Your Places or Mine

Send us Fan Mail Picnic hampers, black tie, world-class opera — it’s the season for Glyndebourne, the festival that sired the happy, uniquely British phenomenon of country house opera. This week Clive and John discuss the house from which it all began (still central to the experience) as well as the headstrong, eccentric but visionary John Christie, founder of the festival in the 1930s.  They reve...

Send us Fan Mail The Tower of London is one of the great sights of the capital, a place that is as steeped in history as it has sometimes been, through the numerous executions it has witnessed, drenched in blood.  In this week’s episode of Your Places or Mine, Dr John Goodall, Britain’s foremost historian of castle architecture, discusses this extraordinary fortification-cum-palace with Professor...

Send us Fan Mail In his mid 20s, Lutyens fell passionately in love with Lady Emily Lytton, daughter of the Earl Lytton, a diplomat and Viceroy of India who had really wanted to be a poet.   He pursued her ardently, writing letters that were romantic, delightful and often funny.  Beating down opposition from Lady Emily’s family, they got marriage in 1897 but were an unlikely couple.  She hated bear...

Send us Fan Mail Sir Edwin (Ned) Lutyens’s old friend Edward Hudson founded Country Life in 1897.  A London printer, he was not a countryman, but commissioned three country houses as well as the Country Life office in Covent Garden.  Convinced of Lutyens’s genius, he also ‘boomed’ him through the magazine and lost no opportunity to promote his career. Nobody could be better placed to discuss this...

Send us Fan Mail The first of a series on the early-20th-century architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, this episode examines the relationship between the young Ned — gangly, witty, shy — and the craftswoman turned gardener Gertrude Jekyll, his senior by 25 years.  With her deep instinct for crafts and passionate attachment to Surrey, she shaped the boyish architect and introduced him to many of his best ea...

Send us Fan Mail Clive and John discuss one of the most spectacular medieval buildings in Britain, Westminster Hall. Originally built by William the Conqueror’s heir, the voracious William Rufus, it was a structure of immense ambition — said to be the biggest hall of its kind north of the Alps.  In the 14th-century, this huge space was reimagined as a statement of royal majesty by art-loving Richa...

Send us Fan Mail One of the greatest of HM the King’s many enthusiasms is architecture.  He made his first pronouncements on the subject in 1984 with the famous ‘Carbuncle’ speech and has been championing the causes of tradition, community, Classicism and Transylvania ever since.  After 40 years it is time to take stock of his achievement, seen most obviously in the model town extensions (Poundbur...

Send us Fan Mail In this first episode of Your Places or Mine, Clive and John are in London’s Pimlico, exploring the dynamic personality of the great Victorian builder Thomas Cubitt and the area’s struggle to become fashionable.  The idea of Your Places or Mine is to replicate the fun that Clive and John have on their visits to old sites, towns and buildings around the country, which have often re...