In our divided age, casting announcements are a particularly fraught affair. When the news broke earlier this year that British actor David Jonsson (The Long Walk, Industry) had been picked to be Marvel’s new Black Panther, the court of public opinion roared into action.

Preferred courtroom? Social media. The charges brought against Jonsson — who will be playing the king and protector of the fictional African nation of Wakanda — included his nationality. ‘Are Black British actors taking roles from Black American talent?’ wrote someone on Twitter (now X).

White actors have faced similar backlash, including Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Dominic West (as Jimmy McNulty in The Wire) and Daniel Craig (as Benoit Blanc in Knives Out). In fact, the debate is almost as old as cinema itself.

A cursory look at early-20th-century trade papers sees them complaining that American performers were losing prestige roles to British talent. By the 1950s, professional competition was also brewing further down the credits, between American and British stuntmen. Hollywood had a headstart and was better organised, with film-makers using champion male and female rodeo riders to pull off daring feats of horsemanship. Britain’s studios called on a ramshackle group of audacious circus performers, factory workers, bar men and cab drivers looking to make a quick bob.

‘You could be sitting in the dressing room and the assistant director or the stunt coordinator would come up and say: “Who wants to fall down the stairs?”, and you’d say: “How much?”,’ remembers one of them, in the 2021 feature documentary Hollywood Bulldogs: The Rise and Falls of the Great British Stuntman (ITVX).

Out of these reckless operators, however, emerged a group of legendary performers who would revolutionise the industry: Nosher Powell, a six-foot-four-inch former heavyweight boxer who sparred with Muhammad Ali, Ray Austin, Bob Simmons, Jock Easton and British commando veteran Joe Powell.

The latter, doubling for Sean Connery in the 1975 film The Man Who Would Be King, plummeted 100 feet from a collapsing rope bridge (the war hero was the director’s last hope after every man in the film’s vast American stunt team all declined to give the hair-raising drop a go). Co-star Michael Caine point blank refused to watch. Powell’s crash pad — a stack of cardboard boxes and mattresses — was assembled on a ledge and, if he missed it, there was another 1,000 feet to go. Thankfully, he didn’t. In fact, he climbed back up, asking how it had gone and if the crew wanted to do another take.

When Ray Austin, who contributed to Hollywood Bulldogs two years before his death aged 90, left the army, he discovered that post-war Britain had surprisingly little use for a man whose chief qualifications were discipline and a formidable grounding in physical training. A career as a PE teacher came to nothing, so he worked as a chauffeur.

One night, Austin was asked to ferry Cary Grant around London and, when they stopped for a coffee, valiantly intervened when a violent customer rounded on the debonair actor. His cool-headed bravery won him a foot in the door of the industry and he progressed from stunt performer to stunt coordinator to, eventually, director.

For all the laissez-faire, derring-do of Britain’s early film sets, these silver-screen bruisers had seen plenty of real-life action on real-life battlefields and were seldom fools. They knew how to fall, how to take a blow, when to keep their heads down and how to behave. Their military training was their safety net — in the absence of a real one.

The 1960s marked a Golden Age: productions such as the James Bond films demanded increasingly sophisticated car chases, fights and high falls; British stuntmen gained an international reputation for precision and ingenuity. By the 1970s, our stunt performers were working across both Hollywood and major television series. Their culture of apprenticeship and technical experimentation created remarkably resilient arenas in which our homegrown talent continues to shine.

Think of Chris Corbould’s mindblowing coordination of that explosion in 2008’s The Dark Knight (he used a carefully plotted sequence of squibs, air cannons and explosives to demolish a real, albeit empty, hospital, setting a benchmark in practical-effects filmmaking) or George Cottle’s mindbending organisation of the lengthy car chase in 2020’s Tenet, that sees the vehicles move forwards and backwards in time.

Also of note are Anthony Skrimshire and Arran Topham’s efforts in the First World War epic 1917 — also from 2020 — in which, as George MacKay’s stunt doubles, they tumbled into trenches and ran seamlessly through exploding artillery shells (although the impact may not have killed them, it would likely have disfigured them), all in a tightly choreographed sequence made up of takes that sometimes lasted as long as nine minutes.

From headline-grabbing bangs to subtle foot chases, Britain’s stunt performers and coordinators know how to make screen action feel convincingly real. Surely, they are a shoe-in for the Oscars’ new competitive category for Best Stunt Design when it is awarded for the first time at the 100th Academy Awards in 2028.

When it closed in March this year, the exhibition ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at the V&A Museum was praised for cleverly enticing an audience fascinated by fashion into learning about the culture of the ancient régime. The Queen’s story, as you don’t need Athena to tell you, did not end happily. Could the same now be true of the V&A?

It has enjoyed a long period in which its director, Sir Tristram Hunt, and his team have been lauded for one of the most ambitious extensions of any of our national museums in the past decade, the opening of two new sites in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London, the V&A East Museum and V&A East Storehouse. Yet, for some months now, much of the news emerging from the museum has been bad.

An initial sign that morale at the V&A was not all that it should be was the resignation in January this year of Yuko Kikuchi as head of academic programmes, claiming that there was ‘a culture of systemic racism within the organisation’, an accusation that the museum’s management strongly disputed.

Then, on two separate occasions in September, the museum was forced to close most of its buildings — first in east London, and then at its main site, in South Kensington — because of strikes by employees represented by the Prospect and Public and Commercial Services (PCS) unions, which were demanding a 4% pay increase for staff earning above the living wage. Only a last-minute improved offer from the V&A management averted a further strike over the half-term holiday in October.

The PCS has claimed that the V&A is projecting operational deficits amounting to a cumulative total of £19 million by 2030 and, although the museum has neither denied nor confirmed this figure, fears that it has serious financial problems seem to be justified. In October, staff were informed of a voluntary exit scheme, open to all (it was due to close on the 26th of last month). According to an unconfirmed report in the Art Newspaper, it is hoped that the workforce can be trimmed by up to 15%, including the loss of curatorial roles.

Also last month, the museum announced to universal dismay that the much-admired V&A Academy, launched in 2016 as a core part of the museum’s adult learning programme, is to be dismantled with the loss of about half of its 17 permanent staff.

What has gone wrong? When the creation of the east London museums was agreed, the Government increased the V&A’s grant-in-aid by £9 million a year to cover their running costs (in 2025–26 the total grant was £59.9 million). All the staff who spoke to Athena are convinced that the museum’s management fatally underestimated these new costs. It is time for the director and trustees to be frank about the causes of the predicament in which they find themselves.

The first time Mr B and I scrimped and willed our way to an Andalusian spring holiday, many moons ago, wafts of the wildflower meadow that was Malaga airport opened a door in our hearts. Hiring a Fiat Panda for £50 for the week, we headed for the hills on switchback roads, stopping to breathe in the orange groves and to garner herbs. After a roadside lunch of garlicky fried rabbit and potatoes under a naked fig tree, we opened the car door to find the new nylon and plastic interior oozing with the aromatic volatiles from the bouquets cooking on the back shelf. Teaching me to look and smell, Mr B told me stories of smelly ambushes, such as the acrid pong of the tanneries in Fez, Morocco, evaporating in the trail of a train of donkeys laden with great bundles of mint. Or how the Ambre Solaire suntan lotion, the essence of my girlie adolescence, smelled of Lilium regale.

Mr B is not quite sure when it happened. At no point did he have covid symptoms. ‘Not even a sniffle,’ he says. Then came a day when he decided to wash the flagstone floor and then wax it with pure turpentine mixed with beeswax, one of the great smells he has always loved. Yet there was nothing there. No smell anywhere.

This was four years ago.

For a man who has valued and nurtured his sense of smell, a sensualist, an artist in the garden, this has taken some adjusting to. Even admitting it to himself took a while, never to be assailed by hay, hot tarmac, rain, bread, books, woodsmoke, sea breezes, even diesel.

At times, it has brought him quite low. How much smell affects us all is hugely underestimated. Without smell, taste is also spoilt: taste is more than half smell. On the tongue we glean only sweet; sour; salt; bitter; umami. Unsurprising then, that Mr B says everything tastes of cardboard — except ‘Alphonso’ mangos, the sweetness and texture of which are still luxurious, although not the perfumed pleasure they once were. There again, unpleasantness is lost also: no more broken elder branches and berries; gone is the perfumed reek of airport duty-free zones.

I have tried to monitor if this loss of smell has changed his way of making gardens. He seems less connected to the plants that used to drive all his dreams — roses, mock orange, lilac, lily-of-the-valley, Daphne odora ‘Aureomarginata’ and Viburnum carlesii, the bringers of spring, which were always ‘must-haves’. It may be more difficult in winter, because winter smells — wintersweet, hamamelis, Algerian iris — are so full of hope and singularity. Is this responsible for his hunter-gathering approach to searching out the pinkest Cyclamen coum? Has his planting become brasher, more dazzling in colour? It is difficult to tell. Never afraid of a French marigold, he has always planted Tagetes, but he is using more of the midget-flowered, pungent-leaved Tagetes tenuifolia ‘Golden Gem’ among the tomatoes as a companion plant. Their pungency is enough to push away the whitefly and he thinks that he sometimes still feels it in his nostrils, but the hairy smell of tomato leaves escapes him.

His particular persuasion has always been for green smells — ferns, mossy places, stumps, snowdrops, scented woodlanders, such as honeysuckle, lily-of-the-valley and the wood daphne, Daphne laureola. The memory banks are still crammed with the cool smell of Devon primroses and warm thyme in open downland and oddities such as Ribes odoratum and the catty smell of R. sanguineum ‘Koja’.

Mr B’s fealty to many salvias was as much for their tangy cassis foliage as their colour. The apple-farm smell of the leaves of the Eglantine rose, Rosa rubiginosa, no longer brings hope after rain on an April day. He still loves the cream suede cups of grandiflora magnolias, but it is the suede texture and ‘Italian matchstick’ anthers that amuse him now.

All of these hold their place in his memory, yet he fears losing the memories, too, through lack of stimulus. He grows some night-scented stocks for pots, with those suntan Lilium regale and brugmansias, for the ‘idea’ that they scent the terrace where we eat and drink, and says he is left only with memory: ‘Words, that’s all I am left with.’ Words for remembered smells, such as lime blossom, a very early memory wrapped up in the fact that the Tilia tomentosa flowered at the same time as the summer fair came to the square in Stanhope on the River Wear in Co Durham. Gardeners are good at adapting, conditioned to find unexpected opportunities among the losses; to eliminate the negative; accentuate the positive.

'Few architectural styles get the pulse racing quite like Scots Baronial,' wrote James Fisher of Borthwick Hall when it came to the market three years ago. 'I can feel my blood quickening as I type.'

As well it might have done. This landmark Scottish Baronial mansion is set in just under 12 acres of formal gardens, grounds and paddocks in a secluded woodland valley to the south of Heriot village, 18½ miles from Edinburgh city centre. Today, it's up for sale once more, with Andrew Thomson of Savills in Edinburgh quoting a guide price of £2.25 milliion for this Category C-listed home — and to say the place has changed over those three years is putting it mildly indeed. More on that later.

Borthwick Hall was built in 1852 by the prolific Scottish architect John Henderson, who, although best known for his Gothic Revival church architecture, designed a relatively small number of villas and estates that blended practicality with picturesque elements.

With its harled walls, bartizaned tower, crow-stepped gables, corbelled turrets and fine interiors with timber-panelled rooms and ceilings inspired by 16th-century motifs, Borthwick Hall is a supreme example of both the practical and the picturesque.

It was always a fine house on the inside as well as outside (you can see the full article from 2023 here) but it's now become an exotic and striking family home, full of the sort of colour schemes, design elements and little touches you'd expect of a boutique hotel. This comparison of then-and-now gives a nice idea about the extent of the work.

Beautifully renovated by its current owner, the house offers more than 11,000sq ft of impressive living space, with beautifully preserved original features.

The grand spaces at Borthwick include a dramatic double-height reception hall and a fine staircase that demonstrates exquisite timber craftsmanship.

It has all the rooms you'd expect to find in a house this size — drawing room, study, dining room, huge family kitchen — but also many extras, from the music room and the cinema room to a huge garden room that houses a hot tub in one corner.

There are seven bedrooms in total, one of which is set up as a separate flat, with spiral staircase from living area to a bedroom mezzanine above. It makes this house a fine choice for multi-generational living, or for those wanting self-contained guest space.

