ACCIDENTS will happen, but their consequences needn’t always be disastrous. In the 1930s, Ruth Wakefield, proprietor of the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts, US, created the chocolate-chip cookie by chance when throwing broken slabs of chocolate bars into her biscuit mix, assuming they would melt in the oven. Her mishap created one of the world’s favourite sweet treats. And so it is with buildings that tilt, lean, list, slope or camber. We have long embraced these architectural equivalents of the failed soufflé with the kind of warmth and sentiment usually reserved for the retro sweets of our childhood.
Wonky pubs, houses and church spires are the poor kittens of construction and their obvious failings are precisely what we most adore about them. Perhaps it’s because a crooked building is a wobbly riposte to all that is over engineered, over codified and, inevitably, over budget on our high streets. Or because, as a nation, we love the eccentric in any form (except when it comes to war memorials and train timetables).
Certainly, when we featured Alex and Oli Khalil-Martin’s 600-year-old pumpkin-hued home, the Crooked House in Lavenham, Suffolk, on the front cover of the January 12, 2022, issue, the magazine sold like hot cakes. ‘With a house like this, you’re looking after it for the time you have it, not owning it,’ Oli told us in a subsequent article. ‘There’s such a long line of people that have lived here and you are part of that chain.’
Denne historien er fra November 29, 2023-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra November 29, 2023-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.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
Tales as old as time
By appointing writers-in-residence to landscape locations, the National Trust is hoping to spark in us a new engagement with our ancient surroundings, finds Richard Smyth
Do the active farmer test
Farming is a profession, not a lifestyle choice’ and, therefore, the Budget is unfair
Night Thoughts by Howard Hodgkin
Charlotte Mullins comments on Moght Thoughts
SOS: save our wild salmon
Jane Wheatley examines the dire situation facing the king of fish
Into the deep
Beneath the crystal-clear, alien world of water lie the great piscean survivors of the Ice Age. The Lake District is a fish-spotter's paradise, reports John Lewis-Stempel
It's alive!
Living, burping and bubbling fermented masses of flour, yeast and water that spawn countless loaves—Emma Hughes charts the rise and rise) of sourdough starters
There's orange gold in them thar fields
A kitchen staple that is easily taken for granted, the carrot is actually an incredibly tricky customer to cultivate that could reduce a grown man to tears, says Sarah Todd
True blues
I HAVE been planting English bluebells. They grow in their millions in the beechwoods that surround us—but not in our own garden. They are, however, a protected species. The law is clear and uncompromising: ‘It is illegal to dig up bluebells or their bulbs from the wild, or to trade or sell wild bluebell bulbs and seeds.’ I have, therefore, had to buy them from a respectable bulb-merchant.
Oh so hip
Stay the hand that itches to deadhead spent roses and you can enjoy their glittering fruits instead, writes John Hoyland
A best kept secret
Oft-forgotten Rutland, England's smallest county, is a 'Notswold' haven deserving of more attention, finds Nicola Venning
