Innholdsfortegnelse for 05-Feb-2020 i Country Life

PICCADILLY CIRCUS Is this London’s most romantic statue? In short, probably not. The Shaftesbury Memorial Fountain—built to commemorate Victorian philanthropist the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, by Sir Alfred Gilbert—has been dogged by controversy since its unveiling, in 1893. Opinion is divided over the aluminium figure: some mistakenly believe it represents the Angel of Christian Charity, despite the bow and arrow; others that it was designed to depict Eros. It is, in fact, Anteros, the Greek god of requited, selfless love and Eros’s twin brother (the god of love and sex would have been too sinister a subject to be associated with the Earl). The mysterious figure was removed during the Second World War and replaced some years later, facing the ‘wrong’ way. Those in charge argued that the placement was…

Residents love the community feel. Compared with other central London areas, where second homes abound, ‘Marylebone is a place where people set up their families,’ says Martin Ballantine of Carter Jonas Residents like the great food, with restaurants such as Chiltern Firehouse and Fischer, deli-meet-bistro Le Vieux Comptoir and shops including La Fromagerie, plus a great Sunday farmers’ market. ‘You could literally eat your way across Marylebone,’ says Marlon Lloyd Malcolm of Lurot Brand Residents could do without the premium parking. There is a 50% parking-bay surcharge for pre-2015 diesel cars, but this helps improve air quality. Resident parking permits are free for eco-friendly vehicles, you can walk everywhere and the area is well served by the Tube…

London is home to 8.6 million people and 8.3 million trees According to a report by the London iTree Eco Project, those trees store about 2,367,000 tons of carbon London’s 3.8 million gardens cover 24% of the capital and are where we have the greatest power to ‘protect, conserve and create life’, according to London National Park City, a movement to improve life across the capital This month, wintering crocuses carpet the city’s frosty floor, from Kew Gardens to Battersea Park…

GO FOR FREE There are several charity Pancake Day races in London, including Flippin’ Good at Greenwich Market, SE10, on February 22 and Shrove Tuesday, February 25; no tickets required for spectators. Fancy dress is optional (www.greenwichmarket. london/events) BOOK NOW ‘David Hockney: Drawing from Life’ opens at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, WC2, on February 27. Tickets from £17 (www. npg.org.uk) LAST CHANCE James McAvoy (below) stars in Cyrano de Bergerac at the Playhouse, WC2, until February 29. Tickets from £34.50 (www.atgtickets.com) CHURCH Choral eucharist with ashing, on Ash Wednesday (February 26), at St Bartholomew the Great, EC1, London’s oldest parish church (www.great stbarts.com)…

LOVE is in the air. Celebrate with a whimsical arrangement (if subtle hints don’t work, treat yourself) from East London florist Grace & Thorn (www.graceandthorn. com). Dine in style at Davies and Brook: Claridges’s new restaurant sees Daniel Humm return to the hotel kitchen, a quarter of a century after starting his career there at the age of 15 (www.claridges.co.uk). Go all out with a staycation at the eccentrically elegant Charlotte Street Hotel, in Bloomsbury, W1. Book through Mr & Mrs Smith for complimentary cocktails in the hotel bar (www.mrandmrssmith. com). Leave your room for an out-of-this-world experience at the Royal Observatory. Astronomers narrate a brand new show on the moons of the Solar System (www.rmg.co.uk). Alternatively, hunker down at home and employ a private chef from La Belle Assiette,…

How does London inspire your work? There is always something to look at in London, from the Georgian grandeur of Robert Adam’s Kenwood House and the Brutalist architecture of Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower to the shining, gleaming Modernism of The Shard, plus everything in between. That breadth of aesthetic stimulus is a constant inspiration for me. Do you have any favourite projects? I love everything to do with Georgian architecture and interiors and we’re currently doing a full refurbishment of a beautiful listed Georgian house off Hyde Park, which means lofty ceiling heights galore. My first job on my own, however, was a Grade II-listed building on the Strand. When the builders started peeling back the layers of paint, we discovered all this forgotten, intricate plasterwork on the walls and…

Spreading your wings A rescued owl was deemed ‘too fat’ to fly by the Suffolk Owl Sanctuary. Staff found the bird to be ‘extremely obese’ and it has been put on a strict diet Macmillan Cancer Support Some farmers are threatening to withhold donations after the charity encouraged people to give up meat for March. They are concerned the charity is inferring that there is a link between eating meat and cancer Japanese whisky It’s an ‘open secret’ that some high-end Japanese whisky is merely re-packaged Scotch, says The Times. The practice, known as ‘whisky laundering’, has come about due to demand for Japanese whisky far outpacing supply Wine A two-degree rise in global temperature would trigger a 56% loss of vineyard land, and a four-degree increase would wipe out…