And you'll be likely to have plenty of guests, come to think of it, since Borthwick is in a wonderful location that's peaceful, rural, and accessible. It is a 10-mile journey north-east as the crow flies from Eddleston to the quiet, small village of Heriot at the foot of the Moorfoot Hills, which run in a north-easterly direction from Peebles to Tynehead in Midlothian.

According to Thomson, commuting from the area to the Scottish capital has been much enhanced following the reopening of the Borders Railway in September 2015, with stations at nearby Gorebridge, Newtongrange and Eskbank providing regular services to Edinburgh Waverley, a journey time of less than half an hour.

Much is made of the art of switching off these days — with very good reason — but I can only claim to have done it once, really, truly, properly, and it took four flights and the best part of two days to be able to do so.

It happened when I was sitting at the prow of Si Datu Bua, a regal wooden trading vessel called a phinisi, as we set sail on eastern Indonesia’s Flores Sea at golden hour. There was a bottle of wine in an ice bucket to my left and a magazine crossword I’d started in some previous time zone or other to my right, but I was just gazing out to the orange-pink horizon when I felt the all-too-rare sensation of being completely untethered from, well, everything else.

Then two whales breached in front of me and I laughed at the idyllic absurdity of it all.

It was my welcome to a barefoot, six-day adventure sailing west along the archipelago from Alor to Flores through Indonesia’s Ring of Fire, where a string of 120 active volcanoes provide regular reminders of their elemental power.

Phinisi boats have been common sights on these ancient spice routes for centuries, being used for fishing and carrying cargo. Si Datu Bua, and her big sister, Silolona, sailing alongside us, are altogether more luxurious, however, with polished teak surfaces, roomy cabins with huge beds and en-suite bathrooms, even an on-board masseuse.

Silolona was built in 2004 and named after the local island legend of Atuf, who built a boat to sail to the sun in memory of his beloved wife, Silolona. Si Datu Bua (‘beloved princess’) followed in 2012, both constructed by the Konjo boatbuilders of Ara in south Sulawesi who have long crafted phinisi by hand.

They select and remove individual ironwood trees from the dense jungle before bending the timbers and assembling the boats almost entirely by sight (and, remarkably, to strict Germanischer Lloyd’s shipbuilding standards). The man who built both, the irrepressible and seemingly ageless Nasir, remains part of the crew to this day.

It helps that each vessel is a thing of beauty, because what surrounds them is as breathtaking as it gets. The verdant islands and jungly coastlines pass in shades of rich, ripe green with the occasional flash of a white-sand beach. The waters — thrillingly quiet save for a few chugging jukung fishing boats — seem to change colour by the hour: glassy blues, dark indigo depths, gleaming turquoise shallows.

We frequently spot flying fish and dolphins leaping above the surface. Beneath the waves a whole kingdom thrives: bright, untainted coral reefs and marine life, from pygmy seahorses to whale sharks (and the occasional free-diving Bajau fisherman). As such, the diving is some of the best in the world and, whether you’re a PADI-certified pro or a casual snorkeler, the crew will arrange excursions to suit.

The sheer enthusiasm of trip leader and dive master Goris is infectious, to say the least. One morning before sunrise, he takes us fishing as Mount Ile Lewotolok spews lava behind us — it leaves me awestruck.

Goris and Nasir were the first employees of what became Silolona Sojourns, founded by Patti Seery, an American expat who became so beguiled by the region she led an explorers’ club, befriending indigenous tribes and charting remote waters along the way. ‘She kept the tradition going, but also helped the conservation,’ Goris says with affection.

After Seery died in 2020, her son, Tresno (Javanese for ‘love’), took the helm — he and partner Sarah are our hosts, proudly continuing Seery’s legacy. It’s most keenly felt when we venture onto dry land, where relationships forged by Seery and nurtured by her son make for some profound experiences.

On Alor, we’re welcomed to a remote village to witness the blessing of a new house where the residents, clad in ceremonial clothing made from tree bark, lead us in a drum-led dance of togetherness. We meet ikat weavers and dye-makers whose methods have not changed in thousands of years. We spectate at a local volleyball match. We have the most extraordinary beach-barbecue evening on a remote spit of sand that Seery and Goris stumbled on by chance years earlier. ‘We go to places and make connections,’ explains Tresno. ‘Not only with the people, but with the places that we visit, too.’

For our last trip ashore in Flores, we head high into the jungle in the shadow of Mount Egon, where we’re welcomed like old friends for a ceremony to remember the village ancestors — a framed photo of Seery in her finest ikat sits at the front — before the mood turns celebratory and the dancing begins. We get whirled around and spun by elders and children alike. It’s joyous, trance-like and real, to the point that leaving is a wrench.

As we descend, we passed a clearing that frames our two boats perfectly as they bob gently against the pastel-pink sunset and all was quiet again. Not that it lasted. In our absence, the crew had adorned the boat with decorative bamboo hangings and prepared a final-night feast of local favourites, including a plate of fragrant rice in the shape of a volcano, the top of which has to be ritually cut off and passed to someone important, in this case Tresno, before the meal can begin.

As the crew start up the music, we all trade stories of the trip and tuck in to fresh prawns, fiery sambal and plenty of volcano rice. I ask Tresno if he could ever tire of sailing this stretch of sea. He smiles and shakes his head: ‘There’s so much to explore, every time it’s different. One of the beauties is we get off the beaten path and do whatever we want on the day.’

A note from Goris and the crew when I arrived said: ‘May this experience stay with you long after the journey ends.’ Initially I thought this might refer to the gentle swaying motion I felt when I reluctantly returned to land full time and made my way to the airport, but this is so much more than just a spectacular sailing trip. It’s really a journey of connection — to the water, to the land, to the people, to the past, present, and future, and to the vision of Patti Seery — and it will stay with me forever.

At this time of year, as the nights get colder, there is one thing and one thing only I want to stuff my face with, and that is potatoes. Baked, mashed, smashed, roasted or — of course — in chip form, there simply isn’t anything cosier (potato salad excluded, that dish is meant for summer only).

Thankfully, if you don't feel like cooking, there are plenty of excellent restaurants in which you can indulge your cravings for this particular carby goodness. It is why we at Country Life have compiled a list of the hautest potatoes in London. It’s a list nobody asked for, but that you’ll be thanking us for when your next spud craving kicks in.

What? The hash browns

Where? Milk London

There aren’t many things that would get me out of bed before noon on a Sunday, but Milk London’s hash browns are one of them — and that’s even with the inevitable queue to get through its doors.

Whether it’s the crispy stack piled high with feathery shavings of Lincolnshire Poacher cheese, or the one hiding in the middle of The Convict — a gloriously indulgent breakfast sarnie stuffed with a Gloucester Old Spot pork patty, crispy streaky bacon, scrambled egg, cheese and Milk’s homemade ‘hangover sauce’, aptly named given the sorry state of many of its Sunday customers, my flatmate sitting opposite me included — these are, without doubt, the best hash browns in London.

Milk makes excellent use of seasonal ingredients, with an ever-changing menu of inventive specials that are well worth investigating. Accompanied by a very good coffee and my favourite smoothie in London (The Lauren), this is a combination capable of chasing away even the most harrowing of Sunday scaries. Flo Allen

What? The vanilla mash

Where? Bar de Prés

Mashed potato is the queen of potatoes, largely because it is enveloped in (ideally the same amount of) butter and also because it has been the preferred side of the nation’s favourite flesh — the banger — for over 100 years.

Throwing vanilla into the mix is a choice that may not fly with purists; but cooking, perhaps more than any other art form, has been demonstrably improved by the fusions and innovations of the past 40 years (a quick search for ‘1970s British food’ is confirmation enough).

At Bar Des Prés, where chef Cyril Lignac has been serving a mélange of French and Japanese flavours since opening on Albemarle Street in 2021 (it moved to a larger home, in Mount Street, this May), the vanilla mash has complemented such dishes as miso black cod, Chilean seabass and wagyu sando.

It melts in your mouth like silk so smooth you’ll want to order another, and another, and another until you resemble the very vegetable that started it all. Roll all the way home — and back for more. Will Hosie

What? The jacket potato

Where? The Goring

This is a potato at its most theatrical, its most decadent and, let’s be honest, its most ridiculous. Wheeled out on a cart, under a smart silver cloche is the most depressing, bland and, frankly, pathetic form of all the incarnations of cooked spuds — a plain, beige, wrinkly baked potato. Then, with all the grandeur deserved of a prince or a sultan, the most indulgent and delicious of ingredients are used to garnish it and, like a caterpillar to a butterfly, it becomes a thing of beauty.

You can almost hear executive chef Graham Squire of The Goring hotel's Michelin-starred dining room laughing from behind the scenes as the spectacle takes place, and yet my-oh-my does it work.

With lashings of creamy mushrooms, crème fraîche, sweetcorn, chive emulsion, parmesan, caviar and even popcorn, a basic staple becomes the classiest thing on the menu — and elusive too. It is only served at lunchtimes and, when I went, it wasn’t on the menu, so I had to ask specifically for it.

With toppings changing with the seasons it will be different each time, based on Squire's fancy. Is this the fanciest potato in London? Let’s just say that this potato doesn’t just have a jacket on, it has a top hat, black tie and tails to boot. Lotte Brundle

What? The mashed potato

Where? Pavyllon

If mashed potato typically stirs up memories of school dinners and pub lunches, it ought as easily to conjure an image of Michelin-grade refinement. Allow me to explain. You see, in the French kitchens from which we take our cues, mashed potato is called ‘pomme purée’, which does not mean apple compote despite ‘pomme’ indeed meaning apple but a silky-smooth substance that has been passed through a sieve so fine it could maim a small animal.

At Pavyllon, the exceptional ground-floor restaurant of the Four Seasons Hotel in Park Lane, the potato has been maimed to the point of sublimation—whipped, drenched and cloaked in a facade of unsalted butter, applied with the kind of exactitude usually reserved for open-heart surgeries.

An army of chefs works in the eerie and pacifying calm that only a Michelin-star kitchen can muster and under the culinary direction of Yannick Alléno, of Paris’s Ledoyen and Courchevel’s Le 1947.

Topped with shavings of nutmeg and served in a small bowl of stainless steel with handles on either side, it is the perfect accompaniment to the confit duck — or, when it’s in, the monkfish. [Ed. note: Cholesterol may rise.] Will Hosie

What? The caviar, crispy potatoes and crème fraîche

Where? 45 Jermyn Street

Ah, martinis and chips: the adult Happy Meal. If you're in St James's with a workaday hankering Maison Francois will do you nicely, but if you're in the mood to take things in a truly haute direction 45 Jermyn Street has you covered with its caviar, crispy potatoes & crème fraîche.

Somewhere between a chip, a hash brown and a roastie, the spuds take up two compartments of a specially designed three-leaf-clover holder; the third is full of caviar, with a little crème fraîche beneath (think mayo and chips). Y

ou're not obliged to pair them with the restaurant's signature martini for two (Hepple gin, Noilly Prat Dry, palo cortado sherry) but we'd strongly encourage you to. Emma Hughes

What? The smoked potatoes

Where? BRAT

If the Michelin star won’t convince you to visit BRAT, then perhaps their smoked potatoes will. They’re by no means the most extravagant dish on the menu — think whole turbot or Angus beef rib — but these humble potatoes deserve to take centre stage.

Taking inspiration from Basque-style cooking over fire, as well as chef Tomos Parry’s own upbringing cooking over fire on the beaches of coastal Wales, everything at BRAT has a smoky, flame-kissed quality, thanks to its huge Basque-style grill. Following the restaurant’s shtick, the potatoes have a gentle smokiness that seeps right into their hearts. Less like eating an ashtray and more like eating a golden nugget that has danced among flames.

They’re satisfyingly crisp and bronzed on the outside, yet wonderfully light and fluffy within. They come with hay butter, smoked over real hay, which is salty, faintly sweet and dangerously moreish. It had me wondering whether it would be socially acceptable to drink it by the strawful. It’s a dish that neatly captures BRAT’s cooking: simple ingredients, treated with fire and given time to develop their flavour. The potatoes are unfussy, unique and undeniably high-quality — much like BRAT itself. Bella Fulford

What? The croustillant potato

Where? Julie’s

A croustillant, perhaps, makes the most obvious case for the potato’s innate versatility. Cut into wafer thin slices and layered upon itself over and over, then drenched in oil that crackles and pops as the beatific carbohydrate emerges in chef’s pincers, it is to an actual potato what Philip Seymour Hoffman was to Along Came Polly.

