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Send us Fan Mail In this episode Clive unveils some new research. It’s the result of a coffee shared with his guest in today’s podcast, Nicholas Boys-Smith. Nicholas founded Create Streets, a social enterprise, think tank and urban design consultancy in 2012. The coffee shop was on a schizophrenic part of the street, half of it being Victorian terrace — brick built, repeating classical windows, a lot of variety in the modest shops and cafes as street level — the opposite side of the street having been rebuilt not so long ago in a Modern style of unornamented grey walls and window openings without mouldings.  Nicholas commissioned Deltapoll to conduct a visual preference survey, showing a randomly chosen group of over 2,000 people of all ages, backgrounds, ethnicity and geographical location within the UK which they preferred of two options: 1, the street as it is. 2, a photoshop of the street with Modern section replaced by a copy of the 19th-century terrace.  The result was conclusive.  Only 17% of the sample chose the Modern image, 83% preferred the Victorian one.  People say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder but that’s not quite right.  There are a lot of aesthetic matters on which most people agree.  They would prefer to live in neighbourhoods built as they were in the past, with variety and interest, rather than a Modern development that seems bleak and unfriendly. The results of the survey can be found on the Create Streets website www.createstreets.com.  Importantly, this was not a chance result but entirely predictable (indeed he did predict it).  Create Streets have undertaken numerous similar projects and the outcome is always the same. This shines a spotlight on new development. How are developers ever going to convince the public that it is a good thing, when so many people are instinctively opposed to it?  The subject stirred in Clive’s mind when he visited the sublime landscape garden of Rousham in Oxfordshire, laid out by William Kent in the 1720s and 1730s. His client General Sir James Dormer was a friend Alexander Pope, himself a keen landscape gardener.  The views from it are now threatened by the proposal to build an enormous housing development nearby. What can be done to save it?

Send us Fan Mail Worcester Cathedral rises above the banks of the River Severn as one of England's great medieval buildings, its honey-coloured stone and soaring central tower dominating the city's skyline much as they have for over nine centuries.  Who better to discuss its architecture and history than John Goodall? Founded in 680 as a monastic community, the earliest fabric of the cathedral dates from a rebuilding begun in 1084 under Bishop Wulfstan, the only English-born bishop to retain his see after the Norman Conquest and later canonised as a saint. His original crypt survives intact, a rare and atmospheric example of Norman architecture that still forms part of the working cathedral. Yes, yes – we know that during the following four centuries the building was steadily transformed, absorbing Gothic additions in the Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular styles, so that a walk through its nave and choir amounts to a tour through the evolution of English medieval architecture. But what about the cathedral’s TWO royal tombs?  One is that of King John, whose effigy is one of the earliest depicting an English monarch.  John died at Newark but chose to be buried here between the shrines of two Worcester saints, Wulfstan and Oswald.  Nearby lies the exquisite Prince Arthur's Chantry Chapel, built for Henry VIII's elder brother, whose early death in 1502 unexpectedly cleared the path to the throne for the future Henry VIII.  As Prince of Wales, Arthur had been at Ludlow, the centre of administration for Wales. Beyond its royal connections, Worcester Cathedral is celebrated for its cloisters, chapter house, and the peaceful green of College Green, as well as for its role as one of the three cathedrals hosting the Three Choirs Festival, the oldest music festival in the world. Its bells, stained glass, and Victorian restorations by Sir George Gilbert Scott add further layers to a building that has survived civil war, Reformation upheaval, and the passage of nearly a thousand years. What riches for a podcast with John and Clive.