IF you watched Ben Stokes’s heroics at Headingley or the Cricket World Cup Final last summer, then the news that sports fans experience dangerous levels of physical stress will hardly sound like news at all. However, the science is now here to back it up, as researchers from the University of Oxford have shown that watching your favourite team can lead to high levels of cortisol, which increases blood pressure and stress on the heart. The study was conducted on 40 Brazilian football fans during the 2014 FIFA World Cup and it also found no difference in stress levels between women and men during games, rubbishing notions that men ‘care more’. Raised cortisol can also give people a feeling of impending doom, which is how we all feel whenever England…

Cheering up February THANK goodness for the Six Nations rugby tournament—without it, February would be an even drearier month. The ephemeral pleasures of the pheasant and partridge seasons ended last weekend, thereby allowing my coats and various pieces of sporting kit to finally dry out after a series of soakings. My fishing rods—I dare not tell you how many I own, but are all justified in my mind, as they all have a different role to perform, rather like the various clubs in a golf bag—will lie dormant until April. I should be tying flies now, ready for that moment, but my poor eyesight makes it too frustrating these days. The garden is largely snoozing, yet, happily, the surrounding woods and copses are coming alive. Catkins or lamb’s tails hang…

THE tempestuous weather of this month might be almost depressing were we not buoyed up with the hope derived from the fact that last Sunday, which was St Paul’s Day, was a gloriously fine one. For are we not told that: Clara dies Pauli bona tempora denotat anni, Si fuerint venti denarrant praelia genti Si nix aut pluviae, pereunt animalia quaeque Which has been thus rendered into English: If St Paul’s Day be fair and clear It doth betide a happy year; If blustering winds do blow aloft Then wars will trouble our realm full oft, And if it chance to snow or rain Then will be dear all sorts of grain. 1) ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ 2) Kidney 3) Tiramisu 4) Haemoglobin 5) David Bowie Riddle me this:…

Trust in the north I WOULD like to point out that there is a separate National Trust for Scotland, contrary to the impression some might have gained from perusing your first edition of 2020 (January 1). It was a wonderful read and we all enjoyed it, but it did effectively omit our entire country north of the border. Joanna Macpherson, by email Of mice and men IS anyone else experiencing mouse invasions this winter? I keep finding little piles of red lentils hidden in various places in my cottage—first in a pair of shoes, then under a heavy Persian rug (how they squeezed underneath is remarkable) and, most recently, in my linen cupboard, between two empty hot-water bottles. I was rather alarmed that the mice may be getting into…

‘The reason why I like it is I’ve had it hanging above my bed for 20 years and, even though it was painted in 1941, the hands and the feet look like a 1960s progrock album cover. The symbolism in it is too weird to mention and every time I look at it I see more. Mednikoff’s partner Grace Pailthorpe invented the term ‘juvenile delinquency’ and every time I look at the picture, I enjoy that association’ John McEwen comments on Mednikoff’s painting SEX, politics and religion absorbed the Surrealists, especially sex, as they were most influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis. The term Surreal —‘transcending the real’—was coined in 1917 by Apollinaire. In 1924, his fellow French poet André Breton wrote the Surrealist Manifesto, advocating artistic expressions of ‘pure psychic automatism’…

Personal flags are the remit of the heraldic courts, ‘effectively, a by-product of having a coat of arms,’ says Philip Tibbetts, who was recently granted his own. Once you have a coat of arms, it can be transposed onto a flag that becomes your banner of arms. ‘The practice here when an individual wants to fly a flag to represent themselves is to fly an heraldic banner,’ affirms Mark Scott, Blue Mantle Pursuivant at the College of Arms. The best known of these is the Royal Standard, The Queen’s arms on a flag. ‘Anyone who has a coat of arms may fly a banner,’ Mr Scott adds. ‘The reason they’re associated with the peerage is because you usually need a grand house to pull off a flagpole.’ Bearers of coats…

IN 1840, William Henry Fox Talbot discovered how to ‘fix’ latent images to photographic paper with the judicious application of chemicals, paving the way for the future of the art. Today, his processes have been embellished by the drone and the macro lens, introducing a whole new generation of photography that brings out astonishing details and allows eye-opening angles. This year’s British Photography Awards, the winner of which was announced last night, reveal a diverse range of techniques. Here, we showcase some of the shortlisted images, from an ant to a halo.…

