Innholdsfortegnelse for 4-Jan-2023 i Country Life

January Art London Art Fair brings together more than 100 galleries showcasing contemporary artworks from the early 20th century to today. January 18–22 at the Business Design Centre, 52, Upper Street, N1 (www.londonartfair.co.uk) Opera The Irish National Opera’s run of Least Like the Other: Searching for Rosemary Kennedy (facing page) is a thought-provoking work about the older sister of former President John F. Kennedy. January 15–19 at The Linbury Theatre, 35–36, Bow Street, WC2 (www.irishnationalopera.ie) Music The Piccadilly Sinfonietta will tackle Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by Candlelight and other timeless classics, January 28, at St James’ Church, 197, Piccadilly, W1 (www.sjp.org.uk) February Theatre The Globe Theatre (21, Globe Walk, SE1) and Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (21, New Globe Walk, SE1) will both stage performances of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, to mark…

Letter of the week Hello, Reynard ON one of the busiest Christmas shopping days in December, we suddenly saw a fox coming through the front door of our shop in Walton Street in Knightsbridge. It trotted through the shoppers to the far end, where it stopped among the fabric-pattern books. After a panic about how to get it out again, one of the designers calmly picked it up and transported it outside. It went completely limp and didn’t mind being carried. It was very unlike any country foxes, which might have bitten her! Jane Morris, managing director, Percy Bass, London The writer of the letter of the week will win a bottle of Pol Roger Brut Réserve Champagne Contact us (photographs welcome) Email: countrylife.letters@futurenet.com Post: COUNTRY LIFE, 121–141,…

1914 Published April 18 Two farm hands ride out from the farm at Poxwell Manor, Dorset. The house was praised in COUNTRY LIFE for preserving its 17th-century character and the farm for its ‘unstudied arrangement’. From this image, it seems unimaginable that Britain was only a few months away from war. Every week for the past 125 years, COUNTRY LIFE has documented and photographed many walks of life in Britain. More than 80,000 of the images are available for syndication or purchase in digital format. To view the archives, visit www.countrylifeimages.co.uk and email enquiries to licensing@futurenet.com…

POPULAR photographs of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct show walkers blithely passing along its narrow towpath and canal boats inching along an 11ft-wide trough as their occupants airily gaze into the far distance, as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be 130ft up in the air with nothing more than a thin metal handrail on one side and a gaping void on the other between them and the River Dee far below. Not a venture to be undertaken on a gusty day or, for acrophobics, on any sort of day. The UNESCO World Heritage Site citation for the longest and highest navigable waterway in the world (the aqueduct was formally added to the World Heritage List in 2009) describes the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct as ‘a pioneering masterpiece of…

FOR most of us, Twelfth Night is the day we tear down tinsel and wrestle a desiccated tree out of the front door, but, up until the late 19th century, it was a time of feasting and merriment, second in importance only to Christmas Day. Fires were lit in the fields and revellers would go from door to door playing practical jokes on their neighbours. Also known as the Feast of Fools, Twelfth Night marked the end of the festive period and, in echoes of the ancient Roman midwinter festival of Saturnalia, in which social order was reversed, it gave everyone the chance to dispense with normal conventions. Today, as have festivals such as Shrovetide and Whitsun, it has lost its meaning and dissolved into a lacklustre end of Christmas.…

HAMAMELIS—witch hazels—are one of the great revelations of the garden in winter. They flower for about six weeks and are hardy everywhere in the British Isles. In large spaces, they are the mainstay of the winter display, offering a succession of flowers and a choice of colours between December and March. Yellow cultivars are more conspicuous, but orange and red hamamelis are pretty when cut for the house, where they will remain in flower for a fortnight—longer than most plants. Hamamelis is a genus in a very active state of evolution Hamamelis is a genus in a very active state of horticultural evolution. No one knows this better than Chris Lane, who grafts and sells plants on his open days—although they can also be grown with difficulty from softwood cuttings—and…

I WOULD like my daughter to dance at the Palace,’ remarked King Albert of Belgium when he brought the Queen and Princess Marie José to Mürren for a skiing holiday in January 1929. ‘But this may be against the rules, because she did not attend an English public school.’ Perched on a cliff edge opposite the crowning peaks of the Bernese Oberland, pre-war Mürren was an unofficial British colony in the Swiss Alps, thanks to Sir Henry Lunn, who reserved its hotels for members of his socially exclusive holiday company, the Public Schools Alpine Sports Club. The Swiss used to joke that you needed a British passport to board the train at Lauterbrunnen. Lunn laid on ice rinks and fancy-dress balls for clients, as his son Arnold organised ski instruction,…

