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29 Articles

Hampshire on a high

Future Publishing Ltd, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London W2 6JR 0330 390 6591; www.countrylife.co.uk IN case you are wondering, the place to go on holiday this year is, according to The New York Times’s 50 places to visit in 2025, Jane Austen’s England. Yes, Hampshire trumps the Galápagos Islands, New York’s own revamped museum spaces, the Indian state of Assam, White Lotus Thailand—and Greenland. The next European destination listed is Cézanne’s home town of Aix-en-Provence, France, in seventh place. The Austen salutation cites, of course, celebrations for the 250th anniversary of her birth, many of which are in Hampshire, at her birthplace of Steventon, her brother’s home at Chawton and her grave in Winchester Cathedral. Austenmania (‘Hold on to your bonnets’, page 60) shows no signs of abating and Hampshire, a county rarely…

Hampshire on a high

Across the universe

FOR the first time ever, the World Monuments Fund (WMF) has gone inter-planetary; the Moon is among 25 sites on its 2025 Watch list, a biennial round-up that identifies places facing major challenges, such as climate change, tourism, conflict and natural disaster. There are more than 90 locations on the lunar surface where spacecraft have made historic landings, with relics including humanity’s first footprints there, courtesy of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, and part of Tranquility Base, Apollo 11’s landing site, together with more than 100 other artefacts. ‘Items such as the camera that captured the televised Moon landing; a memorial disk left by astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin; and hundreds of other objects are emblematic of this legacy. Yet, they face mounting risks amid accelerating lunar activities, undertaken without…

Across the universe

Town & Country Notebook

Quiz of the week 1) Where in the human body are the metatarsal bones located? 2) What is the name of the dog in The Magic Roundabout? 3) In the rhyme beginning ‘Monday’s child is fair of face’, which day’s child works hard for a living? 4) Which purple-flowered plant can be ‘dog’ or ‘sweet’? 5) In which century was Sir Walter Raleigh born? Riddle me this Two sailors on the same ship’s deck can both see each other, yet one is looking north and one is looking south. How is this possible? 1) Feet 2) Dougal 3) Saturday 4) Violet 5) 16th century. Riddle me this: They each have their back to the side of the ship and are looking across it Time to buy On this day… January 22, 1901 Queen Victoria died at 6.30pm at Osborne House on the…

Town & Country Notebook

Letters to the Editor

Pointing to the past YOUR image of the newly listed fingerpost (Town & Country, January 8) brought to mind this pair. The older one (left) has a carved stone base that details the distances and if you have a magnifying glass, you will see the date: 1739. The fingerposts are at the junction of the Trough of Bowland road and the road to the hamlet of Dunsop Bridge in Lancashire—allegedly the geographical centre of Britain. Michael Finch, by email Walk like a Roman MY heart leapt when I saw Fiona Reynolds had chosen Cwm Bychan with the Roman Steps along the Barmouth Ridge (‘For every walk of life’, January 8). More than 50 years ago, as a student at Coleg Harlech, Gwynedd, I climbed those steps. It was autumn and we experienced a…

Letters to the Editor

Beware forever chemicals

IN the early days of television cookery programmes, the irrepressible Fanny Cradock used to fulminate about non-stick pans. ‘Where do you think that coating goes, as it inevitably wears off?’ she would ask. ‘I don’t want it in my food!’ Now, 50 years later, it turns out that her instinct was right. The ‘forever chemicals’ that were heralded as such a perfect breakthrough are seen today as a serious threat, not only to our food, but to our health and the wider environment. PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), to give them their proper name, are the some 10,000 human-created compounds that we find in non-stick pans, pizza boxes, waterproof clothing, cosmetics and fire-fighting foam. They seemed to be a wonderful answer to so many simple problems. Non-stick, heatproof, greaseproof, stainproof and…