Send us Fan Mail Everybody in the world has heard of Buckingham Palace. The official London residence of the British monarch, it stands at the western end of St James’s Park, very near St James’s Palace.  As well as being used for great occasions of State, accompanied by the daily ritual of the changing of the guard, it was also somewhere that successive kings and queens lived when they were in town.  Now the decision has been made for HM the King to move out, giving Clive and John the excuse to consider its evolution as a work of architecture and changing taste.   The architectural story begins in 1703 when the Duke of Buckingham commissioned a house from the soldier-architect William Winde.  Winde’s design for Buckingham House, published in Vitruvius Britannicus, would prove highly influential on the development of later Georgian country houses.  Little remains to be seen of it now but it set the scale for what came later.  In 1761 George III acquired Buckingham House as a private retreat for Queen Charlotte, to which he added several libraries for his famous collection of books: the foundation of the British Library.  George IV turned the house into a palace, persuading Parliament to commission John Nash for the purpose.  Nash produced a scheme that was both characteristically elegant in concept and slapdash in execution.  The old brick building was clad in Bath stone, doubled in size towards the garden front, provided with wings to either side of a central courtyard, whose termination was a triumphal arch – later moved to the top of Park Lane and called the Marble Arch.  Nash was by then an old man and the project ran hopelessly over budget.  By the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, it also looked impractical: there were too few bedrooms and nurseries.  Edward Blore to close the courtyard with a new East Front facing the Mall.   When Victoria died in 1901, after a long reign and with the British Empire at its zenith, a fund was established to remember her.  This not only produced the sculptural composition of the Queen Victoria Memorial by the sculptor Sir Thomas Brock on a ronde-point (roundabout) in front of the palace but a revamp of The Mall culminating in Admiralty Arch by Sir Aston Webb – a set piece of imperial town planning.  There was even enough money to reface the east front of the palace – work that amazingly was carried out in three months while George V was at Balmoral.  Central is the most famous balcony in the world, on which successive generations of the royal family stood to wave to the crowd. Presumably there will be less waving now, given the palace’s change of function – which is all the more reason to consider it as a work of architecture and art.

Send us Fan Mail The Monument, rising above the streets near London Bridge, is one of the City of London's most striking historical landmarks - a soaring Doric column erected to commemorate the Great Fire of London of 1666. Begun in 1671 and completed in 1677, it stands 202 feet tall, a height chosen deliberately: the distance from its base to the spot on Pudding Lane where the fire is believed to have started. But who designed it?  The candidates are Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke - Clive and John weigh their respective contributions in the light of new scholarship, discussing what it meant to design a building (with your name on it) in the 17th and 18th centuries. What a structure it is. Built from Portland stone, the column is topped with a gilded urn of flames, symbolising the fire itself. Inside, a narrow spiral staircase of 311 steps winds upward to a viewing platform, offering visitors panoramic views across London - a reward that has drawn sightseers since the 18th century. At its base, elaborate inscriptions in Latin recount the devastation of the fire, which destroyed much of medieval London, gutting over 13,000 houses and 87 parish churches, while a sculpted relief by Caius Gabriel Cibber depicts the City's destruction and subsequent restoration. The Monument was more than a memorial. In its early years it also served a scientific purpose: Hooke and Wren designed the structure as a giant zenith telescope, with a hollow central shaft intended for astronomical and gravitational experiments, though vibrations from passing traffic ultimately made such precise observations impractical. Standing at the junction of Monument Street and Fish Street Hill, the column remains a quiet but powerful reminder of destruction and renewal at the very heart of the City.

Send us Fan Mail As a great expert on the English castle, John has been thinking about one of the great icons of England: Warwick Castle.  This extraordinary building, created over centuries, has come down to us intact, not having been slighted after the Civil War in the 17th century – something exceptional. Equally remarkable is the mythology that surrounds the place, including the medieval legends attached to Guy of Warwick, after whom one of the castle’s famous towers is named.  Although Guy may never have existed, his story was revered by the Earls of Warwick as their foundation myth.  In an attempt to contain the Earl of the day, Henry I took away a portion of his earldom from the Earl of the day and bestowed it on a favourite, who built Kennilworth Castle, only five miles away.   The result was a rivalry that lasted through the Middle Ages, which was conclusively ended when Kennilworth was reduced to the ruin that it is now. Founded by William the Conqueror, when travelling to Yorkshire to inflict the vengeful punishment known as the Harrying of the North, Warwick Castle occupied a powerful position at the heart of the country, overlooking the river Avon.  The 16th Earl of Warwick became known as  Warwick the Kingmaker, from his ability to tilt the scales of the Wars of the Roses in favour of the side he supported at the time.  Later centuries associated Warwick Castle with the England of Shakespeare, who was born in Warwickshire.  It was arguably the first building to have been copied in recognisable form during the early Gothic Revival.   A visit to Warwick Castle still stirs the imagination.  Listen to John’s account and you’ll see it with fresh eyes.