The best croustillant I’ve had in London is at Julie’s, the beloved family-run restaurant in Holland Park, where it serves as an appetiser and is topped with a dollop of aioli — and caviar. Will Hosie

What? Dripping hash brown with whipped cod’s roe and scampi fries

Where? Whole Beast

Truly a gem of South London, Whole Beast’s hash browns are something worth going back for again and again. They have lived in my memory even since I first tasted them and have the ability to make me salivate by the act of thinking about them alone (fortunately for me, I live just down the road).

Served as a thick beefy slab — quite literally, it is a beef-dripping hash brown — the potatoey goodness comes with lashings of smoked cods roe, best used as a dip, and crushed scampi fries. Moreish would be an understatement.

The perfect meal is actually a couple of these combined with a few of the pickled eggs on the menu (which come with a brilliant hot sauce), and a gilda each. Swill the whole lot down down with a slew of either the house negronis (earl grey infused gin, campari, vermouth blend) or the house picantes (tequila, orange cordial, crystal hot sauce, lime saline), and you have a salty and delicious night out on your hands. Lotte Brundle

What? The sweet potato

Where? Nammos London

If you prefer the potato’s ‘healthier’ and more nutritious relative, this one is for you. Sweet potato is so often relegated to the role of a fry, but at the newly opened Nammos on Berkeley Street, it gets a makeover.

Listed as a side dish, the baked sweet potato with feta and melissa is good enough to be a dish in its own right. Soft, sweet and comforting, it’s beautifully balanced by the salty tang of feta and the freshness of lemon balm. It makes you wonder why sweet potato isn’t given the starring role more often.

If you’re a sweet potato enthusiast, it’s worth a visit for this alone. Pair it with the sirloin steak to share and one of the most interesting non-alcoholic drinks I’ve had in London in a while. I would, however, advise against finishing with two helpings of chocolate mousse, as I did. Flo Allen

Full of potatoes? For Country Life's guide to the most innovative eggs in the capital, click here.

This week's issue of Country Life magazine includes our annual 'Gentleman's Life' supplement — and in it, you'll find our list of 39 things that make a cad.

A true cad would never read such a list, of course — but they would take an online quiz. So here it is. Consider it a gift for cads seeking to prove to themselves just how naughty they are — and a gift for those looking to avoid getting involved with a wrong-un.

As for the scores? A true cad will nail these questions, and be proud of having done so. For once, scoring low might be something to be proud of.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 2pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

What exactly is club fender and why is it called that, we hear you ask? Well, the club fender is a rather ingenious piece of British furniture that combines a fireplace guard with an extra seat.

Popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, it takes its name from the gentlemen’s clubs where members would gather around the fire to talk, read, play cards and keep warm.

Traditionally made from brass or iron, its low, three-sided frame was topped with an upholstered seat, allowing gentlemen to perch beside the hearth without fear of flying sparks.

Eventually, club fenders graduated from the smoky card rooms of Pall Mall to the drawing rooms and libraries of grand country houses.

Fireside warmth

Warm tones accentuate the inviting mood of this sitting room by Susie Watson Designs, its focus a roaring log fire surrounded by a Stripe Kilim fender, from £1,495.

Historic detail

Specialising in natural-stone fireplaces, After the Antique’s collection includes the Tudor Rose design, shown here with a matching limestone hearth. Prices start from £5,940.

Get a grip

A saddle-leather grip covers the handle of each metal tool in the Megève fireplace set by Italian specialist Rabitti 1969. It costs £1,505 from Abask.

The art of brass

Acres Farm has been making club fenders at its workshop in Berkshire since 1983, offering an impressive range of styles. This Curved Dip brass fender with a hand-applied antiqued finish and leather upholstery costs £5,000.

Natural beauty

The Milo fireplace from Chesneys is shown here in Lilac marble, accentuating the elegance of its bolection moulding and canted feet. It costs from £6,080.

Distinctive hue

Cotswolds-based Everhot is launching its new colour, Aqua, shown here on the 110i model, which costs £13,600.

Bigger range

The latest Esse 1000 T Pro electric range cooker has 40% more oven capacity, making it a good choice for entertaining at scale, batch cooking and family feasts. It costs £11,488, and is pictured here in chef Gill Meller’s studio kitchen in Devon.

Character piece

The top (or ‘header’) of the Mawley fire surround rises upward and outward to form an ‘eared’ design, a feature typical of 18th-century chimneypieces. Shown here carved in Occhio Pavone, it costs £9,480 from Jamb.

The joy of the old

Westland London has been dealing in antique fireplaces since 1969, so expect an ever-evolving selection of interesting finds, such as this Regency Bullseye stone chimneypiece. It costs £6,960.

Join the club

The scrolling cutaway of this early-20th-century English-steel and tan-leather club fender adds a decorative flourish to the design. It costs £3,400 from Max Rollitt.

Hot news

Shown here in Almond, the C-Five wood-burning stove features Cleanburn Airwash technology to improve performance and efficiency, and landscape proportions to accommodate a longer log length. It costs £1,599 from Charnwood.

Go pro

Italian kitchen specialist Officine Gullo is also known for its handsome custom-designed range cookers, including the OG Professional shown here, which can include burners, pasta cookers, fry-tops, grills, ovens, warming compartments and drawers to suit your requirements. Prices on application.

Buying in prime central London has long been stereotyped as being reserved for those named in the Panama Papers. Yet a market slowdown over the past 10 years has changed the narrative and make-up of those buying here. Opportunists are now finding deals they could not have dreamt of in Zones 1 and 2 since before the late 1990s. ‘Transactions have really picked up in the past six months,’ confirms Richard Gutteridge, head of prime central London at Savills. ‘All the agents I know had a really busy summer.’

Who is buying the dip? The Renters’ Rights Act, which came into force earlier this year, did away with Section 21 and imposed a limit on annual rent increases, has spooked the investor market. Today’s buyers are not empire-builders in the classical sense. ‘My brother and I bought a three-bedroom flat in Shepherd’s Bush, of more than 1,000sq ft, from a 92-year-old lady who had retired to a convent, saving £185,000 on the initial market price and eventually getting the flat for £415,000,’ says Arnaud Plantenga, 29, who works in tech sales. As with many first-time buyers, Plantenga took out a mortgage to pay for the flat. Others in his position will often rent out a spare room to help pay this off. The process took two years.

For today’s young professionals, properties that haven’t changed hands in a while (‘my place hadn’t been touched since the 1980s,’ Plantenga notes) are the golden ticket. There are many such homes in prime central London — where sellers largely form part of an ageing population — which often are in need of upgrades, giving buyers more bargaining power. These aren’t fixer-uppers per se, but slightly tired properties that the modern yuppy is happy to do up slowly. Using the sluggishness of the market and snail-like speed of conveyancing to their advantage, the current class of buyers is made up not so much of sharks as serpents, unafraid to bide their time as they keep an eye on the prize.

‘The market is weighed down by inefficient conveyancing,’ says Rupert des Forges, a proprietary partner at Knight Frank, ‘and the high-street mortgage industry has got slower since covid. Time is a deal-killer.’ To some, however, it is a strategic advantage. Buyers are finding sellers more willing to accept low-ball offers. ‘I managed to shave £45,000 off the asking price of a two-bedroom flat with a garden in Islington,’ reports corporate lawyer Chris Selwyn, 28. ‘I saw it online mere minutes after it had gone up, visited it within the week and made an offer that was almost immediately accepted.’ Desperate times for sellers prove propitious.

A former insurance broker tells of a 1,400sq ft maisonette he bought a few years ago in Chelsea that went on the market for £2.1 million, but eventually sold for £450,000 less. How did he do it? ‘I found the previous owners’ names through the Land Registry and then learnt via social media that they were going through a divorce,’ he says, on condition of anonymity.

Unsurprisingly in a sluggish market, many sellers choose to list their homes off-market, eager to avoid any price reduction from being made public. ‘Two-thirds of deals on properties worth £3 million to £15 million are happening off-market,’ says buying agent Lucie Hirst. ‘We live in a culture of uncertainty,’ agrees Frances McDonald, associate director of residential research at Savills. Until the market reclaims ‘more confidence’, many are set to benefit from the downturn.

When might things turn around? Most of the agents spoken to said the catalyst would be the elimination of stamp duty. ‘When you add this to all the legal fees, conveyancing fees and cost of removal, it usually comes up to 20% of the total purchasing cost, which is why so many rent instead,’ says des Forges. Another one to note is the introduction of mansion tax in April 2028, targeting homes valued at £2 million and above. ‘It won’t do much,’ des Forges says of the policy. Labour hopes it will raise a mere £400 million, which is the cost of running the National Health Service for all of 17 hours.

It is this very uncertainty, however, that is making some people more bullish. Many are banking on a change of government, in 2029 or earlier, to do away with mansion tax — something the two biggest opposition parties are against — as with other Labour measures such as the land value tax, which Andy Burnham has refused to rule out. (The latter is a levy on the value of the home, designed to replace stamp duty.)

There is a reason those shorting the market are doing so mostly in prime central London: an area that would be most severely affected by the very policies some bet won’t come into being. A few of Labour’s promises, instead, are welcome. ‘One reason my brother and I managed to get our flat for so little is because we bought it on a very short lease,’ says Plantenga, ‘because Labour said it would overhaul leaseholds and move flats into commonhold ownership.’ It’s a case of rolling the dice and seeing where it lands.

If one trend is currently dominating the world of watchmaking, hard stone dials might be it. Look around the recent launches and you’ll see them everywhere.

Whereas big names such as Cartier, Bulgari and Rolex seem mostly to return to the stones that first cemented their status as paragons of the genre (lapis, malachite, turquoise, tiger’s eye and onyx), independent makers tend to be less orthodox, introducing watch aficionados to ruby root, charoite or moss agate.

There are few dial materials that I would choose over hardstone. Give me tiger iron over another gradient lacquer, lapis lazuli over another shade of sunburst blue or carnelian over another textured finish inspired by linen, sand or hammered metal.

It is not that I don't admire those techniques — or the craftsmanship behind them — but the fact is that no matter how skilled the artisan, they are still competing against something nature perfected millions of years ago.

Perhaps that is why stone dials feel so relevant today, in an age where watchmaking has become defined by technical progress. Every year brings advanced escapements, new alloys and increasingly elaborate finishes, each promising to produce something no one has seen before. Yet one of the industry's most compelling design stories has come from slices of ornamental stone that existed before civilisation.

‘The thing I like with hardstone,’ says Emmanuel Gueit of Dennison, who has previously designed for Rolex, Harry Winston and Hermès, ‘is that every single dial is unique. We take the raw stone and cut it wherever we can — and they are all different.’

For Gueit, who also works with Tiffany, that individuality has little to do with price and everything to do with design. ‘I'm interested in new materials,’ he says. ‘We've seen ceramics and all sorts of innovations over the past 20 years — and I admire them — but when I think about luxury, I keep coming back to materials that come from the ground.’

The apparent simplicity of a hardstone dial belies one of the most demanding manufacturing processes in watchmaking. Every dial begins with a carefully selected block of mineral that is assessed for colour, pattern and structural integrity and later sliced into sheets, often little more than half a millimetre thick. Many never progress beyond this stage — even a spectacular pattern can conceal a hidden fault. A section that is structurally perfect, meanwhile, may simply lack the visual balance that is required for it to stand out.

Once selected, the stone is bonded to a metal base before being drilled for the hands, cut for complications such as the date and fitted with indices. Every operation runs the risk of reducing the material to fragments.

Where this was once the preserve of the great jewellery maisons, smaller, more boutique brands are now having a go. Names such as Christopher Ward and Frederique Constant are making natural stone available to collectors who, until recently, might only have admired it from afar. Through them, hardstone is not only becoming more financially accessible but seeing its very definition broadened in real time.

As Christopher Ward's Biel-based product director, Jörg Bader, puts it: ‘Our role is not to lecture collectors: it is to spark curiosity.’ For Bader, the objective is not to imitate haute horlogerie at a lower price, but to introduce collectors to natural materials that they might otherwise ignore. ‘If someone buys one of these watches because they fall in love with the colour or pattern, then discovers the remarkable story behind the stone itself, that is a wonderful outcome.’

