Innholdsfortegnelse for 8-Nov-2017 i Country Life

Crossing the red line HE phrase ‘crossing the red T line’ has suddenly become far more commonplace, but its origins appear rather obscure. May I propose a possible origin that I found in my family’s archives? My grandfather, The Rev William Pollock-Hill, was granted a living in Cheshire as the young rector of the parishes of Padgate and Bowdon and rural dean for two other churches they sponsored. His patron was Sir Philip Reginald le Belward Grey Egerton, 14th Baronet, and his wife, Dorothy, who owned Arley Hall and Tatton Park. Each year, they held a Christmas ball to which all staff and servants were invited. When it came to dancing after dinner, the ballroom had a thick red rope across the middle of the floor. The family and…

‘Measure Draw Build' is an exhibition by George Saumarez Smith, a Director at ADAM Architects, of his own work. As the name suggests, it juxtaposes studies, designs and photographs of completed buildings in an attempt to explain his creative process. The drawings are particularly satisfying, condensing material onto the double-page spread of a notebook. Implicit in the exhibition is the idea that drawing permits the detailed understanding of existing structures, forms and designs. From that knowledge, moreover, it's possible to create new buildings that are simultaneously contemporary as well as being informed by the architecture of the past; that they are-in other words-Classical both in form and in the sense of transcending time. The exhibition, which is accompanied by a catalogue, runs at the RIBA until November 26.…

‘Misty layers of the forest ridges disappearing into the semi-darkness, ponies snorting as they settle for the evening’ IT’S autumn in the New Forest. Amber-shaded leaves quiver in the misty atmosphere, but there’s no chill on this warm autumn day. Ponies graze on the heathland, lawns and greens and I’m entranced by the timeless quality of this ancient landscape. I’m visiting after too long an absence. I came here on camping trips as a child in the 1960s and as a young campaigner in the 1980s; what strikes me most today is how little—once you get off the main roads and away from the ever-advancing suburbs—has changed. For years, we argued that the New Forest should be a national park and, since 2005, it has been, providing safeguards against inappropriate…

Domestic Science Housed over four floors in a period stone house, Domestic Science is a charming lifestyle store. Launched in 2012, it is literally brimming with a carefully curated offering of vintage one-of-a-kinds and an eclectic mix of contemporary home, hardware, clothing, accessories, stationery, toys, jewellery, wellbeing products and more. There’s no better place to source unusual presents for any occasion and the in-house Cafe 53 is perfect for coffee and cake or a light lunch. Domestic Science has a second branch in nearby Nailsworth. 53, Long Street, Tetbury, Gloucestershire GL8 8AA ( www.domestic-science-home . co.uk ; 01666 503667) Twig I am Su Daybell, the creator and owner of Twig. Twig originally opened 10 years ago, selling plants,…

‘The worst garden pests, by far, are children’ EVERY year, the RHS publishes a report on the incidence of pests in our gardens. These are listed from one to 10 according to the number of enquiries and complaints that the society receives. Slugs, snails, vine weevils, lily beetles, woolly aphids: they’re all there, year after year, upsetting our plans for carefree gardening. All too often, the RHS has to confess that there is no prevention or cure available to amateurs—you can thank the Greens for this unhelpful development—and we get the same depressing message from gardening magazines and newspapers. Professionals can poison us, but we may not poison ourselves. It’s the same with plant diseases. Anyway, animals are much more of a pest than invertebrates and microfungi and the…

ALMOST everything connected with Modern art in St Ives is rooted in the dynastic partnership of Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. By the early 1950s, the art colony that they had pioneered here was becoming established, but it was Alan Bowness, the young art historian who married their daughter Sarah in 1957 and went on to become director of the Tate in London, who helped to engineer its fame and success. The Cornish outpost of the Tate that opened in 1993 was his brainchild and the Tate’s acquisition of Hepworth’s nearby Trewyn studio and garden was another of the family’s pragmatic and strategic acts of philanthropy. Now, after years of behind-the-scenes planning and manoeuvring, Tate St Ives has at last reopened with a new extension that provides a highly…