IT all started with a chunk of Parmesan. George Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, sent the cheese, together with seemingly innocent letters, to Lady Mary Anne Sturt, wife of his friend and fellow MP Charles Sturt. But concealed inside the envelopes were passionate love letters: ‘I can think of nothing else but you,’ wrote the Marquess when he feared she was ill. ‘I have never felt such a tremor as I do now!’ Unfortunately for him, Sturt chanced upon one of the hidden letters and sued Blandford. Only the vagaries of Georgian politics prevented awkward encounters between the two under the Gothic turrets of the Houses of Parliament: the Marquess had briefly stopped serving during his dalliance and, when he returned, Sturt lost his seat. Blandford, however, was soon dogged by…

THERE are many more beautiful buildings in London, but few sit quite so spectacularly in the cityscape as the Alexandra Palace. To reach its spot at the top of a 300ft hill, guidebooks suggest walking from Alexandra Park station (the attraction was once served by its own branch line), which enables the visitor to admire the extensive prospects of the capital below. But an alternative approach is from the Muswell Hill side, starting at the bottom of the hill. Climbing the slope through the trees, you get an arresting view of the building itself. It’s quite a montage. The long, terraced frontage has the massiveness of a national museum and a gabled central arch with a large circular window is akin to a cathedral. The round-headed openings above the colonnade…

Fabric of our past SOME 240 sites were added to the National Heritage List for England last year, Historic England has announced. Among the sites are a Lake District watermill once painted by Constable, a Georgian folly in Cornwall, trenches in Norfolk that were used to train soldiers in the First World War and a 1920s sunken garden commissioned by Victoria, Lady Sackville, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and featured in COUNTRY LIFE in 1927. The garden, at White Lodge in Brighton, is now listed Grade II. It is a striking example of Lutyens’s landscaping style and a manifestation of the relationship with his patron Lady Sackville, which was the subject of much gossip. The garden survives today with most of its original structure intact and shows Lutyens’s style…

ONE summer’s day in 1889, the 20-year-old Edwin Lutyens went to a tea party in the Surrey hills, near the village where he had grown up. At this party, he met the gardener Gertrude Jekyll, a lady who was more than 20 years his senior, well connected and a skilful craftswoman. Conversation between them did not flow, but, as she was on the point of stepping onto her pony cart, she asked him to call on her the next day at Munstead House, outside Godalming. It was the beginning of an exceptional friendship. With her strong ideas about homes, she shaped the young man as an architect—not least by entrusting him with the design of her own home of Munstead Wood. Impishly, Lutyens caricatured Jekyll in his letters to his…

NO animal,’ Kenneth Grahame wrote in The Wind In The Willows, ‘is ever expected to do anything strenuous, or heroic, or even moderately active during the off-season of winter.’ After the exertions of the festive season, it can be very tempting to hide away in your study like Badger until the first snowdrops appear. However, conserving resources needn’t mean total hibernation. There are at least two dozen ways to have fun in 2023; to enjoy many of them, nothing more strenuous than stepping outside is required—Badger would approve—and most won’t cost you a penny. Instead, they will encourage us to slow down and appreciate what we have. Take this list as a jumping-off point and channel the spirit of travel guides such as Wilkie Collins’s freewheeling Rambles Beyond Railways, published…

AS did so many business owners, Andrew Cussins, founder of Sofas & Stuff, had a challenge on his hands. ‘Cast your mind back to the beginning of the first lockdown,’ he says. ‘As a furniture retailer with lots of bricks-and-mortar shops that were shut, I was absolutely panicking.’ After a miserable morning spent attempting to negotiate reductions in rent with the landlords of his stores, he found himself facing more gloomy hours ahead. ‘I sat there thinking there’s got to be something better I can do with this afternoon than argue with landlords,’ he recalls. Picking up a copy of the textile magazine Selvedge, he began flicking through its pages. ‘As I looked at the pictures of artisanal fabrics and weavers from around the planet, it hit me that we…

TWENTY years ago, an acquaintance said I might be interested in ‘this chap who’s planting like a forest, only it’s food’. I scoured the internet, I tracked him down, and persuaded him to let me visit. The subsequent day I spent with Martin Crawford caused a complete turn in my kitchen-garden mindset. This, he explained, was a forest garden. Rather than follow the traditional kitchen-garden approach with annual vegetables planted in lines and grown almost in two-dimensional format, a forest garden is designed to mimic a natural woodland, planned and planted in integrated tiers, starting with the canopy, beneath which smaller trees, shrubs and herbaceous layers flourished, together with ground-cover and subterranean harvests, each linked by climbers. The emphasis on perennial plants brings resilience and a long productive season: after…

