Your Places or Mine

Send us Fan Mail Last week’s Your Places of Mine celebrated the rebuilding of the House of Commons after the original interior was bombed during one of the last raids of the Blitz. This week, Clive and John consider the Palace of Westminster, otherwise known as the Houses of Parliament, as a whole.  After the old Palace had been all but destroyed by fire in 1834, Charles Barry won the competition...

Send us Fan Mail On May 10, 1941, an incendiary bomb destroyed the seat of British democracy, the chamber of the House of Commons.  This was not the first time fire had struck the Palace of Westminster: most of it had already been rebuilt after a disastrous fire of 1834, caused not by enemy action but the burning of obsolete tally sticks – a medieval system of accounting which symbolised the antiq...

Send us Fan Mail This week John and Clive are bowled over by Albi Cathedral, a towering, outwardly austere edifice of rosy brick which is ‘quite unlike any other medieval structure that you will see – a work of abstract modernism made in the 13th century’.  They discuss the background to its construction, in particular the merciless crusade against the Albigensian Heresy which takes its name from...

Send us Fan Mail Phipps, Carnegie and Old Westbury Gardens In its turn of the 20th-century heyday, Long Island could boast no fewer than 900 country houses.  Since then, most have disappeared, leaving Old Westbury Gardens in a unique position – the only house to have survived complete with its collections, garden and archive.  Clive has just been there and shares its wonder with John, asking why t...

Send us Fan Mail Clive has just been to an event at Hatfield House, the palace to the North of London which  stands as a monument to the political gene of the Cecil family.  John is more than equal to discussing this great country house and its treasures, which the present Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury are subtly making even more special. In the 16th-century, Robert Cecil inherited it from...

Send us Fan Mail In 2019 a devastating fire consumed the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, one of the towering symbols of French identity, and it seemed that one of the greatest cultural monuments in Europe had, literally, gone up in smoke. But after only two short years, it has now been restored and John has been to see – and celebrate – the result.   The old Notre Dame had evolved over many cent...

Send us Fan Mail An extraordinary cultural loan is about to take place: soon, while its home in France is being improved, the Bayeux Tapestry will be displayed in the British Museum for two years.  This will give members of the British public, along with visitors to London from overseas, the chance to get up close to one of the founding documents of England’s story.  One of the foremost medievalis...

Send us Fan Mail In advance of Remembrance Sunday on November 11, Clive has been visiting the Commonwealth War Graves in France.  The Imperial War Graves Commission, as it was called when established in 1917, was the brain child of Fabian Ware, a civil servant turned newspaper editor who commanded a Red Cross dressing station during the First World War and was therefore saw the horror at first han...

Send us Fan Mail Which cathedral is closest to the English heart?  Impossible to say but it may be Salisbury, the subject of this week’s Your Places or Mine.  On September 28 a special service will be held to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the dedication of the altars at Salisbury’s east end in 1225.  To many people, Salisbury Cathedral approaches architectural perfection more nearly than any...

Send us Fan Mail The creation of Regent Street under the Prince Regent is a rare instance of a master plan that reshaped London. It linked North and South, starting in the new Regent’s Park and ending at the Prince’s Carlton House on the edge of St James’s Park. Clive and John celebrate this extraordinary achievement, which sprang from the brain of the no less extraordinary John Nash. A triumph of...

Send us Fan Mail Today, the Cotswolds are famous around the world, as can be seen from the number of celebrities making their homes here.  They are a brand which commands instant recognition.  This, however, is a recent phenomenon, and visitors from past centuries – such as the journalist and contrarian William Cobbett – did not take anything like such a favourable view.  The change came with the...

Send us Fan Mail Sennowe Park in North Norfolk is one of the most ebullient country houses built during the swaggering Edwardian decade at the beginning of the 20th century.  It reflects the personality of the man for whom it was built, Thomas Cook, grandson of the Thomas Cook who founded the travel business. The latter, born in 1808, had been a Baptist evangelist and temperance campaigner. His ep...

Send us Fan Mail The Romans arrived at Bath in AD43, calling it Sulis Minerva – a combination of the goddess Minerva with the local deity of Sulis.  They loved the hot springs, practically the only ones in the country, which gush from the ground at 40 degrees Celsius.  Their bathing complex came to include a huge, vaulted structure, which collapsed at some point after the legions left Britannia.  ...