At the helm of the stone-dial watch’s revival is Piaget — which, over time, has become the maison most closely associated with the style. The brand never abandoned its belief in ornamental stone, just as its purveyors have never faltered in their remarkable appreciation for Piaget’s vintage creations: think of the 15102, a watch known for its galvanic anthracite dial, or the asymmetrical timepiece that would later be known as the Limelight Gala.

These were watches, after all, worn to the most glamorous events of the day, by the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Andy Warhol and Sophia Loren.

Although tempting to conclude that Piaget invented the hard-stone dial, the reality is rather more complex. The stone dial first ascended in the late 1960s and 1970s, its story shaped not by one house, but by a shared appetite for experimentation. Piaget produced some of the era’s defining models, pairing slices of malachite, lapis lazuli, jade and coral with ultra-thin movements and sculptural gold bracelets.

At about the same time, Chopard was creating equally accomplished stone dials and Cartier was incorporating ornamental stone into both jewellery watches and icons such as the Tank. Rolex, too, was experimenting with jasper, malachite and other natural materials in its most prestigious collections.

‘The 1970s was a period of remarkable creative freedom in watchmaking and jewellery,’ a spokesperson for Chopard explains. ‘Designers were moving away from convention, embracing bold colours, sculptural forms and unexpected materials.’ For the house, stones transformed the watch from a functional object into wearable art — a philosophy that continues to shape them today.

What has changed is not the material, but the speed at which ideas now spread. Fifty years ago, several brands arrived at similar conclusions through a common cultural consensus. Today, inspiration travels instantly. A handful of influential launches, strengthened by auctions, collectors and social media, has been enough to encourage brands to reboot the stone dial across the board.

Perhaps this is why the second gold rush feels so different from the first: the revival of the stone dial is no longer confined to a handful of household names. Trends come and go, colours rise and fall, materials drift in and out of fashion, but nature’s offering seems to endure as the watchmaker’s eternal muse.

Our much-anticipated Prince of Wales Guest Edit is nearly here.

The Royal Guest Editor spent the past six months working with Country Life Editor Mark Hedges, Managing & Features Editor Paula Minchin and the whole team to produce a 300-page special issue revealing fascinating insights, from his public role to the more personal aspects of his life — including his fondness for an occasional visit to the pub for a pint of cider with ice.

'We need to protect our pubs,' says The Prince of Wales — or should that be Prince of Ales? We cannot reveal much more of what's inside until next week, but trust us when we say that it's worth the wait.

Prince William follows in the footsteps of a remarkable roll call of Guest Editors:

• October 2025 Sir David Beckham
• July 2022 The Duchess of Cornwall, now Queen Camilla
• July 2020 Princess Anne
• November 2018 Prince Charles, now The King
• November 2013 Prince Charles, now The King

The Royal Guest Edit will be available for one week at all good newsagents, supermarkets and shops, from November 11.

Alternatively, subscribe to Country Life for a year (51 copies) for £150 and you'll save 47% on the cover price, and receive a copy of Prince William's issue free of charge.

The autumn of 1588 was marked by a succession of huge storms across Britain and Ireland. Climatologists debate their cause to this day, with most agreeing that the appalling weather was a symptom of the 'Little Ice Age' that increased the sea ice around Greenland.

Such clever deductions would have been of no consolation to those who died around the coasts of these isles that year, among whom were many thousands of the soldiers and sailors who'd formed part of the Spanish Armada in the summer. Philip II's attempt to invade Britain, and its defeat by a combination of luck, the tactical superiority of the English Navy and the often woeful communication between the Spanish commanders has filled countless books. But the deadliest factor in the confrontation was, by far, Mother Nature. Thousands died from disease, most notably in outbreaks among the thousands of the Duke of Parma's troops, who had been waiting in Flanders to be escorted across the English Channel. Almost as deadly were the diseases which raced through the thousands of English soldiers and sailors in Kent after it was all over. Many came through the fighting without a scratch only to die after the Armada had been chased away.

And then there were the shipwrecks of the Armada itself — around 50 of them sank as they rounded Scotland and Ireland en-route home. Many had lost their anchors while fleeing Francis Drake's fireship attack in Calais back in August, and thus had no way of finding shelter and riding out the worst of the waves.

Perhaps the worst since incident concerns La Girona, a galleass — or oared sailing ship — from the Neapolitan Squadron of the Spanish Armada. During a storm on October 26, 1588, she was driven onto Lacada Point, near the Giant’s Causeway in Co Antrim. Of the 1,300 men aboard, only nine are said to have survived.

Archaeological investigation of the wreck has produced a wealth of finds, some of which are in the Ulster Museum, Belfast — but not all. Two iron iron-bound chests survive to this day at Glenarm Castle, where they're among the most prized objects in the collection of The Earl of Antrim. Both are said to have been saved from La Girona, and offer a fascinating glimpse into what happened to the ships

The chests are a tangible link to Sorley Boy MacDonnell, who received the survivors from the wreck in 1588 and immediately searched it for cannon and treasure. ‘Boy’ comes from the Gaelic buidhe, meaning fair haired, yellow being associated with luck.

‘My ancestor was a charismatic leader of the Scottish Clan Donald,’ says the Earl, ‘who, after an astonishing life of battles, massacres and assassinations, acquired title to 330,000 acres of Co Antrim at the age of 81.

'He was succeeded by his fourth son, Randal Arranach, in 1590. Randal was made Viscount Dunluce in 1618 and Earl of Antrim in 1620, despite the fact that the family remained resolutely loyal to its Gaelic heritage and openly Roman Catholic.'

These 450-year-old relics might once have contained crucial documents or treasures from the Spanish fleet; that's not been the case of late, adds the Earl.

'The chests were used to store deeds and family documents in the 17th and 18th centuries, but, more recently, they have held children’s fancy-dress costumes.’

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 2pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

1. Refuses to change a nappy

2. Reads books on business strategy

3. Tops up your glass when it’s already half full

5. Quotes lines from books he hasn’t read and never will

6. Asks no questions, apart from ‘what do you do?’

7. Has an empty fridge, but for the odd spirit

8. Never gets his round in

9. Suggests unkind games at a party

10. Shows more chest hair than is appropriate

12. Deletes his search history

13. Treats his bonus as if it were a national news story

14. Has dark-coloured bedsheets and only one pillow

15. Squashes a spider rather than releasing it outside

16. Refuses to call it a night

17. Loves mansplaining — and manspreading

18. Still goes to Mykonos

19. Expects more than just room service

21. Wears loafers without socks

22. Communicates via solicitors

23. Doesn’t know the lyrics to Jerusalem

24. Gives a disloyal best-man speech

25. Looks over your shoulder at parties

27. Travels business, but makes his family fly economy

28. Wears glasses with clear lens

29. Irons in creases

30. Pretends Uber Luxe drivers are his personal chauffeurs

31. Has few longstanding male friends

32. Cannot name a favourite film

33. Sneaks secret glances in the mirror

35. Has an Eames lounge chair

36. Uses hair-growth serums

37. Brands every neck he kisses

38. Only ever signs a group card and never writes his own

39. Insists on getting the Chateaubriand — then suggests 'Going Dutch'

The scenic Scottish Borders is an area of grand country houses and estates, gently rolling countryside, fertile farmland, productive forestry, steep river valleys and picturesque towns and villages. It is bounded to the south by the majestic, 97-mile-long River Tweed, one of Britain’s great salmon rivers, which flows from west to east across the region and forms the historic boundary between Scotland and England.

One of the most magical country estates in this landscape — and a place that ticks most, if not all of those boxes — is the 3,460-acre Portmore estate in the upland valley of Eddleston Water, a landscape dominated by the straight, narrow channel of the watercourse that flows through high-sided valleys on its way south to join the Tweed at Peebles, the county town.

Rated of ‘outstanding architectural and archaeological value’ by Historic Scotland, Portmore truly has it all: a Category A-listed Scottish Baronial mansion, spectacular gardens and grounds, seven estate houses, farmland, hill ground and woodland, all within easy commuting distance of Edinburgh, which is 18 miles to the north.

Recently relaunched onto the market through Christopher Dewe of Knight Frank’s country department and Emma Chalmers of Galbraith, the estate is for sale for offers over £15 million for the whole.

Offers over £8 million are sought for Lots 1 and 2, some 1,200 acres in all, comprising Portmore House with its gardens, parkland, hill ground, forestry and Portmore Loch, a 105-acre Victorian reservoir managed by Scottish Water, to the south of which lie the remains of a Neolithic fort and settlement, the Northshield Rings, a Scheduled Ancient Monument deemed of national significance.

Offers over £5 million are sought for Lot 1 alone, comprising Portmore House with its gardens, designed landscape, hill ground and amenity woodland, some 300 acres in all.

The original Portmore estate was established in the early 18th century by the Earls of Portmore and acquired in the late 18th century by Alexander Mackenzie, whose son Colin, a close friend of Sir Walter Scott, established Portmore’s parkland, woodland and designed landscape.

In 1850, his son, William Forbes Mackenzie, had Portmore House, an imposing red sandstone mansion, built by the eminent country-house architect, David Bryce, in his signature Scottish Baronial style.

Following a fire, the whole interior was remodelled and a family wing added to the north end by Bryce’s younger brother, John, in 1883. Further substantial remodelling took place following another fire in 1986.

Today, Portmore House offers more than 17,200sq ft of well-proportioned accommodation on three main floors, including several wonderfully elegant reception rooms, a family-friendly kitchen and various domestic offices on the ground floor.

There's also a library, as you'd expect of a house whose floorplan could have been pulled from a Cluedo board, and an organ room that's almost 40 foot long. The organ, naturally, is included.

A grand principal bedroom suite, two en-suite bedrooms, seven further bedrooms and five further bathrooms are located on the first floor, with yet another bedroom on the second floor.

And if a mere 11 bedrooms isn't enough? You'll find seven more on the lower ground floor, along with a billiard room, a playroom, guest annexe, wine cellars and caretaker’s flat.

According to Historic Scotland, ‘the overall trend at Portmore from the late 20th century onwards has been one of repair and restoration. The original Victorian terraced lawns have been tidied up, and a central pond added. The walled garden has undergone a radical transformation, while the glasshouse looks like the sort of thing you'd find up the A703 at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Designed by the present owners during their 40-year tenure, the garden now forms the main attraction for open days organised under the Scotland’s Gardens Scheme’.

Perhaps it is because I own a cat, but I am starting to wonder if we are over-indulging our dogs. It’s understandable. Can you really put a price on love? Apparently if you were going to put a price on love (love for our dogs), it would be about £10 billion per year. Dogs now have their own shepherd’s huts. They have their own architecture competition at Goodwood (‘Barkitecture’, in case you were wondering). Some might say they live better than we do.

Is the world of cars insulated from the madness? It is not. Arguably, it is more effected than anywhere else. Manufacturers have gone to great lengths to make sure that people’s dogs are as comfortable and included in any road trip as they possibly can be. Nothing is too extreme. May I remind you that Rolls-Royce once built a bespoke Spectre for a labrador called Bailey.

Now the Spectre Bailey is an extreme (and very stylish, I would add) example, but accessories for our dogs is something that has become ubiquitous, especially at the higher end of the market. Aston Martin produces a ‘Pet Pack’ for its DBX, featuring a 36-inch dog lead (leather), a dog-food carrier and dog bag (leather), a portable washer, dog partition and bumper protector.

Bentley offer something similar for the Bentayga, with a bespoke dog guard and luggage divider, quilted load-space liner and a rear-facing camera that allows you to keep an eye on your pets while on the move. It should also be noted that it’s not just dogs Bentley will provide for; back in 2017 Mulliner, Bentley’s in-house coachbuilders, produced a falconry pack, for the distinguished birders among us.

Skoda, Land Rover, you name it, they've put a dog in it. Stellantis, the group behind Citroën, Alfa Romeo, Jeep, Peugot and others, seems to have a keen fascination with dogs that might be as unhealthy as the rest of us. They recently announced the Citroën ‘Pawlingo’, a customised Berlingo for dog walkers, in partnership with the Blue Cross. Some features include, but are not limited to, air-conditioned kennels in the boot (with cameras), a dedicated washing zone, harness storage and treat table. There also appears to be a foldable ladder for our more geriatric pooches.

