Your Places or Mine

Send us Fan Mail As a great expert on the English castle, John has been thinking about one of the great icons of England: Warwick Castle.  This extraordinary building, created over centuries, has come down to us intact, not having been slighted after the Civil War in the 17th century – something exceptional. Equally remarkable is the mythology that surrounds the place, including the medieval legen...

Send us Fan Mail Clive has taken the riverboat to Greenwich, one of the most spectacular sites of London.  ‘Good Duke’ Humphrey, brother of Henry V, built a retreat here in the 15th century, which Henry VII developed into a palace.  This was where Henry VIII jousted in his early years, and where his armour was made.  To the early Stuarts Greenwich’s was important from its position at the mouth of...

Send us Fan Mail Doddington Hall in Lincolnshire is one of those country houses you find only in Britain.  The attics are full of old toys, military headgear, unwanted commodes and a giant figure of the White Rabbit, left over from an Alice in Wonderland-themed event.  A collection of Roman antiquities, some found on the estate, is displayed in the downstairs lavatory, along with a child’s pedal-o...

Send us Fan Mail Clive and John have both been to Stansted Park, outside Chichester, though at different times.  Clive remembers it from the time he helped the owner Eric Bessborough revise a book in the 1980s, whereas John’s connection is more recent.  They both find it an astonishing example of an economic revival, apparently inspired by the Covid years when the public was desperate for open spa...

Send us Fan Mail John has been to Cambridge to see the castle, the mound of which still survives.  Although a graduate of Peterhouse and now a Visiting Professor of Architecture, associated with the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at Downing College, Clive comes new to this early history but many stories of more recent times.  Together the pair mull over the developme...

Send us Fan Mail Clive is writing a book for Yale University Press on the Story of the American Country House. John indulges him by discussing an introductory overview of the subject, with which Clive has been engaged since Yale published his The American Country House in 1990.  Here is a rich and colourful theme, celebrating a sometimes spectacular architectural tradition shaped by remarkable ind...

Send us Fan Mail When the German Prince Puckler Muskau visited England in 1826, he told his divorced wife that it would take her ‘at least 420 years to see all the parks of England, of which there are undoubtedly at least 100,000, for they swarm in every direction.’  One of the most splendid was that at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The garden was accompanied by an equally important country house, if...

Send us Fan Mail ‘Let’s all go down the Strand!’ ran a popular music hall song.  But what sort of street were they singing about?  The future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli called it ‘perhaps the finest street in Europe’ in 1847.  Which is quite a claim to live up to.  Certainly the Strand, one of London’s most famous and important thoroughfares, has had a long and colourful history, with much s...

Send us Fan Mail The Laskett in Herefordshire is one of the most remarkable gardens to have been created in the 20th century but now it’s future is threatened.  Sir Roy Strong, scholar, museum director and the author of over 70 erudite books, and his theatre-designer wife Julia Trevelyan Oman created it as a bolt hole from London, beginning in 1973 – a bleak time of industrial unrest and inflation...

Send us Fan Mail One of the most famous Catholic schools in Britain, Ampleforth College in Yorkshire this year celebrates the centenary of its chapel, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.  Scott has emerged in recent years as a colossus of 20th-century architecture, bestriding it alike with his religious buildings – notably the Anglican cathedral in Liverpool – and his secular designs, such as Bat...

Send us Fan Mail Few houses better convey the opulence of Edwardian country house life than Manderston in the Scottish Borders. Built in the first years of the 20th century, it is an exquisite work of the scholarly architect John Kinross – which has always been kept up to the high standards set by Kinross’s client, the racehorse owner Sir James Miller.  Clive reveals a particular affection for Kin...

Send us Fan Mail The fascinating city of Norwich, capital of Norfolk, was one of the richest town in England during the Middle Ages.  The cathedral dates from the early Norman period, as does the Castle which has recently been magnificently redisplayed.  As Britain’s preeminent historian of the architecture of the Middle Ages, John has of course been to see it, and provides a superb commentary.  C...

