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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 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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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 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 been destroyed, 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 necessary to visit his nearby home of Plâs Brondanw, a few miles further inland.

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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 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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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 wall, the Tower of London dominated (in all senses) the City of London, being last fortified against the Chartist demonstrations in the 19th century.  The White Tower, so-called from the whitewash that once covered it, gave its name to the Tower of London as a whole – a unique example of the usage, since all other great fortifications identified with a town or city are known as Castle (as in Windsor Castle or Warwick Castle).  This is not the only quirk of history at the Tower: from the 13th century it housed a menagerie of exotic animals.

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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 spiritual satisfaction in the newly invented religion of Theosophy, falling hook, line and sinker for its beautiful Indian world leader, Jiddu Krishnamurti — an embarrassment for Lutyens when he was designing the Viceroy’s House and laying out the new capital of the Raj, New Delhi.  In middle age the architect developed an intimate relationship with the rich and domineering Lady Sackville.  And yet husband and wife never ceased to be close, as their letters attest.

In this week’s episode Clive and John examine the role that Lady Emily played in Lutyens’s life and vice-versa, with all the joys and heartache, frustration and rhapsodic moments of this singular marriage.

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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 Lutyens called him — had one grande if not wholly required amour.  This was for the fiery Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia, who played to his guests.  Perhaps there were hidden depths.

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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.  

Attached to the Houses of Parliament, this ancient space remains a natural setting for great national events, such as addresses given to Parliament by visiting foreign dignitaries or HM Queen Elizabeth II’s lying in state in 2022. 

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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 programmes he has established there, the estate is now a beacon of hope to an otherwise forgotten community in the former coalfields of East Ayrshire.