All of that pales in comparison to the Peugeot E-5008 Dog Edition, which they claim was basically designed by a dog. The cabin is inspired by canine vision, non-slip materials throughout, a modular mattress in the boot and a special headrest for the window. It’s barely worth mentioning the portable pet dryer and integrated bowls.

It’s easy enough to say that our dogs are no longer just pets, but rather members of the family. I’d argue that for many owners, they might be more important than that. And as long as we remain a nation of dog obsessives, we will continue to see some more strange solutions on how to drive them around. Oh how the other half live.

'There has always been something magical about wearing a work of art. Jewellery has always held a special place in my life because, more than almost any other object, it has the power to carry memory,' says Pauline Karpidas.

Her jewellery collection is now heading to auction, one year after the contents sale of her flat sold for more than £100 million — the most valuable single-owner sale series ever staged in London.

Her similarly whimsical and colourful jewellery is equally reflective of the personal style of a woman so embedded in the art world. They include pieces by Joel Arthur Rosenthal (JAR) and Suzanna Belperron, as well as pieces by Van Cleef & Arpels, Bulgari, Boucheron, Trabert & Hoeffer Mauboussin and Cartier.

The 70 lots featured in Pauline Karpidas: The Jewelry Collection will be offered in a live evening auction at Sotheby's New York on December 8, with an estimate in the range of $10 million. A public exhibition opens on December 2.

Particular standouts include a gold, enamel and coloured stone cuff-bracelet by CHANEL, a pink diamond ring and a sapphire ring by JAR, and an enamel reliquary pendant set with a sapphire, peridots, citrines, rubies, emeralds and diamonds. The latter is from the 17th to early 18th centuries and was originally in the collection of Francesco Martelli, Nunito of Pope Clemens X of Poland.

'More than a collection of jewellery, this is a portrait of Pauline herself. Fearless in scale, bold in colour and exuberant in spirit, these are jewels that make no attempt to whisper,' says Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s chairman, Europe. 'They reflect a woman who trusts her instincts completely, collecting with an extraordinary combination of curiosity, confidence and an appetite for the unexpected.'

Country Life’s resident jewellery expert Jonathan Self adds: 'For me, the star piece is the reliquary pendant. It is completely unique.

‘Not only is Pauline’s cross stunningly beautiful and very much of the period, but it also has an amazing provenance. It was owned by Cardinal Martelli — an important figure in the late 17th-century and early-18th-century church — and stayed in his family for over 350 years.’

If that wasn’t enough to persuade you to bid: ‘At $80,000 to $120,000 it is seriously undervalued in my opinion,’ concludes Self.

Karpidas is best known for her art collection. Works by Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso were among the items from her London flat auctioned off last year. The 83-year-old collector has been acquiring works for more than 50 years and is a patron of Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin.

Born Pauline Parry and raised in Manchester in a working-class family, she worked as a model and as a secretary before moving to Athens in the 1960s. There, she opened a fashion boutique called My Fair Lady and met her shipping magnate husband Constantinos Karpidas, who introduced her to art, as well as Alexander Iolas, the legendary art dealer often credited with discovering Andy Warhol.

After Karpidas charmed him out of early retirement, Iolas helped her to curate her collection. Constantinos died in 2005; Pauline is now based in the USA, where her son lives. In 2009, she made headlines for parting with Warhol’s 200 One Dollar Bills for $43.8 million, making about 114 times her original investment (she bought the work, 23 years prior, for $383,000).

If you can’t wait until December to bid on Karpidas’s jewellery, coming up for sale a tad sooner is a magnificent pink diamond ring, similar to the art collector’s jewel by JAR. ‘The Bulgari Pink’ is estimated to sell for 10,000,000-15,000,000 CHF (about £9,000,000-14,000,000 at the time of writing). The 24-carat ring is part of a live auction with Christie's, taking place on November 10 at 4pm CET (3pm GMT).

Also of note in the sale are a striking coloured diamond and enamel ring, a pair of multi-gem clip-brooches from JAR — both of which look as though they could also be from Karpidas’s stash — and a Bulgari enamel and diamond ‘Serpenti’ bracelet-watch.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 2pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

Many visitors to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in 2025 thought that the best exhibit in the Great Pavillion was the display of crab-apple cultivars in full bloom, mounted by the firm of Frank P. Matthews, a fruit-tree nursery near Tenbury Wells in Worcestershire. The RHS, moving in its mysterious ways, did not award it a Gold medal, but there was no doubt in the minds of many that no other exhibit offered such interest, originality and beauty, not to mention colour and scent.

It takes time to plan and assemble plants for any flower show, but exhibiting at Chelsea called for much thought and preparation over a full four years. Crab apples are wonderful flowering trees, but no one had ever mounted a dedicated display of them at Chelsea.

Many nurserymen consider them better ornamental trees than Japanese cherries because they flower over a longer period, with flowers on the tree for at least twice as long. They are useful pollinators for domestic apples, too, because they produce heavy crops of pollen. All carry fruit in autumn, which very few Japanese cherries do, and, as some crab apples hang on the trees until late in the winter, they supply nourishment for birds and small mammals over many months. As the show leaflet explained, the display revealed ‘the striking diversity of Malus species, showcasing their rich palette of flower colours, unique leaf shapes, and varied tree forms’.

Crab apples do not all flower at the same time. When you read that certain varieties are suitable pollinators for a particular eater or cooker, it is because they can be relied upon to flower at the same time. Some cultivars, such as ‘Princeton Cardinal’, open their first flowers at the end of March, whereas others, including the gorgeous violet-scented American species Malus coronaria and M. ioensis, may not finish blooming until June.

The idea for an exhibit of crab apples in flower was that of Nick Dunn, a director of Frank P. Matthews. Having joined the nursery in 1974, he had 50 years of experience of growing crab apples and was thus in a rare position to decide which varieties to choose. The eponymous Frank P. Matthews was his grandfather, who started the nursery in 1901 (it celebrates 125 years of success this year) by renting six acres at Harlington in Middlesex to grow fruit trees and roses. The business flourished and, when he retired in 1950, Matthews was able to entrust it to his son-in-law, Andrew Dunn. However, by 1956, the site of the nursery was required for a substantial expansion of Heathrow Airport and most of its land now lies under one of the service roads.

It was then that the business moved to its present site near Tenbury Wells. Here, it has a holding of 500 contiguous acres where the three counties of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Shropshire meet. The soil is classified as a rich sandy loam, which is excellent for growth, although the presence of clay does not always make it easy to work. Dunn was succeeded by his son Nick, now in his seventies, and day-by-day management is in the hands of Nick’s daughter Stephanie James.

‘John Downie’ and ‘Golden Hornet’ are still widely grown, despite their susceptibility to scab and premature ripening — but the five recommendations from Mr Dunn are the best crab apples for gardens today. Two facts emerge: first, that all his top choices were bred in Europe or the US, not in Britain. Second, that none was introduced more than 40 years ago, which suggests a recent lack of initiative among most British nurserymen.

There is, however, one field in which Frank P. Matthews is way ahead of other growers and introducers of fruiting trees. The leading English apple-breeder for many years was a man called Hugh Ermen, who worked at the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent. When he retired, Ermen devoted himself to raising new apple varieties. He planted hundreds of trees in his semi-detached suburban garden and cross-pollinated them, then sent his best seedlings to Frank P. Matthews for at least 10 years of further trialling before they were either discarded or introduced.

Ermen bred eating apples, not for commercial growers, but for home gardeners, and his successes include ‘Herefordshire Russet’, ‘Red Devil’ and ‘Scrumptious’, all introduced by Mr Dunn and all now widely grown. He died in 2009, but Frank P. Matthews is still trialling the last of his seedlings.

Some idea of the size of the nursery’s business can be gained from knowing that its production averages about 300,000 open-ground and 200,000–250,000 container-grown trees and shrubs.

The scale of its commercial activity may be judged from the minimum annual quantity propagated of any given item in its catalogue: 50, but up to 1,000 or more for popular items. No fewer than 30 acres (but up to 40) are used as hardstanding for container stock.

The River Teme runs alongside part of the landholding and helps to fill the irrigation lagoons. More than 90% of the trees are grown from the nursery’s own mother tree stock. Although there is a small retail area, beautifully laid out and known as The Tree Shop, it is essentially a wholesaler, supplying trees to garden centres, orchardists and online businesses. However, it also supplies bare-root and container-grown plants by mail order.

Frank P. Matthews has always been known for fruit trees — its list of plums, damsons and gages is especially impressive — but some years ago began to diversify into ornamental trees and shrubs. Among the bestsellers today are Betula utilis ‘Snow Queen’, Acer rubrum ‘Brandywine’ and Magnolia ‘Black Tulip’, although Mr Dunn says that M. ‘Livingstone’ is tougher. Recently, the nurserymen have begun to train fruit trees into such shapes as espaliers, which are perfect for small gardens.

Mr Dunn is a member of the RHS Council and has loyally served on many of the society’s committees. He is recognised as an outstanding expert on ornamental trees and, especially, fruit trees. In 2017, the RHS awarded him its highest honour, the Victoria Medal of Honour, as it did his father. It may, therefore, seem all the more extraordinary that his Chelsea exhibit was not thought worthy of a Gold medal or, even, the Best in Show award. He enjoyed planning the exhibit and is now thinking of putting on another one — determined to do even better next time.

Edward Hopper painted The Martha McKeen of Wellfleet (1944) at the zenith of his career, alongside other, heavily studied works such as Nighthawks (1942).

He had, like myriad artists that preceded and would come after him, struggled for years without recognition. Light began to appear at the end of the tunnel in 1930, when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925) for its permanent collection. It was the first oil painting that the museum purchased and went on to be exhibited in their 1933 retrospective of his work.

It was around this time that Hopper first visited and rented a cottage in South Truro, Massachusetts, with his wife, Jo. Initially both seeking an escape from the stress and heat of New York City, Hopper’s new-found relationship with The Cape would come to define and anchor his work for nearly half a century. When he died, at the age of 84 in 1967, he painted more than 100 canvases during his time there, often working plein air or from inside his car.

For the rest of their lives, the couple spent roughly six months of every year living and working in Truro, according to The Whitney Museum of American Art, in whose permanent collection there is a preliminary charcoal study of Martha McKeen.

The finished painting depicts a sailboat off the Cape’s coast, on an August morning, and is named after Hopper’s friends, Martha and Reggie McKeen, with whom the artist often went on sailing excursions on board their boat. The artist’s signature is clearly visible in the bottom right-hand corner. The 1940s were a tumultuous time for everything including art, particularly in America. The fractured perspectives of Cubism, the outrageous colour palettes of Fauvism and the radical exploration of light by the Impressionists all jostled for attention. What makes Hopper’s Martha McKeen all the more remarkable is his ability to shut out this artistic noise, resist the prevailing fashions and remain entirely true to his own distinctive vision.

Its appearance at auction is notable not only for its beauty and skill, but because it is one of just five major Hopper sailing masterpieces, and one of two left in private hands. Its current owner is the Thyssen-Bornemisza family on whose walls it has hung for more than 45 years. The prominent European dynasty’s fortune was forged in the steel and coal industries, and plenty of it was spent amassing one of the world’s most significant private art treasure troves. Think Albrecht Dürer, Caravaggio, Hans Holbein the Younger and Peter Paul Rubens.

Martha McKeen could, now, be yours, assuming, of course, that the wind is blowing in a favourable direction.

'The Martha McKeen of Wellfleet' will be auctioned off as part of The Modern Evening Auction in The New York Sale, on November 18, in partnership with Celine. Visit the Sotheby’s website for more information and to register to bid.

My grandfather always used to tell me: “Well sown is half grown.” If you do the ploughing well, then get the seed in at the right time in the right conditions, the chances are you’ll have a good crop,’ muses Ian Cradock, as he leans against that same relative’s 1944 Fordson N to survey the plot he has just completed at the 75th British National Ploughing Championships in Austrey, Warwickshire, last month.

When asked whether he is happy with his efforts, he is bashful: ‘I’ve done worse. I did a good block yesterday, but it wasn’t as good as this.’ We have ploughed the fields and scattered seed on the land for thousands of years. Indeed, the introduction of the practice was arguably the most pivotal in farming history, as it reshaped the landscape and the way people lived.

