Your Places or Mine

• The Tale of Parliament Part 2 - The House of Lords

  Send us a textLast week’s Your Places of Mine celebrated the rebuilding of the House of Commons after the original interior was bombed during one of the last raids of the Blitz. This week, Clive and John consider the Palace of Westminster, otherwise known as the Houses of Parliament, as a whole.  After the old Palace had been all but destroyed by fire in 1834, Charles Barry won the competition to rebuild it, producing a building that may have shortened his life but is surely one of the herculean achievements of the Victorian age.  With the help of the superb designer of Gothic ornament, AWN Pugin, he produced a building that is both deeply traditional in its style and iconography and intensely modern in the technology that underpinned it.  The glorious, theatrical composition of turrets, pinnacles, and rich tracery purposefully evokes the virtues of an idealised medieval past, in the hope of inspiring the legislators of the present day.Only two years before the fire, the Great Reform Act had been passed.  Until that point much of the governance of the country had taken place in the splendid homes of the aristocracy, so the state of the Houses of Parliament may not have concerned them unduly.  The new building would be equipped with all the amenities that Parliamentarians could find in their London clubs.   It was at the same time more sumptuous and more middle class.Innumerable statues and paintings of saints, heroes and kings reminded post-Reform politicians of the standards they were expected to live up to.  The Lords chamber was always richer than that of the Commons – a contrast made all the greater when the Commons was toned down after the Second World War.  But the greatest richness of all was reserved for the monarch. What does it mean?  How was it all done?  What does the future hold in store?  The subject is almost endless but Clive and John manage to do it justice in just an hour!

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• The Tale of Parliament Part 1 - The House of Commons

  Send us a textOn May 10, 1941, an incendiary bomb destroyed the seat of British democracy, the chamber of the House of Commons.  This was not the first time fire had struck the Palace of Westminster: most of it had already been rebuilt after a disastrous fire of 1834, caused not by enemy action but the burning of obsolete tally sticks – a medieval system of accounting which symbolised the antiquated nature of the place.  Seventy-five years ago the House of Commons reopened, and John has joined the celebrations that are marking the anniversary. This could have been an opportunity to reshape the Commons entirely, making it obviously modern.  That was not the approach favoured by Sir Winston Churchill.  In particular, he wanted the chamber to remain, as it had been before, slightly too small.  This meant that it would still be crowded when important debates were held, heightening the drama and sense of occasion.  The architect chosen for the work was Sir Giles Scott, famous for the Anglican cathedral at Liverpool as well as Battersea Power Station, the University Library in Cambridge and red telephone kiosks.  Scott designed the chamber we have today in a simplified version of Gothic with modern elements, whose practical if not workaday character heightens the contrast with the House of Lords, where Pugin’s ornament drips with gold.

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• Albi Cathedral: The Greatest Brick Building in the World

  Send us a textThis week John and Clive are bowled over by Albi Cathedral, a towering, outwardly austere edifice of rosy brick which is ‘quite unlike any other medieval structure that you will see – a work of abstract modernism made in the 13th century’.  They discuss the background to its construction, in particular the merciless crusade against the Albigensian Heresy which takes its name from the city.  Externally the cathedral appears to be as much a fortress as a religious building, expressing the authority and power of the Roman Catholic Church.  It was a big influence on some late Victorian architects looking for a new direction for the Gothic Revival, as well as surely on Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Scholars have called it the largest brick building in the world.Unlike most cathedrals, which have doors at the West End, Albi is entered from a late Gothic porch that could be a gatehouse on the side.  The external walls are buttressed by semicircular drums of brick that go the full towering heights of the buildings. The interior is equally unexpected – a vast space whose roof is a single span of over 60ft.  There are no aisles but the walls are lined with chapels. In contrast to the exterior – ‘Brutalism in brick,’ as John calls it – they are decorated by Renaissance artists from Italy in a scheme that remains almost entirely complete.  Each one is composed of a geometrical scheme.  There is a terrifying fresco of the Last Judgement at the West End.  The choir is separated from the nave by a wedding cake-like screen of stone filigree, which miraculously escaped destruction during the French Revolution.   Why was Albi constructed as it is?  That’s something to talk about – as  John and Clive do!

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• Magnates and Mansions: Who Were The American Millionaires That Loved the British Country House?

  Send us a textPhipps, Carnegie and Old Westbury GardensIn its turn of the 20th-century heyday, Long Island could boast no fewer than 900 country houses.  Since then, most have disappeared, leaving Old Westbury Gardens in a unique position – the only house to have survived complete with its collections, garden and archive.  Clive has just been there and shares its wonder with John, asking why the American country house is such a different beast form its counterparts in the UK.  The story of Old Westbury Gardens is romantic.  Jay Phipps, son of Andrew Carnegie’s partner Henry Phipps, built it for his English bride, Margarita Grace – who loved the life she had known growing up at Battle Abbey in Sussex and was only persuaded to marry him when he offered to create something similar on the other side of the Atlantic.  Westbury House, as it was originally known,  was therefore as English as possible.  And yet there are many differences from prototypes in the UK, revealing the difference between English and American priorities. Andrew Carnegie was another builder of country houses.  John ponders why this should have been. The ensuing chat illuminates the values of the plutocracy in the Edwardian age, an age of super wealth and (sometimes) philanthropy.

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• A Spymaster's Lair: The Unmissable Splendour of Hatfield House

  Send us a textClive has just been to an event at Hatfield House, the palace to the North of London which stands as a monument to the political gene of the Cecil family.  John is more than equal to discussing this great country house and its treasures, which the present Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury are subtly making even more special.In the 16th-century, Robert Cecil inherited it from his father Lord Burghley, whom he followed as Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister.  It was Cecil who did more than anyone to negotiate the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne on Elizabeth’s death as James I.  James stopped at Cecil’s house of Theobalds on his stately journey south to claim the crown.  Sickly and, like the King, somewhat misshapen, Cecil became James’s first minister, a position bolstered after the role he played in uncovering the Gunpowder Plot; he was created Earl of Salisbury. James had little affection for the old palace at Hatfield, which had been little used since Queen Elizabeth had spent her girlhood there.  On the other hand, as an addict of hunting he enjoyed his visits to Theobalds, expressing his admiration by the backhanded means of proposing a swop.  At Hatfield, Cecil showed his disgust for the old building by demolishing three-quarters of it, and building the present house to the designs of Robert Lemyinge, who had begun life as a carpenter.  Help was enlisted from the Surveyor of the King’s Works, Simon Basil, and the great Inigo Jones – too late, presumably, for him to do more than sprinkle some Italianate stardust on the south front of an otherwise old-fashioned pile.Hatfield has always been a political house and so it remains.  The present Lord Salisbury, great-great-grandson of the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, was responsible, as leader of the opposition in the House of Lords, for the coup of negotiating the survival of 91 hereditary peers when Tony Blair reformed the upper house in 1999.

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