Send us a text

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 the Picturesque Movement, the line of the Regent Street scheme remains unchanged and the Nash terraces around Regents Park are a byword for domestic elegance. Regent street opened the area of London to development, by providing easy access to the West End.

Send us a text

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 Arts and Crafts Movement, many of whose leading lights loved the round-shouldered hills, villages of honey-coloured stone and old-fashioned rural ways.

In this episode, Clive and John discuss the combination of history, architecture and geology that make the Cotswolds so special. And they look at some of the individuals whose passion for an unchanging English countryside led them to preserve and enhance the area. The Cotswolds that are now so widely loved were in many ways their creation – we see them through their eyes.

Send us a text

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 epoch-making first excursion took place in 1841, when a special train took 570 people from Leicester to attend a Temperance meeting in Loughborough. By the end of the century, when the grandson cashed to buy a sporting estate and build Sennowe, the firm had developed highly profitable banking interests through investing the large sums left with it, interest free, for travellers’ cheques. Thomas Cook of Sennowe described himself as a banker, not travel agent. A painting shows him on the box of a carriage driving horses four-in-hand through the park. It is the image of a man who enjoyed life.

Cook’s architect was Skipper of Norwich, who had a genius for flamboyant effects. Unusually for an Edwardian house, Sennowe not only survives, due to the love and care of successive generations of Cooks, but it remains family home. Much of the Edwardian technology that helped run the house is still in place, including the centralised vacuum cleaning system (a central motor was connected to the different rooms in the house, with openings into which house maids could insert a hose).

In discussing this exuberant country house, John and Clive ponder the glamour of the period in which it was built, evoked by TV dramas such as Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age. For domestic architecture in Britain they were golden years.

Send us a text

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. It became so derelict that the source of the spring was lost and only discovered again in the 1870s.

Clive and John discuss the origins of England’s most beautiful Georgian city, along with the Abbey that was built immediately next to the baths in the Middle Ages. They analyse the personalities of Ralph Allen, the entrepreneur who owned the quarry that supplied the stone from which Bath is built, and the architect John Wood the Elder, another enterprising man, some of whose theories seem weirder now than they might have done at the time. They set Bath on its way to becoming a social centre, in which invalids could drink the waters in the hope of becoming cured of a wide range of disorders, while their friends and family pursued a round of visits and (sometimes) flirtation. Wood is credited with the English fashion for designing terraces of joined houses that look as though they are really palaces. His son John Wood the Younger designed Royal Crescent of 30 houses, overlooking a landscape park complete with haha – one of the great statements of the Picturesque.

Send us a text

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 cases in the 18th century reveal, very little happened that was not known to servants. Privacy, as we understand it today, would have been a rare luxury at almost any period before the Second World War.

In this episode, John and Clive trace the idea of privacy to devotional practices in the Middle Ages. Kings and other magnates could also escape to hunting boxes and pleasances. But privacy only became a feature of domestic planning with the introduction of corridors – such an unfamiliar word to the Duchess of Marlborough that the architect Vanbrugh had to explain it to her as a foreign term. There were recluses, hermits and others who wanted to keep themselves ot themselves. But it was only with the emphasis that the Arts and Crafts Movement placed on “home”, symbolised by the domestic hearth, that architects began to design for what we would now call a normal life.

Send us a text

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 concerned and how they were rebuilt. Northampton was a spectacular example, not only because over 80% of the town centre was destroyed but (as John has discovered from rarely seen drawings) ambitious designs were commissioned by the Earl of Northampton who was closely concerned in the town’s welfare.

A contemporary account describes the progress of the fire, as the bells of the church tolled in the heat:

All Hallows Bells jangled their last and doleful Knell, presently after the Chimes had gone Twelve in a more pleasant Tune: And soon after the wind which did flie swifter than Horsemen, carried the Fire near the Dern-Gate, at least half a Mile from the place where it began, and into St Giles-street in the East, and consumed every house therein, save one, whose end-Walls were higher than the Roof, and by them preserved.

Afterwards, however, phoenix really did arise from the ashes, thanks in part to the 1,000 tons of timber that Charles II donated towards the rebuilding of the church. When Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe and an inveterate traveller who may also have been a government spy, visited Northampton in 1724, he declared it to be the ‘handsomest and best built town in all this part of England… finely rebuilt with brick and stone, and the streets made spacious and wide’.

Send us a text

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. He makes a private visit every year, if he can.

Clive and John discuss King Charles III and his passion for this outpost of the former Soviet Union. What has hooked him? The sense of prelapsarian idyll, the vitality of local crafts, the unselfconscious devotion to traditional building methods, or the existence of species-rich wildflower meadows of a kind that barely exist in the UK, unless specially planted by conservationists? Or the thought that the Carpathian Forest is home to more brown bears than anywhere else in Europe? Or the fairytale character of villages like Viscri and Zalanpatak – looking like England did around 1800 - in both of which he owns homes?

All those things, no doubt. But locals don’t want roads which break the springs of your car. Nor do they always see the charm of draughty, wooden houses, which need constant attention, preferring concrete villas with all the modern amenities. Is the idyll inevitably on a collision course with the 21st century? If so, which will win?

Send us a text

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 examine Britain’s commercial centre as it evolved between the Wars. Nearly every major financial institution was being rebuilt in the 1920s, not least the Bank of England itself. Structures such as the Midland Bank head office were begun in a spirit of optimism, as Britain found its feet again and needed finance to recover from the effects of war. They were often completed in a different era, when the Depression had set in and rooms that were intended to entertain the captains of industry were instead used to put together rescue packages to stop them from going broke.

Clive and John also discuss Lutyens’s relationship with the Midland’s Chairman, Reginald McKenna, who had married Gertrude Jekyll’s niece Pamela, and their shared admiration for Sir Christopher Wren. At the end of the show, they parry questions from the audience who has joined them on one of the hottest days of the year.