GUY RITCHIE walks pensively up the path from Ashcombe House to greet me on the terrace. ‘I don’t know what it’s like elsewhere, but the weather’s always like this here,’ he jokes, referring to the first sunny day England has seen in six weeks. His charm is genuine. I sense it has to be wrested out of a condition of thought: as I toured the estate this morning, the 54-year-old creator of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Snatch (2000) and, most pertinently for this magazine, The Gentlemen (2019) was writing in the sturdy house that overlooks the 1,134-acre estate. But Mr Ritchie, it turns out, is always thinking deeply: readers of GENTLEMAN’S LIFE will be pleased to know that the philosophy that underpins his films relates profoundly to the question of what constitutes a gentleman.
For an hour or so, we sit in an art-decked room called the Studio, an outbuilding beyond the main house: the name refers to the fact that the photographer Cecil Beaton, who lived at Ashcombe for many happy years after the Second World War, used