Start dahlias The dismal clumps of light-brown dahlia tubers that project from boxes and buckets in sheds across the land can now be brought miraculously back to life in preparation for their stage performance this summer. Just as well you labelled them last autumn. For now, simply pot up each plant, bring it into a frostproof glasshouse and begin watering. Soon those familiar chunky green shoots will appear and cuttings can be taken. Alternatively, tubers can be removed for the same purpose. Keep the plants cool to maintain sturdy progress. There’s plenty of time yet.…

A FRIEND of ours gave a dinner the other day and invited a couple who had only recently got together. Welcoming them at the door, he shook hands with the new girlfriend, who wore bouncing plaits and named herself, he thought, Gludenfrieda. He gave them a drink and introduced them to the rest of the crowd. ‘This is Mark and Gludenfrieda,’ he said. ‘Jeremy, Gludenfrieda.’ It was only later, in the kitchen, that he was told that Gludenfrieda’s actual name was Rachel. ‘In that case,’ he objected, ‘why did she say, “Hi, I’m Gludenfrieda?”’ At which point, it dawned on him that she had been hastily trying to signal her dietary preferences at the threshold. Goodwin’s Law states that the amount of attention, measured in minutes, that you give to…

Dunstable Mews, £2.45 million Tucked away in a quiet spot close to Marylebone High Street, this beautifully renovated mews house has a 29ft reception room, dining area and bespoke kitchen on the ground floor and two bedrooms and a second reception room upstairs. Lurot Brand (020–7590 9955; www. lurotbrand.co.uk) and Dexters (020–7224 5544; www.dexters.co.uk) Ulster Terrace, £3,800 per week Set on the ground and first floors of a Grade I-listed Nash building, this magnificent three-to four-bedroom apartment has plenty of interesting details, including fine fireplaces and beautiful cornicing, and long views of nearby Regent’s Park. Dexters (020–7224 5545; www.dexters.co.uk) Harley Street, £18.5 million Beautifully renovated by award- winning architects SHH, this 8,603sq ft, Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse combines period details, including exposed beams and trusses and the original wine cellar,…

THIS striking pillar box is one of a pair in what is now a NatWest banking hall at 1, Princes Street, EC2, next to the Bank of England. The present building was erected in 1929–32 to the designs of Sir Edwin Cooper for the National Provincial Bank and rebuilt internally in 1994–97. The pillar boxes survive from the original interior and were probably manufactured by Maples and Co. They were perhaps intended to celebrate the fact that the world’s first postmarks, an invention of the first postmaster-general of the General Post Office, Henry Bishop, were struck on this site in 1661 at the General Letter Office in Post House Yard. Each has a fluted body and is surmounted by an urn. The tops are veneered and the carved swags and…

WHENEVER Bilbo Baggins’s thoughts turn wistfully to his Shire home and a restorative cup of tea, usually after an uncomfortable encounter with an orc or a troll, one instinctively empathises. Tolkein’s Shire—the Anglo-Saxon word for what we now think of as a county (from the French conté, introduced by the Normans), a place of cultural identity and devolved administration—symbolised home and warm feelings of relief, familiarity and security: indeed, the alternative title of his enduring novel The Hobbit is There and Back Again. Not everyone can live in their home county, or even return there in later life, but the emotions of pride and identification tend not to fade, as our feature on the renewed enthusiasm for county flags demonstrates (‘Flying the flag’, page 64). Anyone who is born in…

YOU never seem to have enough sponges, right? Wrong, according to the Knightshayes estate in Devon, which has come up with a novel solution: growing your own. Staff at the National Trust property have been growing their own loofahs in the kitchen garden and, from 30 fruit, have produced 50 washing-up sponges. The organic sponges will not only reduce plastic at the estate, but any left over will be sold in the shop. ‘You need to grow them up some kind of supporting structure, but there’s nothing more complicated than that involved,’ says kitchen-garden supervisor Bev Todd. ‘You simply grow them as you would courgettes.’ How to grow your own Luffa cylindrica • Sow seeds in April or May in a warm, sunny spot. • Transfer to a large pot…

GENERAL licences for the shooting and trapping of pest birds in England are due to expire on February 29 and there is increasing concern that Defra is not in a position to issue new ones. In a letter to Defra Secretary Theresa Villiers, BASC warned that vulnerable birds, such as the curlew, will be in danger should new licences not be granted or the current versions extended. Caroline Bedell, BASC’s executive director of conservation, said that ‘it has become clear that [Defra] will struggle to issue new general licences by the end of February’ and that Defra needs ‘to seriously consider extending the licences now to avoid the same mistakes as last year’. Last year, a loophole in the wording of the general licence allowed for a successful legal challenge…