At the end of the Neolithic Ice Age, warmer conditions allowed previously nomadic hunter-gatherers to settle and, as the millennia passed by, our dependence on sourcing food within a nearby area grew. Initially, branches were used to scratch the earth, but, by 3000BC, primitive ploughs — hook-shaped wooden tools called ards — were being harnessed to animals.

The arrival of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages enabled metal reinforcement on the tips to improve durability. Meanwhile, the faster farmers were able to plough and the further into the soil they could break to bring the nutrients to the top and to aerate the earth, the greater the quantity and quality of the crops they could produce. The arrival of steam power in the 18th century facilitated another significant advancement, because machines could shoulder the work and, by the 1850s, steam engines were pulling the plough.

Now, our ancestors’ brows would be furrowed with curiosity at modern-day capabilities; earlier this month, an acre was ploughed in a mere nine minutes and 19.96 seconds, a new Guinness World Record. Mention speed to any of the competitors at the Nationals, however, and it is met with dismissive scoffs. When I tease Cradock that it isn’t the most high-octane sport, he smiles. ‘My wife says it’s like watching paint dry,’ he admits. ‘We are given four hours; we do a split, stand up for half an hour while the judges have a look and then we’re off again. But it is a skill and so much goes into it.’

Initial preparation of the plot (usually about 330ft long and 65ft wide) involves raking or forking up loose straw. Then, once the ploughing begins, so, too, does the meticulous tinkering and adjusting, with some ploughers stopping regularly, brandishing a spanner or tape measure and adjusting their alignment with precision. ‘The be all and end all is whether it’s straight,’ John Nicholas, one of the judges of the Ford and Fordson classes, explains.

‘They have to do it by eye alone. If the first couple of runs aren’t exactly straight, they can fix it when they start ploughing properly. As a judge, if you see somebody isn’t straight, but they work on it to get better, we think: “Ok, they’ve tried.” Quite often, you’ll see somebody start well, but then they create a crooked plot and don’t do anything about it. We don’t like that. There is still a strong element of farming; it’s not only about winning, it’s about adapting and doing what’s going to work for your land. It goes back to the old-fashioned values of good ploughing creating good crops. If your ploughing is uneven, it’s going to take more cultivating, cost you more and the crop won’t grow uniformly.’

Nicholas is one of several fluorescent-bibbed judges, all of whom have been selected by a panel and have previously competed: ‘It’s a lot easier to judge when you know what you’re talking about. We’re a bit of a dying breed — I actually stopped ploughing to judge.’ He is on one side of a section of field where green posts demarcate the plots; brown posts define the other end, where another judge patrols. ‘Our scoresheet colours correspond to the posts. We don’t work in partnership, so our opinion can be different.’

The first component judged is the opening — the scratch, or single furrow, then the turn and the second furrow back — on whether it is well cut, uniform and straight. It is this, together with the finish, that are the most important parts. It’s a hard act to furrow. I catch snatches of Carl Fretwell’s Yorkshire tones over the chug chug of his David Brown 880 tractor as he explains: ‘You’re working towards leaving it all parallel and straight. The start is your first hurdle. Once you get going on the middle part, you have to work on keeping parallel and you can measure that to check, but your focus is on the finish — you must get that right. I’m not quite parallel at the moment, but I can widen or narrow my front furrow to adjust.’

I ask how long he has been competing. ‘Far too long! I think I’ve done the National 36 times. I’ve been ploughing since I was 13. My dad was a champion. My grandad wouldn’t match plough because he didn’t like ploughing other people’s land for nothing. He were a true Yorkshireman!’

Rarely in a field of competitors would there be such a range of equipment with the same purpose. At the far end of the site, traction engines heave ploughs reminiscent of medieval torture devices across a stretch of stubble with slow, rhythmical chuntering, the occasional peeeeep of their whistles sounding like an exasperated exhalation of effort. Nearer the trade stands, ribboned heavy horses throw their weight into the jangling harnesses and obey the steadying ‘woah’ of their drivers. Adjacent to them, vintage tractors putter alongside massive modern beasts out of which sunglasses-clad men in overalls jump to assess angles with an air of Top Gun nonchalance. One of them, Euron Griffith, is on a mission. He may be at the Nationals, but ‘no one’s ever won the Worlds from Wales, so that’s what I’m aiming for’.

Griffith started competing when he was 13, entering about 25 competitions a year in vintage classes. Now, he ploughs reversible (where the soil is turned in the same direction) and does about eight: ‘It’s an expensive hobby. There’s £50 here and there in prize money, the same as it was 50 years ago. I was ploughing in the World Ploughing Championships in Croatia last month. It cost £20,000, up from £12,000, because of fuel costs and the extras. If you’re a millionaire, it’d be all right.’

Unlike other classes, where the equipment is small enough to be transported on a trailer, this serious kit requires more logistics — and it’s not going to tuck into most Airbnb parking spaces. Griffith is on plot 13: ‘A lucky number yesterday — I finished top in qualifiers. Everything came right. I think it was better soil where I was; it was a bit heavier down the bottom and that makes a difference.’ I suggest that little can be done if the soil type is different to what is practised on at home and he nods: ‘In Croatia, the ground was rock hard, it was tough going.’

It’s heartening to see so many of the next generation showing interest and there are several family connections in the competitor list, too. This is Ellie Bullard’s 11th year at the Nationals; her brother Josh has competed eight times and it is 16-year-old sister Chloe’s first. ‘It’s nice for the three of us to be here together. We are all very supportive of each other, although it can get a bit competitive — Josh and Chloe were in direct competition yesterday,’ Bullard remarks.

‘We have a range of old tractors at home and were brought up going to ploughing matches over the years. My dad, grandad, great-grandad and great-uncle have all competed in their time and we have always been along to support them. Each one of us started as soon as we could, aged 13. Dad has been our main teacher, but people are really helpful and share their wisdom on the match field.’

Not only is there a sense of community during the competition, but events over the weekend bring people together, from a service to bless the plough in a local church on the Friday to a hog roast on the Saturday night. Nicola Rawnsley, who has travelled from the Isle of Man, didn’t come from a farming background, but has felt welcome from the beginning. ‘My interest in ploughing happened when I met my husband, David,’ she explains. ‘He was a bit of a novice, so we learnt together. I mostly plough general purpose (where uniform, whole furrows are laid), but I have just started ploughing high cut (in which the soil is brought to a sharp point). It’s not done on the island as we have our unique Manx style (an intricate method that creates castellated peaks), so I’m still getting to grips with it.’

The couple currently works a pair of Comtois mares called Tempete and Elle. ‘Tempete’s like a racehorse, she wants to get it done in double time.’ I remark that, despite the heartening number of women participating in the other classes, Rawnsley is very much in the minority in the horse ploughing. ‘It’s really physical — the preparation, putting equipment away afterwards and especially ploughing high-cut style,’ she explains. ‘If you turn short or too far, you’ve got to hoick the plough across. On one wheel I’ve got a 56lb weight to balance the high-cut gear on the other side, so it requires some core strength.’

She laughs as she remembers, ‘I went to get supplies when packing to come here and the shop assistant asked if I was going on holiday. I said: “Loosely — I’m going away ploughing and I’ll be living in a horsebox for two weeks.” She was horrified. I must admit, at this point I’d kill for a hot bath.’ For now, however, she needs to keep ploughing on.

This feature originally appeared in the October 28, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

For more information about the ploughing championships, see here.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 2pm.

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For more space-related reading, why not read our article: A journey to NASA’s headquarters to mark the first crewed lunar mission in more than 50 years.

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Country Life November 4, 2026, looks at puffins, camellias, and how to tell the difference between a gentleman and a cad.

Here's a look at some of what you'll find inside this week's issue.

Send in the clowns

Colour and character help make the puffin one of our most beloved seabirds, argues Stephen Moss

Gentleman’s Life

• The 39 steps to spotting a cad 
• Nick Carvell meets the sartorial scions inheriting good tailoring 
• The best British stuntmen
• Is it time for a revival of stone-dial watches? 
• What shoes tell you about a man 
• Revving up for classic-car restoration A tip of the hat to Swaine 
• The latest luxuries for gentlemen

The other camellia

A profusion of delicately scented flowers makes Camellia sasanqua an autumn and early-winter fav-ourite for Charles Quest-Ritson

Painting in the moonlight

A glowing moon has illuminated the work of the greatest artists, from Jan van Eyck to Édouard Manet, as Michael Hall reveals

Huon Mallalieu’s favourite painting

The Art Market correspondent chooses a ‘miraculous’ 1437 work

Country-house treasures

The English Counter-Reformation is rekindled for John Goodall in the attic of Stonor Park, Oxfordshire

Opulence and variety

In the second of two articles, Steven Brindle explores the 20th-century trials of Burton Constable Hall in East Yorkshire

The legacy

James Fisher gets up to speed on Jensen cars, the classic British marque created 100 years ago

Interiors

The latest lamp and lighting designs, with Amelia Thorpe

London Life

Neighbourly behaviour, seven of the best properties, rooting out capital bargains and ) and our writers on all you need to know this month

The shroom boom

A fascination with fungi has long influenced art and culture, as Deborah Nicholls-Lee discovers

Out and about

The new Country Life tweed and the Gentleman’s Life issue toasted at Hackett in Savile Row

Countryside mysteries

Delight mingles with disgust and amusement with annoyance as John Wright ponders the pungent stinkhorn, the most phallic of fungi

Travel

Pamela Goodman unveils her most prized possession as she assesses the plight of the critically endangered Sumatran tiger

Arts & antiques

William Orpen is remembered as ‘a great journalist in paint’ for his depictions of the First World War, discovers Carla Passino

And much more

Salami with smiley piggie faces; Venetian cicchetti with sequined anchovies; slices of ‘Quattro Stitchioni’. This is a trattoria, but not quite as you know it. ‘The lasagne has layers of machine-knitted pasta sheets and hand-crocheted ragu,’ says Kate Jenkins. ‘Sometimes I’ll add a blowtorch for a burnt finish, as if it’s just come out of the oven.’

The textile artist is talking to me about her current, immersive installation at London’s Air Contemporary gallery — an Italian restaurant where everything is knitted.

There will also be vintage tables, borrowed from Merchant & Found and arranged like a still-life painting, with crochet Chianti bottles and plates of ‘Spaghetti Woolanese’. And a wall of handmade objects, displayed in oak frames, including Mutti tomatoes and Pollastrini sardines.

Brighton-based Jenkins has been the undisputed Queen of Crochet for two decades. Her playful, almost-edible creations, from ice-cream cones to bagels, and prawn platters, are humorous, pretty and playful. ‘I like the challenge of making everything as realistic as possible,’ she says. ‘Whenever I’m abroad, a food market, then a supermarket, are first on my list for inspiration.’ She cites several trips, including a summer cruise with Viking, from Venice to Rome. ‘In Crotone, I saw bunches of Calabrian red onions. I smuggled some home and recreated them for the restaurant.’

Jenkins was taught to knit and crochet by her mother and grandmother, around the age of nine, and quickly realised that she was better at ‘making’ than drawing. A fashion degree with a special focus on textiles led to a career in knitwear, designing prototypes for labels such as Marc Jacobs and Missoni. However, it wasn’t until she made a fried breakfast as research for a foodie knit appliqué, in 2006, that the idea that’s made her famous first percolated in her mind.

‘I kept thinking, would anyone wear a fried breakfast? Of course, they would now, but this was the 1990s, so I put it onto a crochet plate instead.’ To test the public’s appetite for the artform, she put on an exhibition at Brighton Artists Open House, titled ‘Comfort Food’, featuring dishes such as fish and chips, and beans on toast. It sold out. ‘At the time, I was one of the only people doing it, but over the years, food art has become more fashionable.’

Galleries aren’t the only ones hungry for Jenkins. Earlier this year, she received a call from the top dog of luxury fashion, Hermès, who invited her to create an installation for their new, flagship store. She came up with ‘Rocabarn’, spun spa for Hermès’s first client, the horse. ‘I wanted it to look like a stable, so there were Birkin bags stuffed with sugar lumps, crocheted bridles, a ‘hooficure’ bar and a knitted carrot chandelier,’ she explains. ‘My favourite part was the life-size horse’s rear whose lambswool tail was plaited with jewellery (below).

‘Hermès asked for fun and humour, and they really embraced it. They encouraged me to be more over the top.’

