Your Places or Mine

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The creation of Regent Street under the Prince Regent is a rare instance of a master plan that reshaped London. It linked North and South, starting in the new Regent’s Park and ending at the Prince’s Carlton House on the edge of St James’s Park. Clive and John celebrate this extraordinary achievement, which sprang from the brain of the no less extraordinary John Nash.

A triumph of the Picturesque Movement, the line of the Regent Street scheme remains unchanged and the Nash terraces around Regents Park are a byword...

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Today, the Cotswolds are famous around the world, as can be seen from the number of celebrities making their homes here.  They are a brand which commands instant recognition.  This, however, is a recent phenomenon, and visitors from past centuries – such as the journalist and contrarian William Cobbett – did not take anything like such a favourable view.  The change came with the Arts and Crafts Movement, many of whose leading lights loved the round-shouldered hills, villages of honey-coloured stone and old-fashioned rural ways.  

In this episode, Clive and John discuss the combinat...

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Sennowe Park in North Norfolk is one of the most ebullient country houses built during the swaggering Edwardian decade at the beginning of the 20th century.  It reflects the personality of the man for whom it was built, Thomas Cook, grandson of the Thomas Cook who founded the travel business. The latter, born in 1808, had been a Baptist evangelist and temperance campaigner. His epoch-making first excursion took place in 1841, when a special train took 570 people from Leicester to attend a Temperance meeting in Loughborough.  By the end of the century, when the grandson ca...

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The Romans arrived at Bath in AD43, calling it Sulis Minerva – a combination of the goddess Minerva with the local deity of Sulis.  They loved the hot springs, practically the only ones in the country, which gush from the ground at 40 degrees Celsius.  Their bathing complex came to include a huge, vaulted structure, which collapsed at some point after the legions left Britannia.   It became so derelict that the source of the spring was lost and only discovered again in the 1870s. 

Clive and John discuss the origins of England’s most bea...

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These days, privacy is high on the agenda.  There are huge concerns over data, images, digital identity and personal space, all of which should be kept private.  But how was this possible in previous ages when almost all of life took place in the presence of other people.  This was as much the case for the social elite as it was for ordinary families.  As court records of divorce cases in the 18th century reveal, very little happened that was not known to servants.  Privacy, as we understand it today, would have been a rar...

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Everyone has heard about the Great Fire of London – but what about the Great Fire of Northampton…or Marlborough…or Blandford Forum?  Fire has frequently wrought destruction on towns, cities and country houses, and this was particularly the case in the 17th century.  Clive and John discuss why this should have been—what caused the fires, what the consequences were for the places concerned and how they were rebuilt.  Northampton was a spectacular example, not only because over 80% of the town centre was destroyed but (as John has discovered from rarely seen drawings) ambitious d...

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The then Prince of Wales first came to Transylvania in the late 1990s on an official visit.  It’s the only time he’s come on business.  He fell so much under the spell of the place that he bought a house here, in one of the wooden villages, settled, many centuries ago, by Saxons from Germany.  Then he acquired another property, which he has turned into a comfortable, folksy lodge.  He makes a private visit every year, if he can.  

Clive and John discuss King Charles III and his passion for this...

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For the first time in the history of this podcast, Your Places or Mine has gone on location.  John and Clive have been invited to The Ned's Club, the amazing complex of hospitality venues, including restaurants, hotel and private members’ club, which occupies the former head office of the Midland Bank in the City of London.  This provides the podcast with an opportunity to examine Britain’s commercial centre as it evolved between the Wars.  Nearly every major financial institution was being rebuilt in the 1920s, not least the Bank of England itself.  Structur...

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 Windsor Castle has been imbued with symbolism since William the Conqueror founded it after the invasion of 1066. He took the name of Windsor from an existing Anglo-Saxon palace which stood on a different spot.  On a bluff overlooking the Thames, Windsor Castle continues to play a central role in Britain’s national identity, being a great inheritance from the Middle Ages, which no one generation could have the resources or imagination to build.   It has always been there, was always important, it seems to transcend time.  Both a formidable stronghold and a sumptuous palace...

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This week YPOMPOD is joined by Alice Loxton — History Alice to her many followers — to discuss the extraordinary series of crosses that King Edward I built in memory of his queen, Eleanor of Castile in the 1290s. Eleanor died in Lincolnshire. Her body was then carried back to London for burial, and at every place that the cortège stopped a beautiful cross was erected. 

The work of the royal masons, these crosses are of astonishing quality even though some stand in what are now modest situations. The best-preserved is at Geddin...

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The American girl was a phenomenon, charming, sporty, better educated than her European counterpart. talk on a wide range of subjects.  Around sixty American girls became peeresses at the turn of the 20th century.  ‘We are the dollar princesses,’ ran a popular song.
Crossing the Atlantic was no longer as perilous as it had been in earlier days.  Huge fortunate had been made during the expansion of the United States after the Civil War.  From the 1870s, aristocrats began to experience a decline in the income from their landed estates, due to a prolon...

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In this summer episode of ypompod, we got to the seaside – to Ramsgate, beloved of Queen Victoria and now home to the biggest Wetherspoon’s (in an elegant neo-Greek building called the Royal Pavilion of 1913) on the face of the planet.  

Five miles to the east of Ramsgate, connected by a continuous yellow carpet of sand, lies Margate, which developed as one of Britain’s first seaside resorts in the mid eighteenth century.  Ramsgate did not get into its stride until after the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815 (a street is...