Skating to the shops THIS week has seen the advent of two new things in the house that are difficult to ignore. The first is a smartphone for our eldest child. Apparently, they are the last person in their class to acquire one and, after months of pressure, we have finally yielded. To say they are delighted would be to understate the truth. I have drawn up some terms and conditions of use, pointedly written out in longhand like a charter to make them look serious and impressive, and they have signed it. If they observe them properly, they will be more disciplined with their phones than their parents. The other novelty is a birthday present for the younger child in the form of a pair of roller-blades. The sheer…

Polly’s not a cracker Q My elderly aunt recently died and has left us her revolting parrot. Not only does the bird bite, it also smells, swears like a trooper and might live for another 20 or 30 years. I have to admit, the children adore the wretched thing, but I really, truly despise it. Would it be terrible of me to give it away? P. T., London A To whom would you give it? Who do you dislike that much? Children haven’t the faintest grasp of the exigencies of pet care. Toxic relationships benefit no one and this one clearly needs severing. The symptoms of parrot fever (dry cough, muscle ache) are easily counterfeited. However, the disease’s proper name, Chlamydia psittaci, may be too distressing to bear conversational…

LAST week, Athena paid a visit to Canterbury. It’s a city that always gives her great pleasure and this visit was no exception. The sunshine set off the city to advantage and the cathedral in particular, despite it being cloaked in scaffolding (and the sound of an organ tuner remorselessly working their way through the 6,000 pipes of the instrument), looked beautiful almost beyond imagining. The cathedral and its spacious close, however, struck Athena as something of an island, removed from the realities of life in the town. In Athena’s memory, the High Street of Canterbury was a busy and bustling place. Last week, however, it felt as if it was—literally and figuratively—coming to pieces. On both sides of the street were large numbers of boarded-up shops. It added to…

Somerset, £2m Perched high above the Saxon village of Stoke St Mary and described by Pevsner as ‘overlooking a huge view, somewhat colonial with a timber arcaded veranda’, Stoke House enjoys an incredible vista over the Taunton Vale. Built in about 1810 for Lord Portman’s agent, this Grade II-listed, light-filled property boasts five bedrooms, three bathrooms and a coach house, set in about 10 acres of gardens and woodland, four miles from Taunton. Knight Frank Exeter (01392 848842) Kent, £1.95m A fine, early-15th-century, white-rendered Wealden hall house that has been impeccably maintained, Grade II*-listed Henden Place overlooks the village green in Woodchurch, near Tenterden. Reclining in 1.7 acres, which include a large natural pond, this charming timber-frame house has five bedrooms and three bathrooms (two of which are…

How has Patricia Elkington managed to make her Crocus tommasinianus naturalise so healthily? In her view, she can take very little of the credit, believing it is the combination of various conditions that contributes to the stupendous growing habitat. In a sense, this is rather like the terroir that wine growers consider the primary ingredient in a wine’s character and success; that indefinable combination of soil, aspect, weather and je ne sais quoi. At Little Court, the crucial factor in the crocus’s success seems to be the thin, free-draining chalk soil. Mrs Elkington explains: ‘I like to imagine it makes them think they are growing on a stony limestone Turkish hillside or somewhere similar, where they have thrived naturally for centuries.’ She is adamant they would not naturalise so well…

With February 14 around the corner, magazines are full of features suggesting places you should book for dinner with your significant other. I’m here to tell you to ignore them all. If you want to make a success of Valentine’s Day, go for lunch together in Soho. I’m going to take myself out of the picture just this once; you don’t want me crashing your date. But imagine me gently encouraging you as you walk up Dean Street until you get to The French House. The downstairs boozer—Jeffrey Bernard and Dylan Thomas’s home away from home—has always been a place of rackety legend, but although St John’s Margot and Fergus Henderson used to cook upstairs, things were quiet there for a while until 2018. Then Neil Borthwick arrived from Merchant’s…

THE NFU is leading a coalition to keep the pressure on the Government over food and animal-welfare standards now that the UK has left the EU. In a letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the coalition urges that manifesto commitments made in the run up to the 2019 General Election are now enshrined in law. The letter was co-written and signed by more than 60 farming, environment, animal welfare and public health organisations, including the CLA, RSPB, WWF-UK, National Trust, RSPCA and the Sustainable Food Trust. Theresa Villiers, Defra Secretary, recently promised to ‘defend our national interests and our values, including our high standards of animal welfare’. This follows on from commitments made in the Conservative manifesto, which said that ‘in all of our trade negotiations, we will not compromise…