So, what’s next on Jenkins’s menu? ‘A roast chicken. I’ve seen other knitted roast chickens, and I’d like to put my own stamp on one.’

Whatever she does, it’s bound to look good enough to eat.

'Knitalian' is at Air Contemporary Gallery from November 1 until 5 December. For more information visit their website.

In 1933, two of the most well-respected architects working in Britain came together to start a practice together. Erich Mendelsohn, a German Jew who had recently fled the Nazi regime and moved to London, went in to business with Serge Chermayeff, a Russian-born architect and designer whose family had left his homeland for good after the Russian Revolution.

Art Deco was, at the time, beginning to give way to Modernism, and the pair created several buildings that are among the most celebrated of the 1930s. The Grade I-listed De La Warr Pavilion, on the sea front in Bexhill, East Sussex, is arguably the most famous, but they also built a couple of private homes: Cohen House, in Chelsea, and Shrubs Wood, in the Buckinghamshire village of Chalfont St Giles. Both blazed new trails, helped set the template for the International Modern style which had a huge influence on architecture for the next half a century, and one of them — Shrubs Wood — is now up for sale at £3.95 million.

Shrubs Wood was built in 1933-1934, and is Grade II*-listed . If it looks familiar, there's a good reason: it's been used for the filming of many high-profile TV shows when the need has arisen for a house that fits the 1930s aesthetic. Agatha Christie adaptations are a case in point: several episodes of Poirot used the house as a location, Miss Marple has visited a few times, and this is one of the places where they asked themselves why they didn't ask Evans.

Its monolithic reinforced concrete construction allowed for huge rooms, uninterrupted floor space, grand picture windows and perhaps most beautifully of all, a quadrant curve staircase.

Laid out on a largely rectangular floorplan, there’s 3,735sq ft of internal space, with separate living room, dining room and a large kitchen, while the cellar space below has a wine cellar, a boiler room and storage areas, as well as access to the garage.

If the furniture in these pictures strikes you as particularly well-suited to the architecture, that’s no accident: much of it is original furniture created specifically for the house by its two eminent designers. The fact that it’s still here is extraordinary, and contributes to that Grade II*-listing status.

There are six bedrooms, all of which are on the first floor, with five of them sharing two family bathrooms. Most are fairly small, but the master bedroom is anything but: this is a proper suite, with two dressing rooms and a large en-suite bathroom as well as the sleeping area itself.

The house was originally known as Nimmo House, but was renamed by the impresario and Savoy hotel heiress Bridget D’Oyly Carte, who moved here in 1949 and made a wonderful home of the place - and in particular turned the five acres into wonderful gardens that are important enough to be locally listed.

The Buckinghamshire Gardens Trust has carried out a lot of research into the house and grounds, which can be read on their website (PDF link).

It’s a wonderful home, full of history and architectural interest as well as a beautiful building in its own right. What’s more, it’s eminently commutable: the stations of Gerrard’s Cross and Chalfont & Latimer are both just a few minutes’ drive, from where you can be in central London in under 20 minutes.

The caveats? You’ll probably want a specialist surveyor, since reinforced concrete of this vintage can have issues. Additionally, there’s no EPC rating listed on the details, and as a listed building we believe that the house is exempt - again, you’ll need to get your surveyors and solicitors to clarify details with the agents, but do bear in mind that concrete buildings don’t usually retain heat like brick or timber. Bills could be high.

Assuming none of that puts you off, this is a real find: a graceful home full of light and original features. Mendelsohn and Chermayeff only designed two homes together before going their separate ways, and Shrubs Wood makes that seem like a real pity.

Good news for those of us craving a serious carb fix now the weather has turned: E. Pellicci, the landmark east London ‘Britalian’ cafe founded in 1900, is taking up residence in Selfridges.

Until Christmas, the family-run Bethnal Green institution beloved for its enormous cooked breakfasts, Italian comfort food and ‘chips with everything’ policy will be popping up at The Brass Rail: Selfridges oldest restaurant, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.

Alongside the salt-beef sandwiches for which The Brass Rail is famous, dishes on offer will include E. Pellicci pasta with homemade pesto, a chicken schnitzel and mozzarella ciabatta and a pesto Reuben sandwich, as well as ‘school cake’ and custard. Plus you can order a spoonful of Pellicci’s signature ragu with anything on the menu.

The collaboration is the latest in a series of outside-the-box partnerships for Selfridges. It has previously joined forces with the likes of Sotheby’s, which released an Old Masters-printed streetwear collection in 2020, and Penhaligon, which recently created a train station inside the store.

The brainchild of Harry Gordon Selfridge, a flamboyant American entrepreneur, Selfridges opened its doors for the first time in 1909. An advertisement in the March 13 issue of Country Life that year proclaimed it ‘the newest and most interesting Shopping centre in Europe; a truly cosmopolitan institution’. Food, however, was off the menu at that point: the advertisement caveated that Selfridges would ‘supply nearly every requirement of daily life for Men, Women, and Children (provisions, wines, etc., excepted)’.

E. Pellicci was founded in 1900 by the Pellicci family, who had emigrated to London from Tuscany. Its Art Deco frontage and interiors have long made it a favourite with the art and fashion worlds — it was a YBA haunt in the 1990s — and Harry Styles shot parts of his Late Night Talking music video there in 2022. Today it’s run by siblings Nevio and Anna Pellicci, the third generation of the family to take charge. ‘Bringing their food to Oxford Street this Christmas feels like the perfect way to toast two London institutions,’ says Lucy Menendez, director of food and restaurants at Selfridges.

For more information see here.

A faded Fera poacher gilet in an east London beer garden; a Schöffel fleece writhing at a sweaty Hyde Park gig; or a pair of tasselled Fairfax & Favor Reginas settling in for brunch on the King’s Road. The sport of spying countrymen (and women) in the urban wilds has always been akin to seeing a stride in the hunting field — it was just a case of getting your eye in. But the line between country and city gear has never been more blurred, and so what was once about dialling in to the tattersall shirts, is now the sartorial wild west.

Anyone hankering after a Burberry trench would be forgiven for not knowing that when Thomas Burberry established the supersonic brand in Basingstoke in 1856, the idea was to create practical outerwear for the unpredictable British weather, with the precursor to its trench worn by army officers and polar explorers.

Then there’s Barbour, so entwined with A-listers and London Fashion Week that it’s hard to remedy it with the straight-talking Beaufort wax jacket designed by Dame Margaret Barbour in 1983.

And for more than two decades a pair of Hunters has been a red herring for anyone hoping to pigeon-hole the green welly brigade — Kate Moss was the disrupter when she debuted them at Glastonbury in 2005. But even Holland Cooper, with its comparatively short-lived heritage, has long since spread its provincial wings: Claudia Winkleman cloaked in its full-length Regency Coat on The Traitors is a long way from knee-deep mud at Badminton Horse Trials, where founder Jade Holland Cooper started selling tweed miniskirts in 2008.

The latest in Britain’s long line of clothes that masterfully straddle the city-country divide is Fera — tagline ‘made for the street and the stream’ — which since 2021 has been dressing the kind of thirty-something-year-old who could happily be skinning a rabbit in the morning and DJing in Hoxton by the evening. Think flannel shirts, workwear t-shirts and their bestseller poacher gilet. Good luck deciphering if the man in the Fera khaki wading vest has ever stepped foot on a riverbank or not.

‘There is something deeply British about country clothing. It unlocks a deep sense of nostalgia and identity and if done right, it is a timeless style,’ explains Sidney Hiscox, who founded Fera with his childhood friend Declan Morrison. The pair met aged four and grew up together in Wiltshire, Morrison on the sprawling Fonthill Estate outside Tisbury.

‘Think about Burberry and Barbour — country wear and the countryside have always had an influence on contemporary style. Even people born and raised in the city often have some connection to the country, maybe a grandparent or friend or even just an interest. If we can bring the culture that means so much to us to people both urban and rural in an engaging way, then we are achieving a key part of our mission,’ he says.

‘We both had incredibly lucky childhoods, running around being feral, brewing up ideas while we were wading up a river fishing, or racing around on motorbikes. And we wanted to create clothing which represented the lifestyle we loved,’ says Hiscox, who until Fera was born was drawn to Carhartt-type American workwear brands over any hooray red trouser aesthetic. ‘We’re always trying to show a bit of edge to the countryside. Whether that’s a fly fisherman skating around London finding spots to fish. Or our Christmas advert last year, which was an 80-year-old shepherd flinging his quad bike back to get his Fera parcel in time. I’m always scared to use the word cool — you can’t call yourself cool — but that’s what we set out to do.

‘The reality is that city wear and country wear doesn’t have to be that different anymore. There’s obviously the very function specific clothing which might be the exception. But Fera’s whole philosophy is about being able to wade through a bog in the morning and then waltz into The Ritz for breakfast [without getting changed]. We got some custom jackets made for [electronic music duo] Maribou State for their last tour. And they were sending us photos of them on a farm in Hampshire somewhere, and then next thing they’re on stage playing to crowds in the same gear.’

If Fera set out to create something that worked just as well in town as it does in the sticks, then for Schöffel it’s been a happy accident. ‘We have the same core consumer now as we did in the 1990s when the original Ptarmigan shooting coat was launched,’ says Schöffel’s executive director Marcus Janssen. ‘We have been very conscious to carry on developing products for that core country consumer — it’s always been about technical performance and functionality first. Our demographic has got younger, but that’s because shooting has got younger over the years, rather than us targeting a younger consumer. In the 1990s, it was largely middle-aged landowners and farmers shooting. But the commercialisation of shooting has made it more accessible.’

Schöffel has the Oakham fleece gilet to thank for making it a brand as comfortable on certain stretches of the District Line as it is on the peg. ‘The fleece was originally part of a three in one shooting coat that you could zip in and zip out. And very soon we realised people were wanting more of the fleeces than the shooting coats,’ explains Janssen. And so, the Fulham lifejacket was born.

‘But we never targeted a more lifestyle consumer, we’ve just acquired them as the brand has grown and developed its reputation for performance and quality. People are always drawn to the realisation that country clothing lasts. A shooting coat is a lot of money. But if you’re going to wear it to smarter events or to the office as well, and it’s going to last — we still see 15 or 20-year-old Ptarmigan shooting coats out in the field all the time — then that’s good value for money.’

When Marcus Fairfax Fountaine thinks of his Fairfax & Favor customer, it’s similarly someone who ‘moves effortlessly between town and country. She values quality over quantity, invests in timeless pieces rather than trends, and wants a wardrobe that works across every part of her life,’ he says. ‘It’s not unusual for someone to spend the morning in the countryside and end the day meeting friends in London, still wearing the same Fairfax & Favor Tetbury handbag or pair of Fairford boots. If they feel completely at home in both settings, then we’ve done our job.’

Back in those London beer gardens, a Barbour remains the 'OG' of bringing country clothing into the urban zeitgeist. The ultimate country-to-town chameleon. Since its 1894 beginnings in South Shields supplying oilskins to sailors and fishermen and then riding its 1980s Sloane Ranger era, its modern reputation has been helped along the way by collaborations with the biggest fashion houses, from Ganni to Paul Smith.

But as with other outerwear, it is its practicality and versatility that has let it hold its ground in town — plus, perhaps, a hefty dose of nostalgia. As Sienna Miller, who fronts its Autumn/Winter 2026 campaign told BritishVogue: ‘When you go to someone’s country house, you don’t ask, ‘Have you got a wax jacket I could borrow?’ You say, ‘Have you got any Barbours?’ It’s part of our DNA. Baked beans and Barbours – and it’s never not been cool.”’

On a visit to the botanical gardens in Belfast, Edinburgh or Kew (other exceptional ones are also available) you might find yourself marvelling, not only at the array of exotic plants, but also at some exceptional feats of Victorian engineering.

Think magnificent iron and glass green- and hothouses, constructed to nurture plants used to warmer climes.

These vast houses were only made viable by the repeal of the catchily titled National Debt Bill of 1746. Introduced by George II, the bill included a tax on the materials used to make glass. A century later, the same tax had risen to a ridiculous 300% of the value of the product, meaning that even the ultra-high-net-worths of the day couldn't afford them.

When the bill was finally done away with, by Robert Peel in 1845, imaginations ran wild. Hothouse manufacturers, inspired by Joseph Paxton’s vast Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, sprung up across the country.