‘Loading the language is almost always an exercise in positioning’ COUNTRY people grow used to the inability of some townsfolk to face the realities of life. They talk of manure—or even FYM (Farmyard Manure)—instead of something earthier and they’ve seen to it that butchers no longer display recognisable carcasses, but present meat as if it had nothing to do with an animal. Choose a word carefully and you know that you can change the atmosphere or even the outcome of a debate. Marx (Theatre, page 140) and his followers were among the first to recognise that capturing the language is a big step towards winning the argument. If you call gas pumped out of the North Sea ‘natural gas’, you’re well on the way to public acceptance. Call genetically modified…

It’s a cold, crisp thursday lunchtime at the Rosewood on High Holborn in London. I’m in the cobbled courtyard, watching a stream of taxis drop off guests checking in for the weekend. Next to me, one of the hotel’s most highly regarded staff members is on hand to greet the new arrivals. Pearl, who’s friendly, attentive and all smiles, is the perfect host. she is also a golden retriever. Back in 2013, it was decided that the newly opened 300-room hotel was missing something—and that something, it turned out, was a puppy. After a boisterous start (‘Put it this way, we never needed to use the shredder in the office,’ the head porter whispers), Pearl has settled into a comfortable routine. Breakfast at 7.15am sharp is followed by a walk,…

Halfway between the renowned wildfowling hotspots of the Solway firth and the East anglian wash, the yorkshire Ouse meanders sedately eastwards towards the Roman city of york. Some eight miles upstream from the city, her waters mingle with the tiny River Kyle, a deep-brown ditch the margins of which are chocked with dense reeds that give way to wet, low-lying water meadows, where beef cattle have prospered for centuries. Much of the Ouse and her tributaries once flowed through such Ings land—the word is of Nordic origin—and the term endures as a description for scores of yorkshire farms and settlements, although the marshes surrounding most of them have long since vanished beneath the plough. Not, however, those beside the Kyle, where floodgates built to protect york close when the water…

Moody or bright? A mix is essential so that you have the flexibility to set different moods during the day and evening. Bright for reading, working and practical tasks and dimmed for dining and relaxing. Lighting can make a huge difference to the atmosphere of a room and it needs to work for the way you live your life, so we start planning it, factoring in the wiring and circuit requirements, at the very beginning of a project. What is the secret to successful lighting? Think about creating a balance between high, low and side lighting, with a mix of floor and table lamps and wall and ceiling lights. Every light in the room must have a purpose, from illuminating a picture to highlighting a feature. Don't be tempted to…

FOR advocates, conservation areas have been responsible for preserving some of England’s finest examples of built heritage; for others, they allow local planners too much power over seemingly inconsequential matters such as downpipes and tree heights. Like it or not, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Civic Amenities Act 1967, which saw the introduction of the first conservation areas in the UK. The idea of introducing preservation orders on some of the best examples of urban and village built heritage had already been mooted in the early 1960s. A total of 51 ‘gem towns’ were identified by the Council for British Archaeology in response to widespread road expansion projects taking place around the country—among other examples was the loss of heritage assets in Worcester following the development…

The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth William Boyd (Viking, £14.99) YOU DON’T have to be having an affair to appear in one of William Boyd’s stories, but it helps. His cast of upper-crust scammers, novelists manqué and film-industry orbiters have more than usually roving eyes, plus a tendency to get into scrapes. The tales aren’t all of a piece: The Road Not Taken, in which a relationship is told backwards, is tantalisingly brief; conversely, the title story feels baggy (Bethany Mellmoth, the subject of a Spectator Christmas short story back in 2009, probably didn’t need a third of a book dedicated to her). The Vanishing Game, though, which closes the collection, is vintage Boyd—pacy, sexy and clever. It feels like an excerpt from a novel. Here’s hoping. Fresh Complaint Jeffrey Eugenides…

WHAT kind of country are we? One wedded to romantic dreams of the past or one capable of adapting to the future? That is one of many questions resounding through Mike Bartlett’s magnificent new play, Albion, at London’s Almeida. Like his King Charles III, it’s directed by Rupert Goold and, like its predecessor, it seems obsessed by the state of the nation. The setting is highly seductive: a Cotswolds country garden that, in Miriam Buether’s lush design, changes before our eyes. Its owner is a go-getting businesswoman, Audrey, who has bought the house she knew as a child and is determined to restore the ruined garden to its former glory. She embodies the idea of an ‘English Protestant morality based on hard work’. The only problem is that Audrey,…

