Country Life

We’re taking a break, and while I’m not sure when we’ll be back, I am sure we will be back. The world of digital media moves quickly, which is somewhat anathema to the work we do at Country Life. While I have enjoyed every single episode we have made , it is absolutely time to have a look at refreshing, updating and improving the format of the podcast we produce, so that is what we are going to do...

Here at Country Life, we love the Chelsea Flower Show — and we know you do too. So we're absolutely delighted to bring you this very special edition of the Country Life Podcast, recorded live in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, with Clive Nichols and Kathryn Bradley-Hole. Kathryn was Country Life's gardens editor for 18 years until moving on to concentrate on writing, and has a life...

Britain is full of architectural talent and ideas. So why is our affordable housing in such a state? 'We need to think of unusual sites and then do something special with them,' says the architecture critic and writer Jonathan Glancey, who joins James Fisher on this week's Country Life Podcast. Making housing better for all of us — not just the privileged few — is at the heart of the dis...

Bethany Handley was always an outdoorsy kid. Climbing mountains, crossing rivers or surfing in the sea near her home in South Wales, she lived and worked in the wild, with a job as an outdoor activity instructor. All that changed in the matter of a few months as illness left her in a wheelchair. Instead of being out and about, she found herself in a rural home where all the paths she once walked w...

Your grandmother was right: going for a walk really does do you a power of good. Just how much, though, is something that we're only just beginning to discover — a point made beautifully by the writer and researcher Annabel Streets, who joins James Fisher on this week's Country Life Podcast. Annabel's book The Walking Cure has been hugely successful, and she spoke to us on the eve of its pape...

A wise man once said to me, about buying a house, that you ‘have to remember that this is the most money you will spend on anything, ever, so you want to make sure you get it right’. It’s probably best, therefore, to make sure that the people advising you know a thing or two about the market and property, and come loaded with bags of experience about the finer workings of buying and selling your h...

Depending on who you ask, the food and drink scene in London is either in a state of despair or it's never been in better health. As always, when there is this much noise, it's best to get an expert on to cut a path through the metaphorical fog. Who could be better than Leonie Cooper, food and drink editor at Time Out London , and co-host of Messy Lunch with Gizzi Erskine. Where can you meet a man...

Each year, the Country Life Top 100 names the very finest country house architects, interior designers, landscapers, garden designers and craftspeople in Britain. It's one of the magazine's undisputed highlights of the year, with our interiors expert Giles Kime spending months alongside experts from across the country to produce the final list. We're delighted, then, that Giles joins James Fisher...

On March 26, it will have been precisely 300 years since the death of Sir John Vanbrugh, the visionary architect behind buildings such as Blenheim Palace, Castle Howard, and Seaton Delaval. He is, without a doubt, one of the most influential ‘surveyors’ (as they were known back then) in British history. To talk about John, we needed the help of another man called John. The one and only Dr John Goo...

The River Tamar that forms the Devon-Cornwall border comes within four miles of making Cornwall an island. In and around the Scottish Borders, many people define themselves as Bordermen first, and Scottish or English second. And the the great medieval border created in the years of Danelaw both split Britain, and lives on today as one of the biggest roads in the country. These are just a few of th...

The more things change, the more they stay the same. As the Formula One season kicked off on Sunday, we saw the advent of full hybrid racing at the top level for the first time. A full 50/50 split between internal combustion and electrical power at the pinnacle of motorsport. Quite the change. And then Mercedes ran off into the distance. More of the same (mostly). The world of cars is changing, sl...

The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim was an icon. As the creative force behind a string of huge musicals — including West Side Story and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum — he is widely regarded as the 'Shakespeare of the musical'. Sondheim's life and legacy are the subject of a new podcast entitled Loving You: The Untold Sondheim,  hosted by two close friends of...

Novelist, biographer, journalist and writer Justine Picardie joins the Country Life Podcast to talk about her life in fashion and journalism, her writing, and her close encounters with the Royal Family — including the day she found herself in a remote Scottish bothy, helping the late Queen Elizabeth II clean up after lunch. Subscribe to the Country Life podcast on Apple Podcasts Subscribe to...