Beware forever chemicals

Our great houses glitter in fresh eyes EARLIER this month, a short video was posted on the social-media feed of No 10 Downing Street showing the Prime Minister giving the French President a tour of his country retreat at Chequers, Buckinghamshire. It’s unlikely that either man was aware of the fact, but the first official visit of a senior French politician to the house was a comic disaster. It took place as part of the very first Chequers conference, which was held on October 13–14, 1917, immediately after the owners, Lord and Lady Lee, had announced to a delighted and war-weary nation that the house and its collections would be placed in an independent trust for the benefit of British Prime Ministers as ‘a place of peace and rest and beauty’.…

My favourite painting Jennifer Francis

‘The Migration Series’ by Jacob Lawrence ‘Jacob Lawrence’s “The Migration Series” is an absolute favourite of mine, especially Panels 1, 45 and 60. These works capture the essence of the Great Migration. Panel 1 shows families gathered at a train station, ready to leave the South. Lawrence’s warm tones–rich browns and ochres–create anticipation. The scene pulses with the energy of a new beginning. In Panel 45, reality sets in. Lawrence’s cooler blues and greys reflect the challenges of life in the North. A resilience shines through, like the spirit of jazz and the reality of the blues. Panel 60 looks forward with hope. Lawrence’s warm reds and golds return. It’s a reminder that this journey wasn’t only about escape–but creating a new identity that would fuel the Harlem Renaissance in music,…

My favourite painting Jennifer Francis

Regency revival

Brockfield Hall, North Yorkshire The home of Mr Charlie and the Hon Mrs Wood BROCKFIELD HALL was the creation of a certain Benjamin Preston Agar, who succinctly recorded its construction in his personal account book: ‘Commenced the building of my mansion house [at] Brockfield in 1804 and on August 12th 1807 came to live in it.’ A well-lettered date stone inscribed ‘BA 1804’ survives in the house, but the completion of works took rather longer than this note implies. Agar’s surviving account book with its disbursements and accompanying vouchers and bills have been discussed in detail by Margaret Boustead in the North Yorkshire Record Office Publications no.55 (1994). As Giles Worsley explained in a slightly earlier account of the history of Brockfield (COUNTRY LIFE, March 9, 1989), these show that the new…

Regency revival

The legacy Bamber Gascoigne and University Challenge

THE famed BBC2 quiz programme University Challenge was adapted from an American show, College Bowl, by Granada TV in 1962, but it was Bamber Gascoigne who set the tone—and the questions—during his 25-year run as presenter. Viewing figures peaked at about 12 million during Gascoigne’s reign, although the programme was taken off air in 1987 due to dipping numbers; it now commands some 1.9 million viewers. Gascoigne coined phrases such as ‘Fingers on buzzers’, ‘No conferring’ and ‘Your starter for 10’ and would gently nudge ‘I’m going to have to hurry you’ in gentler tones than his successor—from 1994—Jeremy Paxman (‘Do come on!’), whose put downs were legendary. When Gascoigne died in 2022, aged 87, former contestant Bobby Seagull described him as ‘scholarly, gentle, yet commanding’ and Only Connect host Victoria…

The legacy Bamber Gascoigne and University Challenge

Charmed, I’m sure

THE scene was little more than a square of bare earth on the edge of a busy road at the outskirts of Buxton, Derbyshire. It was loud with traffic, battered by rain and devoid of signs of Nature, except that rutted lorry tracks had given rise to a flourishing bank of thistles and this had lured in a dozen birds. It was a ‘charm’ of goldfinches. These joyous little creatures seemed as indifferent to the weather as they were to the disturbance and, in gaps left by relentless car noise, they inserted snatches of their lovely liquid calls. Dancing from one wizened plant to another, they unfolded as momentary patterns of crimson and yellow. What really transformed the birds to a kind of epiphany was that I noticed how, as they fed…

