Innholdsfortegnelse for 20-Jun-18 i Country Life

THE CPRE is championing the introduction of an explicit ‘brownfield-first’ approach in the National Planning Policy Framework. The conservation body warned that property development is increasingly gobbling up vast swathes of countryside, after a land-use report by the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government revealed that the area of ‘non-previously developed land’ lost to housing rose from 5,202 acres in 2013 to 8,234 in 2017. This is despite an increase in brownfield development, which now accounts for 44% of land used for housing. ‘This increasing level of greenfield development is bad news for our treasured countryside,’ cautions Rebecca Pullinger of the CPRE. ‘We agree that we need to be building more homes. However, our analysis shows that the majority of new homes are not being built in the most…

Quiz of the week 1) Ophidiophobia is a fear of what? 2) Who wrote the novel Ivanhoe, published in 1820? 3) Vespula vulgaris is the Latin name for which common insect? 4) Which celebrity chef and food writer was born Phyllis Nan Sortain Pechey in 1909? 5) In Greek mythology, how many labours did Hercules have to perform? Time to buy Stationery Lovers subscription, from £10.50pm, HoneyTree (01749 899333; www.honeytreepost.com) Striped Big Shirt (women’s), £99, Orvis (0333 400 4177; www.orvis.co.uk) All About the Sauce pork-crackling gift pack, £25, The Snaffling Pig Co (020–3096 5200; www.snafflingpig.co.uk) Five things you (probably) didn’t know about… Picasso The artist’s full name has 23 words: he was baptised Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima…

THERE are some fiendishly difficult ways to use the Moon for natural navigation, but it also offers up one of the fastest. If you see a crescent moon, mentally sketch a line that touches both horns, extend it down to your horizon and where it touches will be roughly south—the higher the crescent in the sky, the more accurate it is. The reason this works is a bit longwinded, but not too complex. The Sun and Moon both rise in the East and set in the West. This means that when they are not in the same part of the sky—a new moon—they must be east or west of each other. The Moon emits no light of its own, so the bright side, the crescent, will be lit on the…

YOU’RE more likely to be killed in a road accident in the countryside than in a town and much more likely than on a motorway. It’s partly a matter of distance from accident and emergency services, but also the attitudes of drivers, particularly young ones, once they get into a rural area. The sight of a winding lane seems to encourage young people to take risks they’d never contemplate in congested places. The white line, dotted or continuous, obviously engenders a belief that the road, or at least one side of it, is theirs for the taking. Tractors, cows, dogs or pedestrians may be around other corners, but never the curve they see immediately ahead. ‘We’re more likely to die on a country road, yet nothing much is done’ Perhaps…

ROSES are among the easiest of plants to grow and perhaps the most rewarding. No other shrub is so elegant, scented, continuously in flower and available in every colour bar true blue. Choose well, bearing in mind the seasons, and you’ll find they’re in flower for at least six months of the year. First into bloom are the Himalayan species Rosa sericea, R. foetida from central Asia, our own native Scotch rose R. spinosissima and first-generation hybrids such as Harison’s Yellow. None of them blooms more than once, so the best early flowering garden roses are cultivars with one of these species in its ancestry—a welcome promise of what’s to follow. ‘No other shrub is so elegant, scented, continuously in flower and available in every colour bar true blue’ In…

Clive Aslet reveals MANY readers of Country Life must have dreamt of owning an apartment in Venice. Those who have, as yet, resisted the temptation should stop reading now. For here is an entire 17th-century palace restored by the architect John Simpson and his wife, Erica, to breathtaking effect. Only those who know what it was like during its previous incarnation, as the Bridge Club of Venice, can appreciate the extent of the transformation. Few could have guessed that a largely complete, 18th-century scheme of decoration lay hidden beneath the layers of nicotine, paint, parquet and yellow silk, but the Simpsons’ leap of faith has paid off. Fortune has favoured the bold. The palazzo was one of many Venetian properties owned by the Grimani family, patricians long prominent in the…