Send us Fan Mail Clive has taken the riverboat to Greenwich, one of the most spectacular sites of London.  ‘Good Duke’ Humphrey, brother of Henry V, built a retreat here in the 15th century, which Henry VII developed into a palace.  This was where Henry VIII jousted in his early years, and where his armour was made.  To the early Stuarts Greenwich’s was important from its position at the mouth of the Thames: this was where foreign ambassadors landed on their way to the court: Inigo began a revolutionary building for James I’s Queen, Anne of Denmark, and finished it for Henrietta Maria who was married to Charles I.  The Queen’s House, as this structure became known, was where Charles kept some of the best of his art collection – alas, dispersed by the Civil War.  After the palace was roughly treated after the Civil War, it was earmarked to become once more a palace for Charles II.  He succeeded in building only one block before the money ran out.   Instead of a palace, the Royal Observatory arose at the top of a hill, as a place to study the heavens away from the smoke that was already obscuring the skies of London.  The terrible carnage of the Dutch wars of the 1660s and 1670s, fought at sea, touched the heart of the future Queen Mary, who would ascend the throne with her husband William III, Prince of Orange.  As a result, Greenwich became home to the Royal Naval Hospital, in a magnificent parade of buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren.  They include the Painted Hall, a masterpiece of the artist Sir James Thornhill, and a chapel that was redecorated in the 1780s by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart after a fire.   The complex that Vanbrugh built for his family on Maze Hill, next to Greenwich Park, also survives. .A generation ago, Greenwich – no longer a hospital but a naval college – was difficult for the public to see. Now it houses a university and a music school, and a dazzling restoration of the Painted Hall has proved, literally, a revelation – previously invisible details have been brought to light, such as the figure of Louis XIV who appears beneath William III’s foot in the ceiling.  John is as much enraptured as Clive.

Send us Fan Mail Doddington Hall in Lincolnshire is one of those country houses you find only in Britain.  The attics are full of old toys, military headgear, unwanted commodes and a giant figure of the White Rabbit, left over from an Alice in Wonderland-themed event.  A collection of Roman antiquities, some found on the estate, is displayed in the downstairs lavatory, along with a child’s pedal-operated aeroplane with patriotic RAF roundels.  From the roof, you can see Lincoln cathedral on a good day.  Built around 1600, Doddington has hardly been changed outside, and in half a millennium, it has never been sold. Best of all are the tapestries.   Due to the antiquarian tastes of its 18th-century owner John Hussey Delaval, the Georgian revamp was old-fashioned for the 1760s, and included bedrooms close-hung with tapestries in the manner of the William and Mary era.  The Doddington tapestries are now a rare survival, although not perhaps for the reason that might be imagined.  They are not of the first quality, but relatively workaday– and which is exactly the sort that have most commonly perished.   Clive and John are both enthralled by this house, which – thanks to the conversation of the stables to a shopping experience – is going through something of a golden age.   It was where Clive first rode an electric bike.

Send us Fan Mail 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.

Send us Fan Mail 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?

Send us Fan Mail 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.

Send us Fan Mail 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.

Send us Fan Mail ‘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.

Send us Fan Mail 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?

Send us Fan Mail 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!

Send us Fan Mail 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.