THE 100-year old hydropower system at Castle Drogo, Devon (above)—‘the last castle built in England’, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, who was commissioned on the advice of COUNTRY LIFE founder Edward Hudson—is back in working order for the first time in more than 20 years. High on the northern slopes of Dartmoor overlooking the Teign Gorge, Drogo was commissioned by Julius Drewe, a Victorian businessman so successful he retired at the age of 33, and is the first 20th-century property acquired by the National Trust, to whom it was gifted in 1974. Upon completion in 1930, it was a state-of-the-art home with all the latest technologies of the day, including a hydropower system generating enough electricity for the entire house, using the fast-flowing water of the River Teign. The system…

AS recently as 1970, post—and news and gossip—was delivered from village to village by foot, horseback and motorbike on Exmoor. The ‘postie’ also brought unofficial deliveries of newspapers, bread, tobacco and medicines and was a vital social link between some of the remotest farms. The Exmoor Society is revisiting these old routes and, in the summer, sent an intern to walk some of them. This week, archivist Helen Blackman rode one 12-mile route, starting from the village of Withypool and taking in a circuit of farms around the Barle valley, borrowing native ponies from the Exmoor Pony Centre. ‘Investigating the old postal routes has been more than academic exercise—it’s very much a social history,’ explains Dr Blackman. ‘We can’t really understand the difficulties of communication on Exmoor, which persist to…

TO celebrate 80 years of protected views, the National Trust, the Horniman Museum and Gardens and Bompas & Parr have collaborated to create The Imminent Diorama, an installation atop one of London’s finest unprotected views (above), at the Horniman, London SE23. There are 27 London views that hold some form of designation, but only 13 are protected, nine of which are north of the river and four south. This disparity, says Joe Watson, creative director of National Trust London, ‘is a result of historic power vested in wealthier parts of the city. Breathtaking views of our city are life-affirming. Although they may not cost anything, they are of value to everyone’. With contributions from architects, artists, designers and illustrators, the interactive installation shows the view from the Horniman as it…

Quiz of the week 1) Graves' disease affects which gland in the human body? 2) The boot eaten by Charlie Chaplin in the 1925 film The Gold Rush was made from what? 3) What is a dottle? 4) In which decade did the QE2 make her maiden voyage? 5) Who wrote the play The Winslow Boy? Wicked words Twitter is unspeakably irritating... it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’ Jonathan Franzen 1) Thyroid 2) Liquorice 3) The plug of tobacco left in a pipe after smoking 4) 1960s (May 2, 1969) 5) Sir Terence Rattigan The nature of things Garlic and chives PLANTING out some garlic has made me think more about this remarkable, versatile plant, probably first brought to these isles by the Romans, although its…

Paul Wright and lee Mapley (above) are Britain’s sole remaining master parchmenters. little wonder, you might think, that the craft of turning animal skins into a writing material is endangered, when so many people today have never even penned a letter onto paper. however, certainly until very recently, acts of Parliament were still recorded on vellum, just as the Magna Carta was in 1215. (the house of lords voted to end this practice, but a majority of MPs disagree, so it’s currently the subject of an ongoing debate.) Certainly, vellum does possess superior strength, suppleness and longevity—compare the British library’s 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus with the BBC’s 1986 Domesday Project, the latter stored on laser-discs that were soon outmoded and inaccessible. William Cowley Parchment Works is the craft’s sole survivor: a…

WHEN the poet Edward Thomas, he of Adlestrop fame, was asked why he was volunteering to fight in the First World War, he picked up a handful of English earth and said: ‘Literally, for this.’ Thomas went to war for the fields and birds and trees of Britain. Indeed, he died in the maelstrom of Arras in 1917 for the peace and tranquillity of Adlestrop in 1914. Perhaps, you might think, Thomas fighting for the landscape of Britain was the sort of grandiose sentiment exclusive to middle, urban-class poets? Not so—the Edwardian love of Nature transcended class and rank, town and country. Will Harvey, a farmer’s son from Gloucestershire also went to fight for the fields. He was so bound to the countryside that, when serving in France, he declared…