IN one of the best-known episodes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, sleeping Titania’s eyelids are anointed with the juice of a magical plant and she awakes to fall in love with the first creature she sees: Bottom the weaver, his head transformed into that of an ass. However, for Shakespeare’s audience, the notion of an effective love potion would not have been particularly strange. Philtres claiming to win the heart of another were central to medieval culture, as potions promising love were already as old as love itself and history and literature record that they have never been out of fashion. From the oft-retold Celtic legend of Tristan and Isolde and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and J. K. Rowling’s Hogwarts, potions have been…

CLASSIC 1980s decoration might have gained a reputation for banal excess, but not all of it was knicker blinds and feverish dragging, rag-rolling and stippling. Anyone old enough to remember the more discreet, sotto voce style of English decoration in that decade can summon up happy memories of a heady mix: big, commodious sofas covered in silk damask and trimmed with bullion fringes, good brown furniture, club fenders and rush matting, pictures of which rarely made it into glossy magazines. Yet within a few years, bossy modernists with their fatuous mantras of ‘less is more’ and ‘chuck out the chintz’ set out to kill off the look off in a bid to promote their vision of a chilly utopia of white walls and Le Corbusier re-editions. ‘As night follows…

FOR those familiar with the joy of Joyce Grenfell, there’s a choice moment in one of her unique monologues in which a seemingly endless search for a perfect picnic spot —‘just over this next hill’—in a jam-packed family saloon eventually concludes by a meagre riverbank, with ‘pretty white detergent foam floating by but really quite a nice spot when all is said and done’. Or some such similar words to so perfectly describe a ‘run out’ over a Whit weekend in the early 1950s. I would absolutely hate such an outing and I don’t much like beach picnics, either—all that sand in the sandwiches and sticking to the boiled eggs. Mountain, wood and field don’t fare much better, truth be told. If it’s to be an outdoors affair for…

THE ninth Masterpiece Fair will take place from June 27, the day of the private view, to July 6, and, for the eighth time, it will be in its splendid pop-up version of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in the hospital’s own grounds. It was astute of the original organising team to see the potential of a site that had previously been used only by the Chelsea Flower Show. The lawns, they were told, would never recover from two batterings in quick succession. Furthermore, the art-collecting world would surely never venture so far from the Mayfair hotels that traditionally hosted fairs. Then there was competition from Art Antiques London, the other would-be successor to the defunct Grosvenor House Art & Antiques Fair. At the beginning, the intention was to create…

WE are surrounded everywhere by sport: the football World Cup is under way in Russia, England is playing Australia at cricket and Wimbledon beckons. Over the next few weeks, we shall hear a lot about the drama of sport, but what about the role of sport in drama? I would suggest that, after decades of relative neglect, it’s starting to assert itself in a major way and that dramatists are waking up to the huge possibilities of the sporting life. Plays about football, now elevated from a pleasurable pastime into a national obsession, have, in particular, started to proliferate. It would be hard on stage to match the real-life drama of, say, Arsène Wenger’s eventual departure from his beloved Arsenal, but what the theatre can do is to use…

AS the debate on the best course for post-Brexit Britain heats up, the CLA is supporting a recommendation, made earlier this month by the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, that Defra provide more clarity ‘on funding, timing and delivery’ of future agricultural policies. ‘Brexit brings major opportunities for positive change in farming, but farmers need the Government to provide the right support, infrastructure and policy initiatives to help them through the transition,’ says CLA president Tim Breitmeyer. ‘The committee is right to demand that Ministers provide details and reassurance over how budgets will be ring-fenced to support the industry as we leave the EU.’ In particular, he continues, ‘significant investment is required now and in the long-term if farmers are to continue to deliver a range of environmental benefits,…

THE Twentieth Century Society (C20) is challenging a decision by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, which has refused to grant listed-building status to London’s Southbank Centre. It’s the fourth time since 1992 that the department has rejected Historic England’s advice to list the riverside complex, which consists of the Hayward Gallery, the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Purcell Room. The Secretary of State has also issued a Certificate of Immunity, which means the buildings will not be reassessed for listing for five years. Having seen off plans for a massive glass extension on top of the Hayward in 2013, as well as demolition plans in the 1990s, and with moves currently afoot to improve connectivity along the South Bank, C20 now fears lack of protection will leave the…