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Send us Fan Mail Alnwick Castle in Northumberland is one of the most spectacular castles in England, an immense fortification that guarded the border with Scotland for centuries.  The Percy family who built it had almost king-like power over their territory – and were not above rebelling against the king himself: the impetuous Harry Hotspur was killed fighting against Henry IV at the Battle of Shr...

Send us Fan Mail Trafalgar Square has long been regarded as the centre of London.  It wasn’t always. John describes its medieval configuration when it was still countryside – hence the name of James Gibbs’s church St Martin in the Fields. This was where Richard II kept his hawks in the royal mews.  A square was proposed by the Prince Regent’s architect John Nash but not in the form we have it toda...

Send us Fan Mail Detmar Blow was one of the brightest stars of the Arts and Crafts Movement – but his story is also dark and mysterious.  A pupil of the Kensington School of Art, where he met Lutyens – a lifelong friend – he won a travelling scholarship to draw cathedrals in France.  At Abbeville, he had a chance encounter with the great Victorian sage aesthete John Ruskin, then in the decline of...

Send us Fan Mail This week John takes Clive through Windsor Castle, a creation not just of the Middle Ages (subject of part 1 of this series) but of successive monarchs since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660.  George III, a King who had been trained in architecture, made it into a family home, before being confined here during his years of madness.  Typically, his eldest son George IV had big...

Send us Fan Mail This week John and Clive are frothing with disapproval at Network Rail’s plan to upgrade Liverpool Street Station.  It is proposed that this will be funded by a development which will impose an out-of-scale tower at the entrance to the station, which will deprive the concourse of natural light and destroy the surroundings.  What a pity.  Liverpool Street was brilliantly reimagined...

Send us Fan Mail This week John and Clive present their long-awaited podcast on one of the most essential but least discussed rooms in any dwelling – the lavatory.  Or (because no object in English or any other language is subject to so many euphemisms and circumlocutions) the necessary, the little house, the smallest room, the going place, the jakes, the john, the pissing place, the bog, the toil...

Send us Fan Mail Sir Francis Dashwood, who used to dress as a Franciscan monk and allegedly took part in orgies in the ruins of Medmenham Abbey, was one of the most notorious libertines of the 18th century.  Is this a correct depiction of his character?  John thinks not.  Instead, he acquired his dubious reputation as a result of slurs cast by his political enemies, which Sir Francis, who didn’t c...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of Your Places or Mine , Clive Aslet and John Goodall head west to Exeter Cathedral, one of England’s most distinctive medieval churches. From its extraordinary uninterrupted Gothic vault — the longest of its kind in the world — to its weathered towers and richly layered history, they explore how this cathedral grew, adapted and survived centuries of change. Along...

Send us Fan Mail 2025 celebrates the rebuilding of the Bank of England by Sir Herbert Baker – if celebrate is the right word.  It remains one of the most controversial projects in 20th century architecture.  Baker’s name has been irredeemably blackened for his presumption in destroying the Bank of England created by Sir John Soane a century before.  Clive and John revive the debate, describing the...

Send us Fan Mail This is the time of year when thoughts turn to mince pies, Christmas shopping, mulled wine – and chimneys, whether it is to settle around a roaring hearth or hope that Father Christmas pays a visit.  So John and Clive are turning their attention to the development of this architectural form, beginning with the appearance of walled fireplaces in the Norman period.  Chimneys reached...

Send us Fan Mail In today's episode of Your Places or Mine, John is joined by the inimitable Charles Saumarez Smith who divulges all he knows about the architect Sir John Vanbrugh in anticipation of the 300th anniversary of his death. Discover the remarkable life and legacy of Sir John Vanbrugh — playwright, architect, and one of the most unconventional figures of the English Baroque. From hi...

Send us Fan Mail The founding of the Georgian Group in 1937 was a milestone in the movement to save beautiful architecture.  With an anniversary around the corner, Clive and John discuss how the Group emerged from the parent organisation, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and why it was needed.  They reveal the extraordinary extent to the destruction inflicted on Georgian London...