The history of a nation, a city, or a culture, is written in stone in its cemeteries, and a society may be judged by the way it treats and remembers its dead. In England we have the churchyard – all too often these days with once-handsome headstones stacked irreverently around the perimeter – and the […] More
The homes of great men and women can sometimes tell us much more than words. Over the last two centuries, many have been deliberately preserved and have become shrines, open to the public and to worshippers. Above all, writers and poets have enjoyed this treatment, what with Burns’s cottage, Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, the ‘birthplace’ of […] More
Sandycombe Lodge, built by J.M.W. Turner in Twickenham in 1812, offers an intriguing glimpse of the painter’s potential as an architect. It reopens to the public on 19 July 2017 following a major restoration project overseen by Turner’s House Trust. Writing for Apollo in December 2012, Gavin Stamp outlined the history of the building as […] More
England’s ancient cathedrals are in serious financial trouble, so much so that there is talk of some of them closing their doors (and being allowed to fall down?). The crisis is such that a Cathedrals Working Group has been set up to review the governance and financial management of the nation’s 42 Anglican cathedrals. Huge, […] More
On the night of 30 May 1942, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Royal Air Force Bomber Command, launched the first of his 1,000-bomber raids on Nazi Germany. The target was the ancient city of Cologne. By the following morning a sixth of the city’s homes were damaged or destroyed. But this terrifying raid was […] More
Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, the longest if not the largest country house in England, has been a problem ever since the late Manny Shinwell, Attlee’s Minister of fuel and power, in a one-sided skirmish in the class war, ordered its park to be dug up for open-cast coal mining shortly after the Second World War. […] More
In 1874, the year before he died, the architect Alexander Thomson delivered a series of public lectures on the history of architecture. His Glasgow audience must have been surprised at some of his observations. ‘Philosophers,’ he told them, ‘in explaining the nature of light and endeavouring to give us some idea of the rate at […] More
A town that has, in its centre, a street called the Land of Green Ginger surely cannot fail to be interesting, but this intriguing name is nowhere near as old as the much bombed and much abused city of Hull itself. Properly called Kingston upon Hull since the reign of Edward I, and situated where the […] More