The Imperial—today, the Commonwealth—War Graves Commission was established a century ago this year. The struggle of its founder, Sir Fabian Ware, to give dignified burial to the First World War dead of the British empire is now well known. So too is the success of the Commission in creating war cemeteries and Memorials to the Missing of a high architectural standard and of great and serene beauty by employing some of the best architects in the country—above all Sir edwin Lutyens. What is rather less well known—at least, in insular Britain—is the way in which the other fighting powers responded to the challenge of burying and commemorating their own victims of mass industrialised slaughter. Comparisons are instructive. No other war cemeteries approach the British ones in terms of the care…

We’re all familiar with the mantra ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’, even if that place is concealed beneath a million other absolutely essential objects. In recent years, a whole industry has built up to encourage us to rid ourselves of possessions that clog up our lives or, at least, our hallways. even The Archers’ Kate Aldridge has been divesting herself of any objects that don’t ‘spark joy’. ‘Spark joy’ is the phrase that launched 1,000 skips. It comes from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, written by Japanese decluttering guru Marie Kondo, which has sold more than five million copies. I assume, despite its success, that it hasn’t sparked joy in all of its readers, if the number of copies available in my local charity shop…

Kitchen lighting, particularly in large kitchen-breakfast rooms, needs to be the most flexible scheme in a house. it makes sense to approach a large kitchen as three different spaces: the kitchen, the dining table and the living area. A grid of lights in the ceiling means it’s really hard to create a distinct atmosphere in each zone, so, instead, employ washes of light on the walls and art, atmospheric or intimate pools of light over specific elements and strong task lighting on work surfaces. Dimmers are essential to set these moods, but you don’t want more than four as a larger bank just becomes confusing. A simple control system—i use Lutron (www.lutron.com) or Rako (www.rakocontrols.com)—is definitely a way to overcome this and, these days, the functionality is so much better…

‘It’s so much more interesting to produce something that has a story’ ANEW collaboration between Susan Deliss and the fabric and wallpaper manufacturer Lewis & Wood offers convincing evidence—if ever it was needed—that textile designers don’t stand still for long. The result is Batik, an exotic weave evocative of antique, hand-crafted textiles, in colours inspired by semi-precious jewels. ‘We like doing collaborations—it’s so much more interesting to produce something that has a story behind it, rather than just another floral,’ explains Stephen Lewis, who co-founded Lewis & Wood in 1993. ‘Susan’s approach is similar to ours —she loves colour, warmth, patina and authenticity,’ he explains. Lewis & Wood has established a reputation for beautifully-made fabrics and wallpapers. ‘As a small manufacturer, it’s a bit like David fighting Goliath in…

SET against the backdrop of a historic 17th-century landscape, the exquisite neo-Classical Henbury Hall near Macclesfield, Cheshire, was the realisation of a vision long held by its late owner, Sebastian de Ferranti. It was encapsulated in a painting by artist Felix Kelly and brilliantly executed in perfect symmetry by the eminent country-house architect Julian Bicknell. Widely recognised as one of the most important country houses built in England in the 20th century, the Hall and its immaculate, 530-acre estate have been launched onto the market by Savills (020–7016 3780), at a guide price of £20 million for the whole. A grand house known as Henbury Hall existed in the area in the 1600s. This was replaced by another hall built on the site of the present house in 1742,…

The view from the kitchen terrace of Malthouse Farm—indeed, from the expansive windows of the kitchen itself—offers not only a vision of the beautifully tended, voluptuous kitchen and cut-flower garden laid out close by, but also a compelling vista of the South Downs, filling the horizon beyond. The high, windswept pastures of the Downs naturally command attention in their own right, but the garden draws you in, being complex and planted with choice things. An aerial view reveals it to be subdivided into numerous rectangular plots, chiefly divided by hedges; all of this has developed slowly over the past 17 years or so, since the owners, Richard and helen Keys, acquired their house with its gently sloping, south-facing acreage. horses had been an earlier owner’s passion, so part of the…