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Where is Ewelme Palace?  It was one of the most splendid houses in the country when it was built in the 15th century but nothing of it now remains.  There are, however, some of the ancillary buildings and monuments that went with a great medieval estate.  Its chatelaine Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, is remembered by one of the most beautiful tombs in the country.  A granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, she became a great heiress when her first husband, the Earl of Salisbury, was killed by a cannonball while fighting in France.  Her s...

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The National Gallery, now 200 years old, occupies one of the most famous buildings in London, on the north side of Trafalgar Square.  This Greek Revival masterpiece by William Wilkins was designed to take account of the view of St Martin in the Fields from Pall Mall—so unusually it was conceived as having been seen from the side.  Clive and John discuss both Wilkins’s design and the Sainsbury Wing, added by Venturi, Scott Brown in the 1980s.  This extension followed the controversy of the Prince of Wales’s speech at the RIBA at Hampto...

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In this episode, Clive and John discuss the holiday village of Portmeirion, an improbable, festive vision of the Mediterranean built on a wooded peninsula of Snowdonia, whose centenary falls this year.

Portmeirion was the creation of the architect and card-carrying Welshman Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who died at the age of 94 in 1978.  Clough, as everyone called him, was a conspicuous figure. Wearing an attention-seeking combo of tweed breeches and long yellow socks, he took a prominent role in the debates that raged over conservation, town-planning and the countryside. With a natural flair f...

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Castle Howard in Yorkshire is one of a select group of country houses which must be seen as complete works of art.  Visitors to the great domed palace, set in the gentle landscape of the Howardian Hills north-east of York, may be bowled over by the panache of the architecture, or the beauty of the woods; by the dazzling quality of the pictures and furniture, or the charm of the porcelain.  Together they show why the English country house has so often been regarded as be a beacon of civilization and the arts of...

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Picnic hampers, black tie, world-class opera — it’s the season for Glyndebourne, the festival that sired the happy, uniquely British phenomenon of country house opera. This week Clive and John discuss the house from which it all began (still central to the experience) as well as the headstrong, eccentric but visionary John Christie, founder of the festival in the 1930s.  They reveal a tale of love, passion (for music), setbacks, epic dreams and triumph… somebody should write an opera about it.

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The Tower of London is one of the great sights of the capital, a place that is as steeped in history as it has sometimes been, through the numerous executions it has witnessed, drenched in blood.  In this week’s episode of Your Places or Mine, Dr John Goodall, Britain’s foremost historian of castle architecture, discusses this extraordinary fortification-cum-palace with Professor Clive Aslet, describing both its architectural features and the uses that it has served through the centuries.  

First built by William the Conqueror within an angle of London’s Roman wa...

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In his mid 20s, Lutyens fell passionately in love with Lady Emily Lytton, daughter of the Earl Lytton, a diplomat and Viceroy of India who had really wanted to be a poet.   He pursued her ardently, writing letters that were romantic, delightful and often funny.  Beating down opposition from Lady Emily’s family, they got marriage in 1897 but were an unlikely couple.  She hated bearing children and domesticity.  He was often away from home, on an endless round of visits to clients, country houses and building sites.  Frustrated and feeling neglected, Emily found spiritu...

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Sir Edwin (Ned) Lutyens’s old friend Edward Hudson founded Country Life in 1897.  A London printer, he was not a countryman, but commissioned three country houses as well as the Country Life office in Covent Garden.  Convinced of Lutyens’s genius, he also ‘boomed’ him through the magazine and lost no opportunity to promote his career.

Nobody could be better placed to discuss this extraordinary creative partnership than Clive and John, both of whom are closely associated with the magazine that is Hudson’s legacy.

Although not outwardly charismatic, Huddy — as L...

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The first of a series on the early-20th-century architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, this episode examines the relationship between the young Ned — gangly, witty, shy — and the craftswoman turned gardener Gertrude Jekyll, his senior by 25 years.  With her deep instinct for crafts and passionate attachment to Surrey, she shaped the boyish architect and introduced him to many of his best early clients. She describes the building of Munstead Wood, the house outside Godalming which he designed for her, in her book Home and Garden.

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Clive and John discuss one of the most spectacular medieval buildings in Britain, Westminster Hall. Originally built by William the Conqueror’s heir, the voracious William Rufus, it was a structure of immense ambition — said to be the biggest hall of its kind north of the Alps.  In the 14th-century, this huge space was reimagined as a statement of royal majesty by art-loving Richard ll; carved angels looked down on the divinely appointed king from the hammer beam roof.  Ironically, this would be where Charles I was tried and condemned to death in 1649.  

At...

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One of the greatest of HM the King’s many enthusiasms is architecture.  He made his first pronouncements on the subject in 1984 with the famous ‘Carbuncle’ speech and has been championing the causes of tradition, community, Classicism and Transylvania ever since.  After 40 years it is time to take stock of his achievement, seen most obviously in the model town extensions (Poundbury outside Dorchester, Nansledan outside Newquay) that are the Duchy of Cornwall’s visionary answer to the housing crisis, but also at Dumfries House, which he rescued from break up.  Thanks to the training pr...

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In this first episode of Your Places or Mine, Clive and John are in London’s Pimlico, exploring the dynamic personality of the great Victorian builder Thomas Cubitt and the area’s struggle to become fashionable. 

The idea of Your Places or Mine is to replicate the fun that Clive and John have on their visits to old sites, towns and buildings around the country, which have often resulted in entertaining discussions in the car home — part historical knowledge, part banter.  We hope you enjoy it!