THERE isn’t much that Karl Chattington doesn’t know about coracles. He’s one of the few remaining people making these small, round boats in the traditional way and is a passionate advocate of a dying way of life. ‘The importance of the coracle, salmon and sewin [sea trout] to west Wales can’t be overestimated,’ he explains. ‘Although the village of Cilgerran had 300 coracles about a century ago, the numbers have diminished dramatically over the years as salmon and sewin numbers have collapsed. Nowadays, coracle-fishing licences are few and far between and there are currently only eight issued on the River Tywi, 12 on the River Teifi and one on the River Taf.’ Fishermen work in pairs, with a net suspended between two coracles. The vessels themselves are unique to each…

‘It’s unbelievable that a British minister in the 21st century could champion low-density land-hungry sprawl’ BRITAIN’S National Parks are an easy win for Defra Secretary of State Michael Gove. Who could object to his desire to see them enhanced and possibly extended? A flurry of polls on the state of Britain at the time of the 2012 Olympics put the countryside on a par with the Royal Family, the NHS and Shakespeare as a chief source of national pride. Yet no Government minister this century has shown the slightest interest in the rural landscape, so we must now give a cheer. Mr Gove has set up an inquiry to strengthen the 15 National Parks and 46 Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) that cover roughly a quarter of Britain’s…

The Fish Peter Randall-Page is a sculptor and artist. His work can be seen in ‘On Form: Sculpture in Stone’ at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, until July 8; in the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, London, until August 19; and at Castle Drogo, Devon, until November 4 ‘I decided on the fish drawing from Cueva de la Pileta because it is fresh and beautifully observed and because it was made by someone, probably not dissimilar to me, more than 20,000 years ago and I saw it, by torchlight, last week’ LA PILETA CAVE is still in the family of the farmer José Lobato, who discovered it in 1905. It’s in the limestone mountains of the Serranía de Ronda, 10 minutes by car from Ronda, near the village of Benaoján.…

IT isn’t a worm, it’s an insect—one famous for a chemical romance that brightens up our summer gloaming with a mysterious greenish glow, a beetle that was once the slang word for those of us humble scribes who toil by lamplight. A member of the small family that includes European fireflies (they aren’t flies, either, by the way), the glow-worm is widely distributed across Asia and up to the Arctic. Worldwide, it’s related to many bioluminescent bugs, which include Antipodean cave-dwelling fungus mites and even a subtropical marine species. Populations of Lampyris noctiluca are hard to monitor, but, in Britain, appear patchy and are thought to be in decline. They favour a chalk or limestone habitat, with a penchant for churchyards, golf courses or abandoned railway cuttings, and are best…

Over a period of six months, in collaboration with de Gournay, model Kate Moss designed the hand-painted Anemones in Light wallpaper, which sets a romantic tone for this glamorous and eclectic bathroom. Already a client of the company, Kate was keen to combine the soft, floral quality of anemones with a more graphic aesthetic. Kate worked with Claud Cecil Gurney, who founded Chelsea-based de Gournay in 1986 (page 142), to conceive the design. She was eager to include shards of light, meant to evoke the visual clarity of the Art Deco era, and challenged the team to successfully pair them with the organic shapes of the flowers. To complement the wallpaper, Kate chose the Double Lowther vanity sink from luxury bathroom manufacturers Drummonds (020–7376 4499; www.drummonds-uk.com). The top is made…

ANTWERP grew to prosperity as a port on the River Scheldt and enjoyed two particular periods of affluence, once in the decades around 1600 and again in the Belle Époch before the First World War. Trams and bicycles dominate the picturesque centre, which is well served by shops and restaurants. Work is under way to regenerate the historic dockyard area, with its renovated Port House and new Museum aan de Stroom (MAS). This year, Flanders is celebrating the work of the artist and diplomat Peter Paul Rubens, Antwerp’s most famous son, with a cultural festival. ‘Antwerp Baroque 2018: Rubens Inspires’ has exhibitions, theatre, music, tours and more. Visit www.visitantwerpen.be What to see The Cathedral of our Lady ( above ): this great church, with its huge bell-tower, dominates the city…

