Your Places or Mine

Clive Aslet & John Goodall
  • 0,0 (0)
  • Historia

A podcast about places and buildings, with tales about history and people.  From author and publisher Clive Aslet and the architectural editor of Country Life, & John Goodall

  1. −4 h

    The History of Warwick Castle, and What Makes It One of the Icons of England

    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 legends attached to Guy of Warwick, after whom one of the castle’s famous towers is named.  Although Guy may never have existed, his story was revered by the Earls of Warwick as their foundation myth.  In an attempt to contain the Earl of the day, Henry I took away a portion of his earldom from the Earl of the day and bestowed it on a favourite, who built Kennilworth Castle, only five miles away.   The result was a rivalry that lasted through the Middle Ages, which was conclusively ended when Kennilworth was reduced to the ruin that it is now. Founded by William the Conqueror, when travelling to Yorkshire to inflict the vengeful punishment known as the Harrying of the North, Warwick Castle occupied a powerful position at the heart of the country, overlooking the river Avon.  The 16th Earl of Warwick became known as  Warwick the Kingmaker, from his ability to tilt the scales of the Wars of the Roses in favour of the side he supported at the time.  Later centuries associated Warwick Castle with the England of Shakespeare, who was born in Warwickshire.  It was arguably the first building to have been copied in recognisable form during the early Gothic Revival.   A visit to Warwick Castle still stirs the imagination.  Listen to John’s account and you’ll see it with fresh eyes.

    59 min
  2. The History of Greenwich, Masterpiece of the English Baroque

    28 juni

    The History of Greenwich, Masterpiece of the English Baroque

    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 the Thames: this was where foreign ambassadors landed on their way to the court: Inigo began a revolutionary building for James I’s Queen, Anne of Denmark, and finished it for Henrietta Maria who was married to Charles I.  The Queen’s House, as this structure became known, was where Charles kept some of the best of his art collection – alas, dispersed by the Civil War.  After the palace was roughly treated after the Civil War, it was earmarked to become once more a palace for Charles II.  He succeeded in building only one block before the money ran out.   Instead of a palace, the Royal Observatory arose at the top of a hill, as a place to study the heavens away from the smoke that was already obscuring the skies of London.  The terrible carnage of the Dutch wars of the 1660s and 1670s, fought at sea, touched the heart of the future Queen Mary, who would ascend the throne with her husband William III, Prince of Orange.  As a result, Greenwich became home to the Royal Naval Hospital, in a magnificent parade of buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren.  They include the Painted Hall, a masterpiece of the artist Sir James Thornhill, and a chapel that was redecorated in the 1780s by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart after a fire.   The complex that Vanbrugh built for his family on Maze Hill, next to Greenwich Park, also survives. .A generation ago, Greenwich – no longer a hospital but a naval college – was difficult for the public to see. Now it houses a university and a music school, and a dazzling restoration of the Painted Hall has proved, literally, a revelation – previously invisible details have been brought to light, such as the figure of Louis XIV who appears beneath William III’s foot in the ceiling.  John is as much enraptured as Clive.

    1 tim 3 min

  3. 20 juni

    A Tudor Treasure, The Gem of Lincolnshire: Doddington Hall

    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-operated aeroplane with patriotic RAF roundels.  From the roof, you can see Lincoln cathedral on a good day.  Built around 1600, Doddington has hardly been changed outside, and in half a millennium, it has never been sold. Best of all are the tapestries.   Due to the antiquarian tastes of its 18th-century owner John Hussey Delaval, the Georgian revamp was old-fashioned for the 1760s, and included bedrooms close-hung with tapestries in the manner of the William and Mary era.  The Doddington tapestries are now a rare survival, although not perhaps for the reason that might be imagined.  They are not of the first quality, but relatively workaday– and which is exactly the sort that have most commonly perished.   Clive and John are both enthralled by this house, which – thanks to the conversation of the stables to a shopping experience – is going through something of a golden age.   It was where Clive first rode an electric bike.

    1 tim 4 min
  4. A Parade of Characters and Art: the Glittering Story of Stansted Park, Sussex

    30 maj

    A Parade of Characters and Art: the Glittering Story of Stansted Park, Sussex

    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 space.  As a result, the house and park are beautifully maintained, while estate buildings have been well developed as a retail experience.   Stansted has a long and colourful history, which ushers a glittering array of characters onto the stage.  Owners have ranged from kings to wine merchants, Dukes to the remarkable Lewis Way, who made it a seminary for converted Jews who were supposed to go out to the Holy Land and spread Christianity.  This enterprise was not successful but the poet John Keats attended the dedication of the chapel, made from a fragment of a Tudor building.   The main house was destroyed by fire in 1900 and rebuilt by a member of the Blomfield dynasty. In the 1920s it was bought by the 9th Earl of Bessborough, a Governor General of Canada, who furnished it with the contents of the family’s Irish country house, Bessborough House, in County Kilkenny, which had been removed before Bessborough was burnt during the Troubles.  Today, Stansted still looks out over a well-treed landscape with avenues created during the Baroque period. Few country houses have such a varied history or have been so happily revived.  Clive and John are enchanted.

