Plain English work-ethics – the artist-designer and craftsman Greg Powlesland’s house and workshops at Frenchman’s Creek
This is the house that Greg Powlesland built - artist, designer, maker, boat-builder and reclaimer, repairer and re-purposer of old things - boats, vehicles, architectural salvage and industrial materials. He shares it with his son... 
Jane Hill at Shepherd’s Cottage: Every picture tells a story.
Jane Hill has lived at Shepherd's Cottage for about 20 years now. Its unique, a seventeenth century backlands cottage just behind Highgate high street, once inhabited by a sheep drover who may have penned his...
The Magpie Eye : Mark Hearld
Mark Hearld is the busy, polygamous artist and maker whom I've long wanted to meet. He has made multiple marriages, to print-making and collage, drawing and painting, lino-cutting, ceramics, wallpaper and textile design, cut-outs and collecting,...
Why we loved Laura Ashley, all over again.
Laura Ashley had begun to print textiles in 1953 but her fashion label really took off in the 70s... A couple of years ago we all started wanting it again [this image copyright Jane Ashley...
Charleston Farmhouse needs you.
The French call the little, personal and inconsequential anecdotes that are most revealing of life, les petites histoires. Charleston Farmhouse is full of them, signposts and memoranda of the lives of the illustrious, clever Bloomsbury Group...
The Pauper’s Cookbook and The Country Kitchen, china, compost heaps, cold frames & – country life by Jason Goodwin
Ever since I wrote Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire, I’ve been brooding. On the face of it the Ottomans had precious little to shout about, though they ruled from the castle...
Seaweed, Smoking and Scale, the Importance Of : Molly Alexander remembers her great aunt, Min Hogg.
Feted as the inventor-founder-editor of The World of Interiors magazine, in later life Min Hogg reinvented herself as the proud designer of an exquisite range of seaweed pattern wallpapers. Professionally she was often fierce, but her...
Humble Elegance: John Fowler’s creative response to troubled times, by Daniel Pieckielon Slowik
Arriving one Easter at Veere Grenney's scintillating house in Tangier, Gazebo, I was curious to know who the other guests were. A bedroom door was flung open and Daniel Slowik appeared, smiling beautifully beneath a Panama...
By Ben Pentreath: A Month in the Country and the Story of Parsonage Pink
It’s four weeks now since we’ve been here, down in Dorset. I’d say a couple of weeks ago the house got very tidy indeed. Everyone in the country, housebound and feeling helpless, went on a massive...
the bobt: a trip to the archives
To mark April's Renaissance, the bibleofbritishtaste presents new stories and themes. Some are being commissioned from generous and talented friends. But these are not them. Today's story is an amuse gueule from its archives of thousands...
I am a painter and I paint every day: Romi Behrens at Prussia Cove
Romi Behrens, b.1939, who lived at Prussia Cove in West Cornwall, belonged to no school of art and received no formal painting tuition Romi grew up, very happily, riding donkeys, in the idyllic surroundings of...
Old Albion, Ben Pentreath, Charlie McCormick and their Old Parsonage.
As some of you will know, architect and designer Ben Pentreath and plantsman, florist and collector Charlie McCormick live for most of the time in a small hamlet in West Dorset, although they have a London...
New Years greetings from the bible of british taste 2015
The Eynsham Morris, boy novices at the first stop on their local Boxing Day four-pub fixture. NB Green Man. Photo credit my sister Lizzie who was standing next to me. Thank you for subscribing. A new...
Dingles Fairground Attractions.
A dozen times a year I drive down the A303 to Cornwall. Just before Launceston, when I am thinking of stopping for a cup of tea, I flash past a brown tourist sign that reads...
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 to...
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 the...
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 whom...
The past in black, white and sepia.
My grandmother is the one near the middle, sidesaddle on the donkey like a small, shaggy camel. The caption of the picture, if there were one, would be 'Haymaking in Bierton,' a ceremonial harvest home when...
The Nativity comes to Kentish Town (II), Epiphany.
Saturday January 5th. This was the scene at the Church of St. Silas in Kentish Town yesterday evening, where the Christmas Crib was being reordered for the feast of the Epiphany today, when the three Magi...
The Nativity comes to Kentish Town, (I).
At All Hallow's Church, Savernake Road, on the south eastern corner of Hampstead Heath, Father David Houlding started the business of decorating his church on Wednesday. Today, Sunday December 23rd, is 'Advent IV,' the fourth Sunday...
‘My Guy’ Fawkes.
Nothing you can say, Can tear me away, From My Guy. Nothing you could do, 'Cause I'm stuck like glue, To My Guy. I'm sticking to My Guy, Like a stamp to...
Agricultural-theme wedding in Honiton, Devon.
Wedding March - 'I've got a brand new combine harvester ... '.... wishing them great happiness [All images : copyright bibleofbritishtaste.com ]
The Royal Cornwall Show beats everything.
Merry-go-rounds, Britain in Bloom, flower arranging, garden-in-a-box, huntsmen, otter hounds, prize winning holsteins, tractors, morris men. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7...
At St. Buryan Church in West Penwith.
There are three or four new ‘kneelers’ – the flat cushions that preserve the knees of the devout – in the pews at St. Buryan Church every year. Shelia Hosking began making them in 1982....