WISBECH owes its fortunes to the fluctuating rivers, tides, mud and silts of the Wash and the Fens. In its earliest history, it was on the navigable river route that led to Peterborough and on to Cambridge. Later, the silting of the great Ouse and Nene gave mercantile precedence to nearby Kings Lynn. Nevertheless, the continual industrious drainage of the Fens and their rich peats and silts gave this early market town an increasingly productive and rich hinterland. By the 17th century, when the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden (1595–1677) was turning the reedy wastes of Cambridgeshire into some of Britain’s best farmland, Samuel Pepys described Wisbech as ‘pretty’. By the 18th century, the development of North Brink had begun stretching from Elgood’s Brewery (built in 1795 and still producing…

WRITING in Country Life (February 23, 1967) about the restoration of Grade I-listed The Old Hall, Barnham Broom, near Wymondham, south Norfolk, the architectural historian Mark Girouard highlighted the situation faced at that time by some of East Anglia’s oldest, but least-known small manor houses: ‘Few, if any, are lived in by the families who originally built them: they are silent witnesses of a vanished race of small country gentry who were absorbed or bought out by grander and richer families. Many of them became farmhouses, and remain so to this day… Some of them have been done up and become gentry houses again… Others have been abandoned, and stand with sagging roofs and gaping windows in the desolate remains of their gardens. ‘Barnham Broom was for many years…

Memoir/history Notes from the Cévennes Adam Thorpe (Bloomsbury, £16.99) FOR many years, one of England’s best writers has been living with his family in the Cévennes, that rugged plateau in south-central France where, among a fiercely poor and traditionally Protestant people, Robert Louis Stevenson once travelled with his donkey. It is olive and sheep country, scored by rivers that may suddenly turn violent, with the ancient Roman city of Nîmes, which sits on the Via Domitia that runs to Spain and Italy, as a capital. By turns comic and pensive, Notes from the Cévennes is an absorbing and beautifully composed collection of vignettes, recording Adam Thorpe’s encounters, adventures and meditations over half a lifetime in France. It is very good on the French, but it is not exclusively about them.…

FARMING and conservation bodies have welcomed the launch of a new Government review to step up the fight against waste crime. ‘Organised criminals running illegal waste dumps and fly-tipping are blighting local communities,’ Defra Secretary Michael Gove said last week. ‘The time is right for us to look at how we can best tackle these antisocial and inexcusable crimes.’ Fly-tipping has seen a massive surge in the past few years. It now affects almost two-thirds of farmers and landowners across the country, costing them about £844 in clean-up costs for each incident, according to the CLA. Worse, adds the Green Alliance, it poses significant risks to health and the environment, because of toxic fumes and the risk of dangerous substances contaminating land and waterways. Since 2014, the Government has…

EAST DEVON forestry co-op Axe-woods has launched a log bank to help combat fuel poverty. Working with social services, local charities and food banks, the co-op will provide dry, properly seasoned logs to people in need. A pilot project in the Honiton and Ottery St Mary area will run during 2018, with a view to expanding it later on. Founded in 2010, Axewoods is a not-for-profit, volunteer group working on the principle of trading logs for labour—members manage woodlands on behalf of landowners and keep the timber in return. ‘Getting contractors in and doing work on steep ground or anywhere with a small piece of woodland would be uneconomic,’ says Axewoods chairman Alan Dyer. ‘Landowners get free management, we get our wood, those in need get logs and members learn…

What a fungi AS I walked around the bright-yellow field of rape the other day, in the soft sunshine, with an old yellow labrador at my heels and dandelions and buttercups under the hedgerow, I came suddenly upon an extraordinary colour-coordinated sight. Halfway up one of the beech trees hung a huge fungi; it was well over a foot wide and in depth and had grown in drooping, mustard-yellow velvet folds. I believe I have identified it as Laetiporus sulphureus, also known as the chicken of the woods because of its distinct flavour. I’m sure John Lewis-Stempel would have fried it for his breakfast, but as I have neither his knowledge nor his courage, I left it hanging there, a glowing specimen, decorating the sunny English agricultural landscape.…