Charmed, I’m sure

Squeeze the day

IN her lovely book The Land Where Lemons Grow (2015), Helena Attlee watches Sicilian cooks making marmalade with both sweet and sour oranges, red grapefruit and clementines. She calls those British people who think only Sevilles will do ‘marmalade fundamentalists’. I admit to being one of them and I’m in good company: the late Alan Davidson, author of the magisterial The Oxford Companion To Food (1999), observed, ‘only bitter oranges can be used to make proper marmalade’. The nation’s loyalty to the Seville can be attributed to a storm at the beginning of the 18th century that drove a Spanish ship laden with Sevilles to take shelter in a Dundee harbour. As Mrs Attlee has recorded, a local grocer called James Keiller bought the cargo, only to discover the oranges were…

Squeeze the day

Hold on to your bonnets

MY plastic surgeon doesn’t want me doing any activity where balls fly at my nose,’ advises Amber. ‘Well, there goes your social life,’ quips Dionne. Is this the sort of witticism that Jane Austen would have written had she been born, say, 50 years ago instead of 250? The 1995 film Clueless, based on Austen’s Emma (1815) and set in a Beverly Hills high school, became a cult classic, grossing $88 million (£67.8 million)—more than twice as much as the traditional film adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow of 1996. Austen’s novels were published anonymously and read by a few thousand (including the Prince Regent), but she was almost unknown upon her death in 1817 and many of her books went out of print. It wasn’t until a biography written by her nephew…

Hold on to your bonnets

The designer’s room

WITH contacts in the film industry, Mitch Crook, creative director of the design practice Hotel Creative, was given first refusal on the bathroom used on the set of the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. It was a faithful replica of the one in Garden Lodge, Kensington, London W8, the house that Queen’s singer-songwriter owned from 1980 until he died in 1991. Once filming had been completed, the main components, which had all been designed by Drummonds, needed a new home. Mr Crook, a fan of the band’s music, bought the pieces and put them away in storage for the right project. Three years later, an opportunity arose when Mr Crook was working on redesigning a five-bedroom Queen Anne house in Surrey. The owners were particularly dissatisfied with the main bathroom and…

The designer’s room

All that glisters

All that glisters

The army officer-turned-management consultant Six months ago, Joffy was deploying a battalion of infantrymen to eastern Europe; now, he’s bent over a laptop bound for Waterloo amending the fonts on a PowerPoint presentation. Yet old habits die hard and, on the eve of a commute, he polishes his shoes (he’s the only management consultant not in trainers) and preloads his cufflinks into his shirt, ready to do battle on the 06:24. In the depths of January, he puts his half-alive station runner through the wringer along the icy Dorset lanes—this is the SAS of commuting, more than two hours each way on the stopping service—but, by late April, he’s rewarded by stepping off the train into a Thomas Hardy nirvana. Lunchtime is spent romping along the Embankment at tabbing pace and, on the…

WHEN, in 2001, investment guru Paul Brown and his wife, Maggie, decided to move from Hong Kong, via Yorkshire, to Kent with their three young children, their search agent was instructed to find them a family home near a good village with ‘uninterrupted views and no other building in sight’. The couple’s prayers were answered when their search fell upon The Old Vicarage at Hawkhurst, a pretty, but dilapidated Georgian country house set in 6½ acres of gardens and paddock in the lee of Grade I-listed St Laurence Church on the southern edge of the village, close to the East Sussex border and within the picturesque High Weald National Landscape. The only building visible from the house, which overlooks the Weald, is St Laurence’s 75ft-tall bell tower, which boasts ‘a…

Those old familiar faces

East Sussex, £3.25 million A 15th-century piece of rock-and-roll history wrapped in a moat, Horselunges Manor in the village of Hellingly was once the home of Peter Grant, the revered manager of Led Zeppelin who ‘could out-talk anybody’ and pioneered a new standard of management that ensured his band could focus on albums over singles and reap their just rewards. Beyond the studded oak front door, medieval grandeur reigns in the Great Parlour, with its timber frame, window seats and massive brick fireplace, and the billiard and sitting rooms are equally impressive; in contrast, the sizeable kitchen has been thoroughly modernised, as has a triple-aspect gym with vaulted ceiling. There are six bedrooms in the main house, with further accommodation in a two-bedroom annexe, a two-bedroom cottage and a two/three-bedroom flat…