Is it worth the effort? That’s the question that many people might ask themselves as they stand in the doorway of a knackered old house in the Cotswolds, wondering whether to buy it and start renovating. For Jim Chapman, author, illustrator, presenter, occasional model, fashionable dad and social media star, the answer was ‘yes’. And so began the year-long (and still ongoing) odyssey of transforma...

For as long as he can remember, the writer and illustrator Aidan Meighan has been inspired by Nature. His early exploits might not have been entirely welcomed by those around him — collecting and storing slugs and snails in a cupboard at school, and stashing a dead adder in a drawer at his parents' home — but they paved the way for a career illustrating the beauty of the natural world, both i...

Tom Hilder was born to a life in the country. Born in rural Scotland but raised in Hampshire, he went through school always thinking – and being told — that he needed to find a life, and a career, out in the countryside, working with his hands. A chance meeting with a lecturer at Sparsholt College changed his life for good, and put him on a pathway to become (deep breath) the 'Senior Nat...

It's just over two years ago that the journalist Katharine Hay, a year into her new job as rural affairs correspondent for The Scotsman newspaper, had an epiphany. '98% of Scotland is rural,' she recalls thinking, 'and here I am sitting in the two per cent urban area. It really doesn't feel like I'm doing the role justice.' What Katharine decided next changed her life: she decided to walk the leng...

It's 2006. Tony Blair is the Prime Minister, George W. Bush the US President, the existence of global warming is still up for debate, and a couple of new websites come out of early test versions to open their doors to the world: YouTube and Facebook. Amid all this, in an office on London's South Bank, Mark Hedges takes a new job: Editor of Country Life magazine. Two decades later, Mark has passed...

In the last 20 years, the world of whisky has exploded, being transformed beyond recognition. What was once a croft industry in the Scottish Highlands and Islands has spread around the world. The Scots' craft has spread out across the world, from Ireland and Wales to Japan, India and beyond. In India alone, tens of millions of cases of whisky are made each year. And even the English have been gett...

An off-grid lodge in the Canadian Wilderness? The colourful charm of Germany? A weekend jaunt to New York? Or perhaps a palazzo in Florence? Rosie Paterson, who is both Country Life's Travel Editor and Digital Content Director, has done all of this and more in 2025, and she joins James Fisher on this week's Country Life Podcast to talk about the best places to go in 2026. The good news is that Ros...

Country Life's features editor Paula Minchin is a force of nature. Every week she steers her team of editors and writers through the creation of dozens of pages of magazine features, with hardly a glitch and never, ever a missed deadline. So when Country Life brings in a guest editor — something which has happened five times in the past 12 years — it's Paula who is at the helm alongside our t...

In the heady days of mid-1990s Britain, the actor Adrian Lukis went to a screen test for a glossy new drama: an adaptation of Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice . To an actor, auditions come and go — most don't work out — and having hated the book while at school, he didn't have high hopes. They fell even lower when he bumped in to his rival for the part of Mr Wickham, a dashing...

What makes Country Life? Country houses, gardens, nature, fine art — and dogs. Right from the first issue of the print magazine in 1897, Man's Best Friend has been right at the heart of Country Life — with that original edition featuring an article on Princess Alexandra and her Borzois. Almost 130 years later, dogs are just as important as ever, and September 2025 saw the publication of Count...

The ancient and noble art of falconry has been practised for thousands of years, but it's rarely been more easily accessible to the curious. Today, there are places across Britain, Ireland and the rest of the world where you can go on a hawk walk — or an an owl prowl — accompanied by an expert guide and a bird of prey, to see for yourself how these majestic creatures fly and hunt. One such expert...

A few years ago, Amelia Thomas and her husband packed up their fast-paced lives and moved to a remote farm in Nova Scotia. Faced with a desolate landscape, appalling weather and a husband who — like most Finns — abhorred small-talk, she found herself spending more and more time listening to the animals she cared for in her house and on her farm. And at that point, something magical began to h...