4-Oct-2023

Country Life

Country Life; architecture, gardens, countryside, property, the very best of British life.

Country Life2 min read
Ode To Autumn
OUR perception of the seasons is often one of metaphor: there is the joyous youth of spring, summer’s fecund vigour and autumn’s melancholy decline (of winter we will not speak yet). Autumn represents the year in its late middle age and many people d
Country Life1 min read
Country Life
Editorial Editor-in-Chief Mark Hedges Editorial Enquiries Editor’s PA/Editorial Assistant Amie Elizabeth White 6102 Telephone numbers are prefixed by 0330 390 Emails are name.surname@futurenet.comDeputy EditorKate Green 4171Managing & Features E
Country Life8 min read
Town & Country
THE Prime Minister should declare a national mission to ‘regreen’ Britain’s towns and cities, according to a think tank called Create Streets. In a new report titled ‘Greening Up’, the think tank also urges the Government to give people the right to
Country Life4 min read
Town & Country Notebook
1) Which royal personage bought the Balmoral estate for Queen Victoria in 1852? 2) Becky Sharp is a character in which novel by William M. Thackeray? 3) Which great 20th-century British composer wrote the opera Billy Budd to a libretto by E. M. Forst
Country Life5 min read
Letters To The Editor
I WAS heartened to see our King and Queen enjoy a warm reception from President Macron. It reminded me of a delightful story about my ancestor Maj-Gen Sir Lowry Cole. Maj-Gen Cole was under the command of Wellington fighting the French in the Peninsu
Country Life3 min read
Trouble In The Garden Of England
KENT is a much abused county: the long fingers of London reaching far down into its once verdant countryside and the straggling suburbs of Gravesham and Dartford reaching up to join them; the M25 cutting through the beauty of the landscape around its
Country Life2 min read
What Is Culture Worth?
ATHENA has been enjoying herself in recent days collecting anecdotal accounts of the cost of attending music events. It all began with a conversation with a mixed group of teenagers and adults about attempts to buy tickets for a Taylor Swift concert,
Country Life1 min read
The Way We Were Photographs From The COUNTRY LIFE Archive
In 1943, as part of the war effort, COUNTRY LIFE acquired a 1,000-acre estate in Berkshire called Goodings, as an experimental farm. Here a six-furrow plough works to bring every available piece of land on the estate—including a golf course—into agri
Country Life2 min read
My Favourite Painting Greg Doran
Greg Doran is director emeritus at the Royal Shakespeare Company. His productions include Hamlet, starring David Tennant, in 2008 and King Lear, starring Anthony Sher, in 2016 I happened on this painting recently and it made me catch my breath. Alt
Country Life4 min readAmerican Government
Crazy Age
I HAVE a rather specialist library. The cataloguing is more personal than academic. You won’t find A for Age (Old), D for Dying or G for Gerontology, but it’s all there in my collection devoted to the downhill slalom of life. The books are old friend
Country Life7 min read
A Living Fossil
ARRIVING at St Bartholomew-the-Great always feels like an act of discovery. A single narrow archway separates the bustle of 21st-century Smithfield from a sequestered cemetery. Confronting the visitor across this green space is a spectacular medieval
Country Life1 min read
Native breeds Highland
The Highland can be black (its original colour), dun, yellow, white, grey or brindle in colour, but the rich gingery red is the most common, apparently because Queen Victoria liked it best. Elizabeth ll had a significant fold at Balmoral, Aberdeenshi
Country Life6 min read
Season Of Mists And Mellow Artfulness
FOR Vincent van Gogh, autumn was the most beguiling and poetic of seasons. ‘As long as autumn lasts,’ he wrote, ‘I shall not have hands, canvas and colours enough to paint the beautiful things I see.’ Here was the chance to use a myriad of rich tones
Country Life5 min read
Sailing With The Silver Darlings
AT Foulis Point in East Ross, generations of motorists have diverted their child passengers by pointing out the ‘crocodiles’ that lie in the water there at low tide. These two oak skeletons are all that is left of 12 Zulu herring drifters that were l
Country Life4 min read
Written In Stone
FEW pastimes are more poignant than wandering around a country churchyard and reading the old gravestones. Whether blooming with moss and lichen or neatly scrubbed and tended, they conjure up a sense of past lives —and the passing of time—more solidl
Country Life6 min read
A Seafarer’s Choice?
IN August 1778, Mrs Philip Lybbe Powys, née Caroline Girle (1738–1817), visited Ditchley Park and wrote in her journal that: ‘A bed-chamber with hangings, bed, and furniture of crimson and yellow velvet is shown as a great curiosity, but I think ugly
Country Life2 min read
Colour Story