Those old familiar faces

Coming up roses

WHARTONS ROSES is the biggest rose producer in the British Isles. Its growing fields on the borders of Norfolk and Suffolk are a joy to see when they reach the peak of their flower power in late July. Whartons supplies many of the best rose nurseries and almost all Britain’s garden centres, but the company is not a household name because it is a wholesaler, not a retailer. It produces 1.5 million garden roses every year and its choice of varieties determines what retailers offer and gardeners buy. The heyday for roses was the middle of the 20th century. They were planted in vast numbers—50 or 100 of only one variety—in public parks and large private gardens, often as a cheap substitute for traditional summer bedding. British nurseries produced more than…

Coming up roses

EVERY good gardener knows that one of the chief joys of growing vegetables is seasonality. Those of us who, spurning greenery flown in from thousands of miles away, wait for the crops to ripen in due season and continue to experience that once-universal phenomenon of alternating glut and dearth, all or nothing at all, that marks the vegetable-lover’s year. Now that the days are short and the temperatures low, the options from the kitchen garden are relatively few, astonishingly so compared with autumn’s bounty, but there are treasures nonetheless in prospect. ‘I have never encountered a parsnip on a foreign plate’ Chief among these is the parsnip, that most British of root crops. I have eaten in several parts of Europe over many years, but never encountered it on a foreign plate.…

Kitchen garden cook Curly kale

Curly kale, mushroom and caramelised shallot tart with Gruyère crust Ingredients For the crust 200g plain flour100g butter, coldand cubed50g grated Gruyère2tbspn iced water For the filling A splash of olive oil4 shallots, thinly sliced200g mixed mushrooms, sliced1 clove garlic, grated200g curly kale3 eggs150ml double cream75g grated Gruyère Method 1 Put the flour into a large bowl and rub the butter into the flour with your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs. Mix in the Gruyère and add the water if needed to form a dough that comes together. Wrap in clingfilm and chill for 30 minutes. 2 Preheat your oven to 160˚C fan/180˚C/350˚F/gas mark 4. Roll out the dough between parchment paper to the thickness of a pound coin, peel away the paper and use the dough to line a 25cm (10in) tart tin. Prick the base all…

Kitchen garden cook Curly kale

Quick on the draw

TOM EDWARDS, managing director of art gallery Abbott and Holder, is busy practising self-delusion. ‘I am not a collector. My job brings me into contact with them every day, many are friends, but I know I am not one of them. The accumulation of pictures on my walls is the consequence of being a dealer, a sort of collateral damage. Why then,’ he ponders, ‘would I find it so difficult to part with this small, understated drawing by John Flaxman?’ Born in York, the son of a plaster-cast-maker, Flaxman (1775–1826) excelled at sculpture, but his fortune was founded on pottery and prints. A talented artist with a passion for classical subjects, he began exhibiting early and, by 1775, had started designing for Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery, including an Apotheosis of Homer that…

Quick on the draw

Dark of the sun

PINK blossoms explode on a tree, a hillside dissolves into autumn gold, a shepherd and his sheep lie safe in the crook of a hill and gleaners still toil at the end of a long harvest day, stars already blazing above them. These dazzling pictures now adorn a smart pub in a pretty Kent village, but patrons of the Samuel Palmer in Shoreham might be surprised if its artist namesake shuffled in, a stocky figure in thick, scratched spectacles, a wide-brimmed straw hat and a huge shabby coat with enormous pockets, possibly singing hymns or reciting lines from Milton at the top of his voice. ‘The treasury of stored images would last him the rest of his life’ He didn’t always look like that. The earliest-known image of Samuel Palmer, the 220th…

Dark of the sun

LAST November, it was announced that the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford had raised £4.48 million to purchase a gold-ground panel of the Crucifixion by the Florentine Dominican Fra Angelico (1395–1455). It had been in Britain for two centuries before it was acquired by an overseas owner and became subject to an export stop. A private treaty sale was negotiated, at a price distinctly below its probable value on the open market. Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) was born at about the time Fra Angelico died; by 1470, he was already establishing his career and even his early work demonstrates the speed with which Renaissance art was developing. Angelico was at the forefront of his generation, notably in his rational use of pictorial space and modelling of forms with light and shade, but there…

Onwards to Croydon!