Send us Fan Mail These days, privacy is high on the agenda.  There are huge concerns over data, images, digital identity and personal space, all of which should be kept private.  But how was this possible in previous ages when almost all of life took place in the presence of other people.  This was as much the case for the social elite as it was for ordinary families.  As court records of divorce...

Send us Fan Mail Everyone has heard about the Great Fire of London – but what about the Great Fire of Northampton…or Marlborough…or Blandford Forum?  Fire has frequently wrought destruction on towns, cities and country houses, and this was particularly the case in the 17th century.  Clive and John discuss why this should have been—what caused the fires, what the consequences were for the places co...

Send us Fan Mail The then Prince of Wales first came to Transylvania in the late 1990s on an official visit.  It’s the only time he’s come on business.  He fell so much under the spell of the place that he bought a house here, in one of the wooden villages, settled, many centuries ago, by Saxons from Germany.  Then he acquired another property, which he has turned into a comfortable, folksy lodge....

Send us Fan Mail For the first time in the history of this podcast, Your Places or Mine has gone on location.  John and Clive have been invited to The Ned's Club, the amazing complex of hospitality venues, including restaurants, hotel and private members’ club, which occupies the former head office of the Midland Bank in the City of London.  This provides the podcast with an opportunity to ex...

Send us Fan Mail  Windsor Castle has been imbued with symbolism since William the Conqueror founded it after the invasion of 1066. He took the name of Windsor from an existing Anglo-Saxon palace which stood on a different spot.  On a bluff overlooking the Thames, Windsor Castle continues to play a central role in Britain’s national identity, being a great inheritance from the Middle Ages, which no...

Send us Fan Mail This week YPOMPOD is joined by Alice Loxton — History Alice to her many followers — to discuss the extraordinary series of crosses that King Edward I built in memory of his queen, Eleanor of Castile in the 1290s. Eleanor died in Lincolnshire. Her body was then carried back to London for burial, and at every place that the cortège stopped a beautiful cross was erected.  The work of...

Send us Fan Mail The American girl was a phenomenon, charming, sporty, better educated than her European counterpart. talk on a wide range of subjects.  Around sixty American girls became peeresses at the turn of the 20th century.  ‘We are the dollar princesses,’ ran a popular song. Crossing the Atlantic was no longer as perilous as it had been in earlier days.  Huge fortunate had been made during...

Send us Fan Mail In this summer episode of ypompod, we got to the seaside – to Ramsgate, beloved of Queen Victoria and now home to the biggest Wetherspoon’s (in an elegant neo-Greek building called the Royal Pavilion of 1913) on the face of the planet.     Five miles to the east of Ramsgate, connected by a continuous yellow carpet of sand, lies Margate, which developed as one of Britain’s first se...

Send us Fan Mail Where is Ewelme Palace?  It was one of the most splendid houses in the country when it was built in the 15th century but nothing of it now remains.  There are, however, some of the ancillary buildings and monuments that went with a great medieval estate.  Its chatelaine Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, is remembered by one of the most beautiful tombs in the country.  A granddaughter of...

Send us Fan Mail The National Gallery, now 200 years old, occupies one of the most famous buildings in London, on the north side of Trafalgar Square.  This Greek Revival masterpiece by William Wilkins was designed to take account of the view of St Martin in the Fields from Pall Mall—so unusually it was conceived as having been seen from the side.  Clive and John discuss both Wilkins’s design and t...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Clive and John discuss the holiday village of Portmeirion, an improbable, festive vision of the Mediterranean built on a wooded peninsula of Snowdonia, whose centenary falls this year. Portmeirion was the creation of the architect and card-carrying Welshman Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who died at the age of 94 in 1978.  Clough, as everyone called him, was a conspic...

Send us Fan Mail Castle Howard in Yorkshire is one of a select group of country houses which must be seen as complete works of art.  Visitors to the great domed palace, set in the gentle landscape of the Howardian Hills north-east of York, may be bowled over by the panache of the architecture, or the beauty of the woods; by the dazzling quality of the pictures and furniture, or the charm of the po...