Adam Bray’s new Suze linen for Soane Britain, £250 per m, is inspired by a vintage French design (020–7730 6400; www.soane.com) Blithfield’s new Crosby Ochre features block-printed large-scale leaf motifs on pure linen. It costs £140 per m (020–7460
Country Life5 min read
Fresh Fields And Pastures New
IT takes years of careful planning, investment and land management—not to mention a large slice of luck—to establish a successful stud farm. This the late Christopher Spence, a former merchant banker, senior steward of the Jockey Club and shrewd owne
Country Life4 min read
Property News
THE Hampstead home of actor Richard Burton, in which he lived when he first met Elizabeth Taylor, is up for sale. The property, a seven-bedroom, semi-detached townhouse extending to some 5,100sq ft, is on the market with both Aston Chase (020-7724 47
Country Life1 min readAnthropology
London Life
ALL Souls, Kensal Green—London’s first and largest garden cemetery—opened 190 years ago this year. It was created to alleviate the capital’s increasingly overcrowded and unhygienic churchyards and its status as a site for the burial of the rich and f
Country Life7 min read
London Life Need to Know
Penny Morrison, 9, Langton Street, SW10 THERE’S a cross-hatched slice of SW10 where the Victorian roads are in unusual, apple-pie order. Lollipop bay trees whish; London stock brick gleams. Penny Morrison’s homeware shop, its window given over to win
Country Life6 min read
The Man Who Built COUNTRY LIFE
STROLLING in Trafalgar Square in the spring of 1926, The Sketch writer Beverley Nichols asked Edwin Lutyens how he would improve his surroundings. Distracted by a news ticker flashing across a building, the architect took a while to reply, but eventu
Country Life4 min read
Flights Of Urban Fancy
WHEN Richard Fitter’s London’s Birds was published in 1949, it became the first book to deal exclusively with its eponymous subject for 25 years. Despite such a gap, birds have likely been studied more closely in London for a longer period of time th
Country Life5 min read
After Christo
A LITTLE over a decade ago, the Heritage Lottery Fund granted the sum of about £4 million to Great Dixter Garden. At the time, the naysayers, led by Sir Roy Strong, protested that no garden could be kept in perpetuity. Others, who had enjoyed Christo
Country Life4 min read
Crop Values
AS familiar as apples may be, most of us have only tasted a minuscule sliver of the 7,000-plus varieties available. If you grow your own, you open the door to a world of flavour and texture far superior to those in the shops. Choosing from such a hug
Country Life2 min read
Kitchen Garden Cook Apples
Method ▶ Preheat your oven to 180˚C/160˚C fan/350˚F/gas mark 4 . Grease and line a 25cm (10in) loose-bottomed cake tin. ▶ Cream the butter and caster sugar together until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs, beating between each addition, followed by the
Country Life5 min read
Underneath The Arctic Sky
THE tolling sound of a distant bell rouses me from my slumber. I peel my eyes open. ‘Where am I?’ The room is dark and warm and smells of oiled oak. And then I remember. I’m in Arctic Norway, onboard a Swedish former minesweeping vessel called HMS Gå
Country Life2 min read
Made To Measure
Flexjet—which offers a premium, shared-ownership jet service in Europe and the US—has launched an in-house helicopter service. The new division can operate as a standalone service or an extension to existing jet owners—Flexjet Gulfstream G650 owners
Country Life3 min read
Sod’s Law
I AM currently consumed by the inequity of Sod’s Law, the annoying precept that when you least want things to go wrong, they invariably do. On a mundane level is the dropped toast always landing buttered side down or the long wait at the bus stop bef
Country Life6 min read
The Call Of The Garden
Jackie Bennett (Frances Lincoln, £30) JACKIE BENNETT is an accomplished garden writer with a track record of covering groups of gardens bound together by context, such as those on islands, artists’ gardens and, in this instance, ones made, worked in
Country Life2 min read
Crossword
A prize of £25 in book tokens will be awarded for the first correct solution opened. Solutions must reach Crossword No 4800, Country Life, 121–141 Westbourne Terrace, Paddington, London, W2 6JR, by Tuesday, October 10. UK entrants only ACROSS 1 Polic
Country Life2 min read
Bridge
AT the start of lockdown, almost everybody played their online bridge (of which there was plenty) on Bridge Base Online or perhaps Trickster. Then RealBridge came along, the brainchild of Graham Hazel of Cambridge, with an inbuilt video function. Her
Country Life3 min read
These Are The Best Days Of Your Life
THEY tell me I’ve had the second-best day of my life. It fell on a calm day last November when I fulfilled a long-held desire to become the owner of a yacht, a Westerly 33 ketch built in 1978, a venerable dame of the seas called Emma Kay. As to when
Country Life1 min read
Tottering-by-gently
Visit Tottering-By-Gently on our website: www.countrylife.co.uk/tottering ■

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