NOT only the country-house ideal as we know it, but the whole of Edwardian domestic architecture was shaped by COUNTRY LIFE. Some of the reasons why this came about are straightforward: the magazine had the best critics, the most educated social historians and the most comprehensive experts in gardening and house design of any regular publication, not to mention the campaign it maintained for more than a decade to raise standards. Other reasons, however, are more in the realm of magic.
COUNTRY LIFE’s first number came out in January 1897 and, right from the start, there were illustrated scholarly articles on the historic homes of England. This was a novelty: there were then few places where readers could be regularly tempted into a properly researched, accurate account of an old house, however famous. In the early days, these were mostly Tudor buildings: the Edwardian neo-Classical revival had not yet happened. They were also, however, often in a mixture of styles: an Elizabethan core might have acquired a Carolean staircase, an 18thcentury ballroom or an early-Victorian service wing and the magazine clearly took pleasure in the variety. These combinations—which are hardly ever mentioned in architectural history, with its focus on the purity of a particular era—seem to have been precisely the thing that captivated the magazine’s writers.
Denne historien er fra September 09, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra September 09, 2020-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
