restoring the State Dining Room ceiling and returning Classical sculptures to the North Hall, among other projects. John describes the progress made in this magnificent endeavour.

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‘Let’s all go down the Strand!’ ran a popular music hall song. But what sort of street were they singing about? The future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli called it ‘perhaps the finest street in Europe’ in 1847. Which is quite a claim to live up to. Certainly the Strand, one of London’s most famous and important thoroughfares, has had a long and colourful history, with much shape-shifting over the centuries. John and Clive reveal the secrets of a street where splendour lived next door to vice.
Lying between the City of London and the City of Westminster, it formed an important ceremonial route. Until the 19th century, though, it was as much defined by access to the river Thames as by its function as a road. During the Middle Ages, great prelates such as the Archbishop of York built palaces – sometimes known as inns – along the shore, convenient to reach by barge and within a short distance of the Palace of Westminster. In the Tudor period, many of these buildings had become the preserve of great courtiers like the Duke of Buckingham – assuming that they had not fallen into the hands of the King himself. Somerset House was named after the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector of England until he had his head chopped off. It was then particularly associated with Queens such as Henrietta Maria.
All this changed when Whitehall Palace burnt down at the end of the 17th century and monarch preferred Kensington Palace or Buckingham Palace over Westminster. The inns were redeveloped, famously by the Adam Brothers who nearly ruined themselves building the Adelphi. To Victorian London, the Strand was theatreland – to visit which was as good as a holiday: hence the song. But with theatres, given the proximity of some notorious slums, went other forms of nightlife. Prostitution was rife. So the newly formed London County Council introduced the Strand Improvement Act at the end of the 19th century. The Strand was widened, new buildings arose -- but Clive and John uncover a surprising number of survivals from the ancient of days, such as a Roman bath.
What is the Strand today? Crowded, but once again being improved – look at James Gibbs’s church of St Mary le Strand, now set off by a new piazza that links it with King’s College London and dazzling Somerset House. The reopening of the celebrated restaurant Simpsons in the Strand, in the premises it has occupied since 1904, is (to adopt a culinary metaphor) the cherry on the cake.

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The Laskett in Herefordshire is one of the most remarkable gardens to have been created in the 20th century but now it’s future is threatened. Sir Roy Strong, scholar, museum director and the author of over 70 erudite books, and his theatre-designer wife Julia Trevelyan Oman created it as a bolt hole from London, beginning in 1973 – a bleak time of industrial unrest and inflation. It grew to become the largest formal garden made in the UK since the Second World War. This intensely personal arcadia was a place of memory, where plants, statuary and garden spaces remembered people whom the Strongs knew and important and recorded important events in the Strongs’ life together. Clive and John describe the origins and importance of this Elysium, which can be comipared to Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill.
After a long and painful reflection, the National Trust turned down Sir Roy’s offer to g give it them. It seemed though that a solution had been found when half a dozen years ago it went instead to the gardening charity Perennial. Perennial has found that it cannot generate the visitors needed to make it pay, not least because they have not succeeded in making a car park. Since their main charitable purpose is to support working gardeners in old age, illness or hard times, they cannot keep a loss-making property on their books and have decided, if possible, to find a new owner. If one does not come forward, The Laskett will be broken up. Already the catalogue of a sale at the Cotswolds auction house of Chorley’s has been published, although the date of the auction has been postponed from the end of this month until June.
In this emergency episode of ypompod, John and Clive discuss The Lastkett’s importance. How will it be viewed by future generations? Is it possible for gardens to keep their soul once the people who first made them have left? What should we think of this cultural catastrophe in the making?

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One of the most famous Catholic schools in Britain, Ampleforth College in Yorkshire this year celebrates the centenary of its chapel, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Scott has emerged in recent years as a colossus of 20th-century architecture, bestriding it alike with his religious buildings – notably the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool – and his secular designs, such as Battersea Power Station and the familiar red telephone kiosk.
John describes the remarkable history of Ampleforth Abbey, established as a Benedictine community in 1802, and the foundation of the college, the next year. Scott’s chapel was preceded by a High Victorian one designed by Joseph Hansom, inventor of the Hansom cab. This soon proved inadequate but it was the First World War provided the main spur to enlargement – the new chapel would be a monument to the Fallen. Scott’s design features a 122ft tower, and combines a 1922 Romanesque-style retrochoir with a later, simpler 1961 nave and transepts. A triumph of 20th century architecture, it provides exceptional insights into the social and spiritual values of its time. The altar (John claims) is unique!

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Few houses better convey the opulence of Edwardian country house life than Manderston in the Scottish Borders. Built in the first years of the 20th century, it is an exquisite work of the scholarly architect John Kinross – which has always been kept up to the high standards set by Kinross’s client, the racehorse owner Sir James Miller. Clive reveals a particular affection for Kinross because he knew his son, also called John Kinross, when the latter was an old but sprightly man with many memories to share – as well as because Manderston was the subject of one of his first sets of country-house articles for Country Life.
Sir James had married Eveline, a daughter of Lord Scarsdale of Kedleston Hall, in Derbyshire, a masterpiece by Robert Adam which finds its reflection in Manderston. But if the architectural style is Adamesque, the decoration by Charles Mellier and Company often strikes a French note. Entirely of its time, however, is the staircase, whose balustrade is plated with silver. There was a marble dairy to keep the milk cool in the Scottish Baronial home farm. Given Sir James’s interest in horses, it is no surprise that the stables are splendid. But this was also the age of the first motor cars, much feared by some as an agent of change – which indeed it was.
Not that Manderston itself has changed very much: it still perfectly conveys the domestic priorities of the Edwardian age, when country houses more comfortable than ever before.