FOR the past few days, I have been nursing a winter cold, which has got me thinking about gorillas—a peculiar non-sequitur if ever there was one, but hear me out. That we human beings share all but 1.6% of our DNA with gorillas is well known, hence the painful, but logical truth that our nasty diseases can be shared with them, too—although only, mind you, the transmissible respiratory ones, because humans, as a rule, tend not to get up close and personal enough with their mighty primate cousins to pass on anything else. Up close, however, in my experience at least, isn’t always avoidable. Gorillas, it transpires, have as little understanding of the seven-metre separation rule imposed by conservation guidelines as humans had of the two-metre rule during…

What part of London is home for you? I’ve lived off Cleaver Square in Kennington for the past 15 years. Much of Georgian Kennington is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall estate and, luckily, it escaped the wrecking balls of the 1960s. Cleaver Square is one of London’s finest, hosting up to 10 games of boules a night in summer on the green. I’m an émigré from Chelsea and was lucky enough to grow up opposite the houseboats on Chelsea Embankment. It was quite an edgy place to be in the 1970s; I thought becoming a King’s Road Punk was one of the Seven Ages of Man. The King’s Road is now about as edgy as Esher. Where are your favourite places to eat and drink around the Old Bailey,…

THE longhorn, with its crescent-shaped horns and attractive red-roan colouring, is one of the most majestic of beasts and speaks of Constable paintings and gracious meadows—the cattle may be found adorning the grounds of Dunster Castle in Somerset, Haddon Hall in Derbyshire and Cornbury Park in Oxfordshire. Longhorns are hardy and have become useful contributors to conservation projects—individual animals are said to be able to carry the seeds of 230 plant species, nearly 10 times that of a roe deer. The longhorn was originally a triple-purpose breed, for ploughing, milk and beef, in the north of England, but, in the 18th century, attracted the attention of the influential producer and ‘improver’ Robert Bakewell of Dishley Grange, Leicestershire, who had no time for dairying and developed them as early-maturing beef animals…

THE 250-year-old cottage that has been my home for 40 years is surrounded by a host of animals. There are badgers in a sett at the edge of the field behind us, where it touches the woods that run down to the stream. This is on the north-facing side of the hill on which we’ve perched all these years. To our east is the start of the deer-haunted woods, a remnant of the ancient forest of Anderida. In summer, our garden and its sheds and stables are home to swallows. In winter, the robins grow tame for crumbs. All about, there is the call of wood pigeons, crows and, now and then, the screech of a pheasant in whirring flight. In spring, the woodpeckers return to drum on the old…

SET against a backdrop of tight supply and increased demand from private and institutional investors alike, the value of English farmland soared in 2022 to levels last seen in 2016. Alex Lawson of Savills, who were joint agents with Bidwells in the disposal of the two most important farming estates sold in England this year, sets the scene: ‘With the supply of farmland offered for sale in 2022 the lowest in years at 120,000 acres, compared with a 10-year average of 150,000 acres, there was intense competition for two prime arable estates, the 4,179-acre Coldham estate near Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, and the 4,206-acre Goole estate in East Yorkshire, which were offered for sale in April with a combined asking price of £87.5 million and sold for more than the guide…

Butter-chicken and broccoli curry Method In a bowl, mix together the Greek yoghurt, lemon juice, garlic, ginger and spices until the spices are evenly distributed. Stir in the chicken slices, cover the bowl and leave in the fridge for a few hours—or, ideally, overnight—to marinate. Add a splash of olive oil to a large frying pan. Fry the marinaded chicken pieces until browned and charring on the edges, then remove to a plate. Fry the sliced onion in the same frying pan, adding a little more olive oil if needed. When soft, add the garlic, grated ginger and garam masala, heating to release the flavours, and then add the tamarind. Pour in the tomatoes and stock and simmer over a medium heat for 15 minutes. Return the chicken to…

ROME is impossible. Too much; too beautiful; too outstanding. I have yet to walk into the Pantheon and not be astonished at its beauty. Go early or late to avoid the queues; it is a great place to visit on a rainy day as the precipitation falls though the oculus and onto the floor. Even Byron struggled to make sense of the dome: ‘Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime.’ Constructed during the reign of Augustus, it was rebuilt by Hadrian in about AD126. It is one of the best preserved of all Ancient Roman buildings—thanks to it being converted into a Christian church by Pope Boniface IV. It is my favourite building in Italy and I would never visit the Italian capital without stepping inside. However, the best way to make…