I WAS recently told by a female friend that ‘every girl reads Ballet Shoes, no boy ever does’. A quick straw poll suggests there is some truth in this Wildean aphorism. I certainly came to the Olivier Theatre’s version of Noel Streatfeild’s novel in a state of total innocence and was bowled over by the story, the staging, the acting and the relevance of a 1936 book to today’s world. This is far and away the National’s best show since James Graham’s Dear England. Where to start? I assume my female readers will know that this is the story of three orphaned girls, brought up in the home of an eccentric professor, with distinct ambitions: for Pauline it is acting, for Posy it is dancing and for Petrova it is involvement…

Onwards to Croydon!

The architect as religious teacher

The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his times Nicholas Olsberg (Lund Humphries, £60) THE architect William Butterfield (1814–1900) has always divided opinion. He stands out among the leaders of the Gothic movement in the Victorian period for austere high-mindedness combined at times with a rich sense of materials and decoration. He was a deeply religious man, whose clients were devoted to the improvement of society through Christian worship and projects for education and health. His best-known buildings, All Saints, Margaret Street, in Marylebone, London W1, Keble College Oxford and Rugby School, Warwickshire, show his pleasure in using coloured brick, set in geometrical patterns, inside and outside. They were seen by later critics as examples of the incomprehensible otherness of the Victorians, even as a form of architectural sadism, although this interpretation was…

The architect as religious teacher

Bridge and crossword

Bridge I ENJOYED my week in Copenhagen late last year playing in a World Bridge Tour event. The WBT is a new development in our game, with the emphasis on fair play and respect—and so say all of us. I can’t lie, however, I did pretty badly. Every slam my partner Alex Allfrey bid seemed to go down (some on finesses, some much worse than that) and I went for more penalties than I can ever recall. In jest, my teammates started referring to us as ‘the Eight Bills’ given the number of 800 penalties my partner and I suffered (okay, we had some good results, too, but …). Here was a typical failed slam. How would you declare Six Clubs after West (a) leads the Ace of Spades and switches to a…

Bridge and crossword

Who let the dogs out?

AS we wait for our new gates to be fitted, the dogs cannot simply be turned out in the morning, but must be supervised. Naturally, I wear the correct dress for a gentleman exercising his hounds at home before breakfast, viz. unlaced boots, mismatched pyjamas, an old jacket and, on soft days, Great Uncle Martin’s pith helmet. Our blue whippet Elsa’s primary concern in the winter is to get back to her basket by the kitchen stove and as soon as she has finished her doggy business she presses herself against the back door and quivers. Our bichon, Cosmo, on the other hand, must be watched like a hawk as he is inclined, for no discernible reason, to take off. Despite having very short legs—I have measured them and they are…

Who let the dogs out?

TOTTERING-BY-GENTLY

Visit Tottering-By-Gently on our website: www.countrylife.co.uk/tottering We are committed to only using magazine paper which is derived from responsibly managed, certified forestry and chlorine-free manufacture. The paper in this magazine was sourced and produced from sustainable managed forests, conforming to strict environmental and socioeconomic standards. All contents © 2025 Future Publishing Limited or published under licence. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be used, stored, transmitted or reproduced in any way without the prior written permission of the publisher. Future Publishing Limited (company number 2008885) is registered in England and Wales. Registered office: Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All information contained in this publication is for information only and is, as far as we are aware, correct at the time of going to press. Future cannot accept…

TOTTERING-BY-GENTLY

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