Your Places or Mine

• EWELME: A VILLAGE AND ITS VANISHED MEDIEVAL PALACE

  Send us a textWhere 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 second husband, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, with whom she built what was virtually a palace at Ewelme, does not rest beside her.  Why not?   Having spectacularly enriched himself while ruling England in the place of the weak-minded Henry VI, he was instrumental in losing most of the English possessions in France; fleeing England, he was caught and had his head hacked off, his remains being eventually buried in Suffolk.  The 13 almsmen at Ewelme had a punishing schedule of prayers, intended to shorten the time William and Alice would spend in Purgatory.  You can see why they might have thought it was necessary.The 15th-century school house contains a primary school.  The almshouses, too, are still going, softening the blow of old age.  It’s true, not a stitch of the palace remains above ground, though it was of exceptional splendour and had some extraordinary features, such as an early use of cast iron.  Wholly and utterly gone – but don’t despair.  Ewelme was the subject of John’s doctoral thesis and there is no one who can talk about it with Clive in such fascinating and absorbing detail.  Prepare to be amazed by the story of this little known and now vanished palace and the village that went with it – now one of the most beautiful in Britain.

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• NATIONAL GALLERY: THE SAINSBURY WING AND A NEW CHAPTER

  Send us a textThe 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 Hampton Court Palace in 1984, in which he likened the previous proposal to ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’.With hugely more people visiting the gallery each year and the additional security needed in response to the Just Stop Oil attacks, the Sainsbury Wing has become the Gallery’s main entrance. As a result, the Venturi design has been revisited, subtly revised and delicately enhanced by the German-American architect Annabelle Selldorf.  At the same time, the gallery has been completely rehung under the director Gabriele Finaldi.  What do John and Clive think of the result?

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• MEDITERRANEAN CAPRICE IN SNOWDONIA: THE STORY OF PORTMEIRION

  Send us a textIn 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 for publicity, he felt himself to be fully justified in playing the man of taste in a philistine world.A holiday stage set, Portmeirion included several old buildings which would otherwise had beendestroyed, and offered, with its piazza and campanile and apricot paint, a distillation of Mediterranean experience to an audience that had hardly been out of this country.But there was another side to Clough, whom his friend Christopher Hussey regarded as ‘a spontaneous Welshman with incredible energy and an intuitive love of the thick, rough stone of his country.’ To encounter this side of his being, it is necessaryto visit his nearby home of Plâs Brondanw, a few miles further inland.

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• Castle Howard: Vanbrugh's Palace Redisplayed

  Send us a textCastle 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 living well.  This year, a triumphant redisplay was unveiled. John has been to see it and discusses what he found with Clive.Written into the stones of the house is the story of the extraordinary characters who created it. The 3rd Earl of Carlisle, who rose to become First Lord of the Treasury under William and Mary, loved theatre, music, poetry and gambling – all of which could be enjoyed in the company of fellow members of the Kit-Kat Club, such as John Vanbrugh, the tercentenary of whose death falls next year. In his 30s, Vanbrugh had served as a soldier, before bursting onto the London scene as a saucy playwright and wit.  Thanks to Carlisle, he entered architecture, sketching out – with amazing confidence – the design of an enormous house, whose centerpiece of which was (for the first and almost last time in British domestic architecture) a dome.  Always spectacular, the house came, in the mid 20th century, to symbolize the desperate plight of country houses after the Second World War; as such it was one of the inspirations of Evelyn Waugh’s doom-laden Brideshead Revisited.  Nevertheless, it recovered from the doldrums of requisitioning and a fire that destroyed the dome, and now looks more splendid than ever.

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• Glyndebourne: The House that Gave Birth to the Opera Festival

  Send us a textPicnic 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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