Ghastly Good Taste? The Best of John Betjeman.
John Betjeman hated experts, antiquarianism, art historians and research fellowships. As his daughter Candida Lycett Green has pointed out, he never set out to champion conservation in the academic sense of that word, but rather... 
The hounds of spring.
'When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces...'Atalanta in Calydon, by Algernon Charles Swinburne. Photography by Liz Neville, www.lizneville.com/ model, Flora Neville, grateful thanks to both. vintage tweed coat by Aquascutum. shot on location...
Something for the weekend – Barbara Jones.
The King Penguin Guide to the Isle of Wight - a place that I once commuted to each week - was the first book by Barbara Jones that I bought. One of her illustrations shows...
A.N. Wilson’s Wedgwood.
A.N.Wilson writes: I grew up in North Staffordshire, where my forebears had been potters since the end of the eighteenth century. My brother Stephen and I sometimes look at our hands and think - we...
In the North Kent Downs: the West Street Tickham’s last meet & Twentieth Century Castles.
Hunt supporters don't carry umbrellas. On March 16th under lead-grey skies and needle-sharp rain the West Street Tickham hunt met for the last time on the gravel in front of Doddington Place in Kent. Lachrymal...
‘Nymphs and Shepherds, Come Away’ – Nicky Haslam’s Hunting Lodge.
This week Nicky Haslam's Folly de Grandeur was published. It's the story of the house in which he has lived for over thirty years, told in a prose which is never purple but ever so...
Dark Satanic Mills.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For my taste, these twin cranes or derricks at Battersea Power Station are the only public art worth pausing for from here to Tate Modern. But they...
How Cecil Sharp sowed the seeds of love.
Nothing could be more Romantic than the English Folk tradition as it was revived at the start of the twentieth century. Much of the glory for this belongs to a single character, Cecil Sharp, for...
More Spitalfields Life.
Eloise and Will Palin live in an old house in Spitalfields. It was built for a Hugenot silk weaver in 1717, one of the refugees from religious persecution in France who colonised the area then,...
Thames-side.
A large family grew up in this early nineteenth century villa, standing close to the course of the Thames where it runs into London from the west. Most of these children have come of age...