Green shoppers Sainsbury’s will spend £1bn to become net carbon neutral by 2040. The supermarket plans to cut emissions, plastic waste and water usage to reach its target Pedestrians in Birmingham The council announced it wants to cut air pollution by banning cars from driving through the city centre. Birmingham joins Brighton, York, Bristol, Cardiff and Oxford in considering ways to reduce the number of cars in their cities Seals Two injured and underweight seal pups have been returned to the sea by the RSPCA following rehabilitation. The seals were named Mrs Coulter and Pan, from Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ novels…

AUTHOR Philip Pullman managed to upset the entire internet last week, when he wrote on Twitter ‘the Brexit 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people’. Despite usually being above such petty arguments, COUNTRY LIFE conducted a poll to see what you, our readers, thought. Some 40% of you agreed with Mr Pullman, but 44% of you thought the coin read correctly as it is. A worrying 16% of you answered ‘An Oxford what?’. Well, that’s that settled then.…

Clean and crisp Sainsbury’s, Taste the Difference Petit Chablis, Burgundy, France 2018. £10.50, Sainsbury’s, alcohol 12% Classy and classic nose of citrus and mineral, with a struck-match character. The clean, crisp palate also has a lovely creaminess, all underpinned by a streak of minerality. Fresh, well-balanced and great value for money. Top value Sileni, Straits Grand Reserve, Marlborough, New Zealand 2019. £14.99, Boutinot, alc 13% Named after the Sileni, the hedonistic companions of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, this is an equally exuberant Kiwi Sauvignon (once the youthful nose opens up), boasting lush mango, peach and fresh herbal flavours. The best parcels of grapes were used and it spends time on lees for added complexity, the wine’s yeasty creaminess not masking the mouthwateringly fresh acidity. Top value.…

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Emma Bridgewater, ceramics designer and manufacturer I definitely didn’t plan a life in the Potteries. I wanted to write and I imagined I’d work for a publisher or literary agent. But I think a seductive idea of the importance, and also the loveliness, of household china flowered in my mind early on and made me susceptible to a career in the industry—and for this I blame Beatrix Potter. The Tailor of Gloucester was an especial favourite of Mum’s and she read it quite frequently—together with The Tale of Mr Tod (which also features kitchen crockery: meat plates are smashed in the great fight between Mr Tod and Tommy Brock). When the Tailor of Gloucester is ill in bed, his cat Simpkin imprisons all the kind and clever mice under the…

ENTIRELY appropriately, I start looking for the first asparagus to push through the soil on April Fools’ Day. I’m usually a good fortnight early, but still, what have we if not hope? At some point, when spring crosses a happy threshold, the spears drive skyward, often appearing overnight. I’ve seen a half-brick lifted by this push into the light. It is, of course, all driven by sex: the stems are topped with flower buds desperate to blossom and produce seed, and it’s your duty to interrupt this indecent business to your culinary advantage. For every wet, cold, muddy day in the garden, you need something to swing the pendulum back your way, and quickly cooked asparagus with butter, too much pepper, a little salt and a rubble of parmesan…

Blood-orange, beetroot and butternut salad with labneh and hazelnuts Spread a large platter with 300ml of seasoned labneh (strained and thickened Greek yoghurt). Arrange three peeled and sliced blood oranges and six freshly roasted beetroots, cut into wedges, and an equal amount of cubed butternut squash on top. (To roast, simply wrap the beets and squash in foil with olive oil and a sprig of rosemary and cook until tender.) Scatter over 50g of chopped and roasted hazelnuts, two teaspoons of za’atar , a coarsely chopped sprig of rosemary, a drizzle of olive oil, another of syrupy balsamic and seasoning. Serve Fragrant blood-orange and ricotta toasts Super simple: toast sliced sourdough. Spread each slice with ricotta and top with peeled and sliced blood-orange pieces. Drizzle with honey. Scatter with a…

PICASSO loved paper and he never threw a scrap of it away, firmly believing that ‘one is what one keeps’. A visit to the massive archives of the Musée Picasso in a suburb of Paris, from which about 80% of the loans to this exhibition came, reveals exactly how extensive his paper collection was. Not only did he keep thousands of sketches and graphic works, he also hoarded all manner of paper ephemera, including bus tickets, letters, newsprint, pieces of wallpaper and bottle labels. Many of these fragments made surprising reappearances in his art: magazine photographs were doctored with comic figures, slivers of ugly wallpaper or pages from newspapers were incorporated into collages; a paper napkin was torn to resemble his lover Dora Maar’s beloved pet dog after it died.…