MOST men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste,’ according to Kierkegaard, ‘that they hurry past it.’ Doubtless, everyone rushing through the train station at Gatwick North early last Saturday morning felt confident that he or she was missing nothing. Airports are hardly a place for seekers of pleasure, yet if you exit the terminal on foot, cross the adjacent slip road and roundabout and plunge into the thicket opposite, you will find yourself on a narrow path that meanders through a small, overgrown wood. A couple of hundred yards further on, the trees thin and you’re in the water meadows—lush, green and tranquil—of the River Mole. It’s hard to believe that such a magical place can exist barely 10 minutes’ stroll from the departure gates, but it does. Imagine…

‘I’m engulfed by birdsong, loud enough to obscure an aeroplane taking off from Stansted’ WHEN it comes to being great and British, nothing beats a majestic tree. Near my home in Gloucestershire is a 500-year-old oak. Scabby and gnarled, its ancient limbs stretch and twist, but, each spring, it leaps back to life. In the Fellows’ Garden of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, is a younger (merely two centuries old) weeping Oriental Plane. Standing beneath its limbs is like being in a cathedral; its magnificence won it the cover spot in Thomas Pakenham’s Meetings with Remarkable Trees. There are few places in England better to encounter remarkable trees than our ancient hunting forests and, one fine morning, I set out for Hatfield Forest, Hertfordshire, to visit them. I arrive so early that…

A LONELY gull swings softly in the breeze, buoyed by the rings of vélos that seem to be saturated within the cobbles of the winding streets. Outside the Villa Clarisse, a man of 70 years, skin scarred by ultraviolet, repaints shutters a dark green. Old women sit opposite, painting scenes they have known for thousands of days. Clarisse is a quiet and calm guesthouse in keeping with the atmosphere of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, the heart of which it inhabits. It’s long and narrow, with only nine rooms, and a lonely staff member keeps watch over the front desk and is only seen when asked for; otherwise, the place is your own, to come in and out of as you choose, quiet and soft and storied, and eminently comfortable. The rooms are lightly…

I SWIM with slow strokes, enough to keep me moving forward, not sinking. This is the farm pond, seen anew: the frog’s-eye view. Breast-stroking, my legs scissoring behind me, I feel amphibian. I make no sound as I cruise in a circle, a 25-yard ripple-ring. The water is cold silk, closing around my back as I finish each stroke. In modern argot, I’m ‘wild swimming’; as a child in the 1970s, our gang trips to the River Lugg at Mordiford were merely ‘swimming’. Everything that was once ordinary has to be über-ed. When I came up to the pond half an hour ago, it was as flat as a silver coin, but, now, a breeze has begun to ruffle the water. On the bank, tall swords of yellow flag, already…

IT’S extraordinary how we can have all but forgotten about some important person or event, then an anniversary comes along and it’s all anyone can talk about. Commemorations certainly reignite reverence for those held in high esteem; their lasting effects are not quite so clear. This year, for example, we mark the bicentenary of the death of the last great 18th-century English landscape designer, Humphry Repton, the 300th anniversary of the birth of Thomas Chippendale and 400 years since the execution of Elizabethan sea dog Sir Walter Raleigh (right). Although these anniversaries feel major, their influence on our memories, and on bricks and mortar, can be transient. Ed Sugden, director of Savills’ country department (020–7409 8885), believes that ‘significant history, authorship or patronage, at the national or international level,…

A REBEL from an early age, Enid Marx (1902–98) recalled how she ‘used to lead a gang of other desperadoes from the nursery school over the wall in search of strawberries’. As a new book and exhibition reveal, this streak of mischievousness and penchant for mild (rather than wild) transgression were key personality traits and characterised her career as a designer. Flying in the face of the establishment, Marx produced quietly inspirational work that, although it never set the commercial world on fire, was admired and respected by her peers and has stood the test of time. Marx was part of the so-called ‘outbreak of talent’ at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s, but she is much less well-known than her contemporaries, who included not only Edward Bawden…