    59 min
  5. Dons and Divinity: The Marvellous History of Cambridge

    16 maj

    Dons and Divinity: The Marvellous History of Cambridge

    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 development of this remarkable city, famous for one of the most beautiful ensembles of buildings in England.   The castle reminds those who might have forgotten – or never knew – how important this fenland settlement was to William the Conqueror in the Norman period.  Scholars arrived from Oxford in the 13th century, to establish what became the university.  It rose to glory under the patronage of Henry VII, his mother Lady Margaret Beauford and his son Henry VIII.  King’s College Chapel was finished in this era; Trinity College, St John’s College and Christ’s College were all founded.  It is not only the buildings that give Cambridge its character but the open landscape of the Backs, one of the triumphs of the Picturesque.  Today Cambridge is a boom town, thanks to the knowledge economy associated with the university’s record in scientific and mathematical research.   There has been rapid growth in housing, served by two new railway stations, Cambridge North and Cambridge South.  Can the qualities for which Clive and John love the place survive the pressure?

    1 tim 1 min
  6. THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN COUNTRY HOUSE: DEVELOPING AN IDEA

    9 maj

    THE STORY OF THE AMERICAN COUNTRY HOUSE: DEVELOPING AN IDEA

    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 individuals.   There are numerous reasons people in Colonial American and the developing United States wanted houses outside the city.  Rural simplicity expressed a godlier life; country air was good for the health; the drama of the American landscape appealed to the Romantic imagination.  By 1900 there was a school of highly sophisticated architects who could serve any need.  While some American country houses bore a resemblance to their cousins across the Atlantic, they were, in the early 20th century, built for a different purpose, which was recreation and sport.  There was little sense that these were dynastic seats.  As soon as fashion changed or money ran out, owners moved on.  Hundreds of country houses on Long Island, for example, were demolished after the Great Crash in the 1920s. Clive and John consider these and other aspects of the subject, in the light of the renaissance of country house building that can be seen in many parts of the US today.

    58 min
  7. The Story of Stowe House: A School of Marble and Memory

    2 maj

    The Story of Stowe House: A School of Marble and Memory

    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 not palace. John has just been there and describes this extraordinary creation, the product of many generations. What we see today is largely a product of the 18th-century owner Lord Cobham and his descendants.  It was Cobham who employed ‘Capability’ Brown to turn Stowe into (to quote the poet Alexander Pope) ‘as near an approach to Elysium as English soil and climate will permit.’  Sir John Vanbrugh, William Kent and Robert Adam were among the many architects who worked on the house. Through marriage the family became Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos.  But their princely extravagance hit the buffers in 1848 when a Great Sale of the contents was held.  Not even this could not keep the debts at bay indefinitely and much of the rest of the property was sold after the First World War.  The park came into the ownership of the National Trust and the house became a school.  Since 1977, the Stowe House Preservation Trust has been restoring the State Dining Room ceiling and returning Classical sculptures to the North Hall, among other projects. John describes the progress made in this magnificent endeavour.

    1 tim 1 min
  8. Perhaps The Finest Street In Europe - The History of The Strand

    25 apr.

    Perhaps The Finest Street In Europe - The History of The Strand

    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 shape-shifting over the centuries.  John and Clive reveal the secrets of a street where splendour lived next door to vice. Lying between the City of London and the City of Westminster, it formed an important ceremonial route. Until the 19th century, though, it was as much defined by access to the river Thames as by its function as a road.  During the Middle Ages, great prelates such as the Archbishop of York built palaces – sometimes known as inns – along the shore, convenient to reach by barge and within a short distance of the Palace of Westminster.   In the Tudor period, many of these buildings had become the preserve of great courtiers like the Duke of Buckingham – assuming that they had not fallen into the hands of the King himself.  Somerset House was named after the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector of England until he had his head chopped off.  It was then particularly associated with Queens such as Henrietta Maria. All this changed when Whitehall Palace burnt down at the end of the 17th century and monarch preferred Kensington Palace or Buckingham Palace over Westminster.  The inns were redeveloped, famously by the Adam Brothers who nearly ruined themselves building the Adelphi.  To Victorian London, the Strand was theatreland – to visit which was as good as a holiday: hence the song.  But with theatres, given the proximity of some notorious slums, went other forms of nightlife.  Prostitution was rife.  So the newly formed London County Council introduced the Strand Improvement Act at the end of the 19th century.  The Strand was widened, new buildings arose -- but Clive and John uncover a surprising number of survivals from the ancient of days, such as a Roman bath.   What is the Strand today?  Crowded, but once again being improved – look at James Gibbs’s church of St Mary le Strand, now set off by a new piazza that links it with King’s College London and dazzling Somerset House.  The reopening of the celebrated restaurant Simpsons in the Strand, in the premises it has occupied since 1904, is (to adopt a culinary metaphor) the cherry on the cake.

    1 tim
Visa alla (58)

Om

A podcast about places and buildings, with tales about history and people.  From author and publisher Clive Aslet and the architectural editor of Country Life, & John Goodall

Information

  • Skapad av
    Clive Aslet & John Goodall
  • Aktiva år
    2025 - 2026
  • Avsnitt
    58
  • Åldersgräns
    Barnvänligt
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Your Places or Mine
  • Programmets webbplats
    Your Places or Mine
  • Leverantör

Du kanske också gillar