Gray and Ormson became synonymous with the craft, designing and transporting vast flatpack-style cast iron frames from their offices in Chelsea, all around the country.

The Earl of Stamford and Warrington commissioned a gargantuan conservatory from the company for Enville Hall, Staffordshire, in 1853.

The more than 60-foot tall and 150-foot-long glass palace was photographed by Country Life in 1901. It boasted domes and turrets and mixed Moorish and Gothic tropes. The writer commissioned to pen the words that appeared next to the photographs described it as ‘a truly astonishing feature’ and ‘a fairy palace'.

Sadly, the upkeep of such a thing was far from a priority by the 20th century's inter-war years.

The conservatory fell into a state of disrepair, with parts of it dismantled between the late 1920s-30s. Soldiers, billeted to the hall during the Second World War, used what remained during demolition practice sessions — a dramatic ending for a dramatic building.

The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here.

In Wiltshire, a few miles from Gillingham and Warminster's train stations, lies a house so beautiful it looks like something out of a Disney film.

The property was originally built between 1920 and 1922, on Duchy of Cornwall land, for the daughter of a shipping magnate — who happened to be friends with Edward VII. The house you see today, however, is much changed.

It was almost completely rebuilt between 1999 and 2004, which is when the Millennium Tower and vine-clad loggia were added. In 2015 Country Life wrote about the restoration project of the Grade II-listed home, carried out by David and Mary Thomas. Mary recalled the home as being ‘a mean miserable little house’, when the couple purchased it in 1997 — something which is hard to believe when you look at the property today.

Mere Down House was ‘made of silvery local stone under a Cornish slate roof,’ our reporter wrote. The Thomas’s were inspired by late-17th and early-18th-century English domestic architecture, as well as French and Italian influences, when redesigning the house. The architect Jonathan Harker described their approach as ‘wonderfully anarchic’ and said it combined ‘all the very best of old and new’.

Now on the market with Strutt & Parker, for £3.2 million, it comes with five bedrooms, five bathrooms and five reception rooms, in a total of 4,129 square feet. As well as a lot of undeniably striking architectural beauty, the new owner will also inherit an Aga, a gym, which could also be used as a games room, a boot room and a full-height, baize-lined safe. And, as if that wasn’t enough, a library, tower study and downstairs cloakroom.

Some of our favourite features, however, are the antique marble floor in the entrance hall, the wide, polished French oak boards in the sitting room, and a well-fitted larder.

Outside, there's a swimming pool, greenhouse, cutting garden, fruit trees, potting shed and workshop, as well as amazing views of the Wiltshire and Dorset countryside that extend far beyond the property itself. The house would, quite obviously, suit a lover of the great outdoors.

Mere Down Houses on the market with Strutt & Parker — see more details.

What is your favourite word? As a writer, one hopes to answer something suitably grand; or, better yet, something out of use. My own shortlist skews both ways (‘stentorian’, ‘svelte’, ‘sybaritic’...) until one checks how often these appear in text and finds they are not, in fact, in danger of dying.

According to Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks word frequency from 1500 to 2022, use of ‘stentorian’ has more than doubled since 1980, that of ‘svelte’ is at a near-record high and that of ‘sybaritic’ remains above 1982 levels, when a buoyant economy meant we had more reason to use the term. Against the moral panic surrounding a decline in reading and written abilities, a growing respect for vocabulary appears to have emerged.

‘A surprising outcome of the internet age,’ says Susie Dent, who has adjudicated words on Channel 4’s Countdown since 1992, ‘has been an increase in the variety of words we use rather than the opposite.’ Her claim that ‘online tribes’ rely on ‘highly specific vocabulary often unintelligible to outsiders’ — and often is lifted from the archives — echoes a view from Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, professor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford. ‘It boils down to speech communities,’ he tells me: groups that form through shared adaptations of language (‘to read’, in drag culture, means to pick apart an individual rather than dive into a book) and thereby cementing affinities.

The newfound popularity of complicated language can be traced back to YouTube and podcast hosts, whose loyal audiences reward the niche and the specific against the wider landscape’s tendency to dumb down. Articulacy has become a key differentiator in an age where intellect and communication are more highly prized than ever. Gillian Tett, provost of King’s College, Cambridge, wrote in the FT last May that financial firms are now hiring Humanities graduates over those in STEM as they attempt to fill roles that require greater literacy and critical thinking.

Yet another reason to speak so well that it becomes idiosyncratic is because it is funny. One is reminded of Moira Rose, the eccentric matriarch from Canadian sitcom Schitt’s Creek, who uses such words as ‘pettifogging’ and ‘peregrination’ as casually as one might hail a cab (or, as she might say herself, ‘summon a hired conveyance’). That words are comedy extends to those we avoid. Last week, New York Magazine revived its ‘Queries’ newsletter, a series by copy chief Carl Rosen about the publication’s list of ‘banned’ terms, namely ‘nondescript’, ‘unhinged’ and the suffix ‘-maxxing’, gently ribbing those guilty of such clichés.

The best vocabulary, Dent concludes, is that which is borrowed from the past. We used to have a word for the warmth of the sun on a winter’s day: ‘apricity’. It is high time we reclaimed it.

This feature originally appeared in the October 28, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

Porsche's development engineer had no intention of riding shotgun. He explained the extra controls, asked if there were any questions, then slammed the door. Clunk.

Thankfully, I was to drive solo in the world's most complex and expensive road car. The fastest, too. Porsche claims a top speed of 198mph for the twin-turbo, four-wheel-drive 959, yours for £155,000 if you were sufficiently rich and influential to get on the shortlist in the first place. Only 250 959s are to be made, and all were sold long before the first was delivered. To get one now means waiting for the first used samples to hit the market, at about £250,000.

I was at the Nürburgring in Germany, where Porsche had mustered four late-prototype 959s, soon reduced to three by a £20,000 engine-blowing missed-gear error at the hands of a fellow scribe, poor fellow. With good reason, I was wary of the short, crossways travel of the six-speed gear change, though the double-H shift pattern is logical enough, with first in the left-forward position, top in the right-back one.

One twist of the key and the engine exploded into life instantly, with a deep, resonant rumble. The clutch dipped easily, bit fluidly, and the gear lever slotted with less synchro baulking than that of a normal 911, especially when palmed decisively. Steering needed no more than wristy inputs. It was immediately apparent that the 959 called for neither great strength nor unusual skill to drive smoothly. Pushing it to the limit was something else.

Cruising the first few exploratory laps of the tumbling Ring circuit provided an opportunity to gauge the engine's low-rev bite. It did not feel very strong. Porsche make much of its two-stage turbocharging, designed to overcome off-boost lethargy, but here the engine felt comparatively languid below 4,500rpm. It pulled from 1,000rpm in sixth all right, but not with real vigour; not by supercar standards, anyway.

When turbo thrust did cut in, though, acceleration was phenomenal, startling in its ferocity. One blast to the 7,500rpm cut-out was sufficient to make Porsche's claimed performance figures (would you believe 0–60mph in 3.8 seconds?) seem entirely credible. There was no wheelspin, not even the faintest of chirps from the big Dunlop tyres. The first four intermediate maxima were easily confirmed: 37, 64, 93 and 127mph. Over 160mph is attainable in fourth, though not at the Ring, where the fastest straight was good for only 150mph.

It is an awesome combination, 450bhp and four-wheel drive. The 959's 2.85-litre Bosch-injected engine is a horizontally opposed flat-six with air-cooled alloy blocks, water-cooled twin-cam heads and titanium internals to take the strain. Its Herculean power is fed to all four wheels in varying proportions according to black-box instructions through a normal dry-plate clutch, a new six-speed, close-ratio gearbox and two multi-plate torque-splitting units.

There are four switch-selected transmission programmes to choose from, according to road and weather conditions. One, with fixed 50/50 drive, is for grinding through sand and mud. In the other three modes, there is no fixed torque split, but a variable one determined by each wheel's individual needs, according to sensor information fed to the central computer. In theory, it is not as complicated as it sounds.

A static 40/60 weight distribution might momentarily become 20/80 during a hard, dry-road standing start. Torque is distributed in a similar proportion. In the wet, when traction is poorer and weight transfer correspondingly less, the front wheels can handle more torque. They get it. Less traction means more forward drive, though speed influences the split as well. When parking, there is minimal front-wheel drive, to avoid heavy steering. At speed, the front wheels get a bigger share of the drive to give more understeer stability. Clever stuff.

Apart from its amazing transmission, the 959 also has unique anti-lock brakes, directed by the same sensors that control wheelspin. Then there is adjustable damping that automatically lowers and stiffens the car at speed, to improve stability, not to mention constant pressure monitoring of the huge Dunlop Denloc safety tyres through hollow spokes in special alloy wheels.

As a technical tour de force, the 959 is bewilderingly impressive, a harbinger of things to come. As a competition winner, though, this enigmatic blockbuster, surely the final development of the 25-year-old 911, looks like a beaten finalist. Despite victory in the gruelling Paris-Dakar raid, the car is not really suitable for world-championship rallying. Nor is it competitive against purpose-built Group C racing cars, though its recent seventh-place finish at Le Mans was a fine effort. It is as a street-legal supercar, then, as Porsche's flagship and high-tech testbed, that the 959 must finally be judged.

The cabin is much like that of a normal 911, with extra instruments and switchgear. The chunky rotaries for the adjustable Bilstein dampers, controlling both ride height and stiffness, are centrally mounted. Transmission selection is by a column stalk. There is also a torque-split gauge.

I do not doubt that the car would feel sensationally safe and secure at road-going cornering speeds. On the track it seemed tail-heavy (which it is), even a little pendulous. However, it was only when I braked too late for a second-gear corner on the overrun that the tail snapped into oversteer, and then quite controllably. The power steering is sharp but not especially communicative on smooth tarmac. It is through the seat of your pants, firmly clamped by a hip-hugging Recaro seat, that you get the best feel of the car.

There is nothing unusual about the 959's cornering behaviour. It tends to run wide under power and tuck in on the overrun. Not that you would normally ever know, as such traits are only evident at cornering speeds way beyond the limit of ordinary cars. At the Ring, tantalisingly close to some marvellous motoring country, the best cornering technique seemed to be the classical one: slow in, steady through on a constant throttle, then fast out.

It was on the quick, fourth-gear sweeps that the car felt at its stable best. The higher the speed, the stronger the front-drive understeering influence, remember. Aerodynamics play their part, too. Porsche could have lowered the drag coefficient below 0.31, but only by sacrificing impeccable stability.

With more front-drive bias, in the 'wet' or 'snow' transmission programmes, the car felt twitchier, more sensitive to the throttle on the Ring's dry track. Quite how all this staggering complexity would show up on public roads, particularly on wet ones, I am not sure.

I was left with the impression that the 959 was a staggeringly effective and efficient machine, in the best Teutonic tradition, but somehow lacking in character and soul. For stirring indolent red corpuscles, the rival Ferrari 288 GTO excited me a lot more.

The Country Life Archive contains more than a century of British architecture, rural life, photography, and property records dating back to the magazine's launch in 1897. You can search and explore historical content using the Country Life Archive tag on our site, or access the complete backfile (1897–2005) via the ProQuest Country Life Archive

‘Of the terriers of Ireland we know even less than we do of the early terriers of England,’ Country Life lamented in 1964. Indeed, the origins of the soft-coated wheaten terrier and the Kerry blue are often debated, but the wheaten is generally regarded as Ireland’s oldest breed. It is commonly acknowledged that a ‘tough, wheaten terrier tyke has been found around Waterford, Cork, Tipperary, Limerick and Kerry for the past 200 years’.

Historically used to herd cattle and kill vermin, the wheaten is much like the Kerry blue in colour and shape — and both are sporting and game — but the wheaten is ‘less independent-minded than their blue-coated relatives’.

Until the early 1930s the soft-coated wheaten terriers had aroused little interest and were in some danger of dying out. However, the breed was saved by the efforts of Gerard Pierse, who was so taken with a wheaten he spotted at a field outing for terriers that he badgered the Irish Kennel Club to give recognition to the breed, which the group did in 1937.

However, The Kennel Club in England would not acknowledge the breed until 1943. In 1946 a wheaten called Glenguard Mourneside Firecrest won Best in Show at Romford, Essex, and went on to prove himself as the foundation sire of most UK wheatens.

This is an extract from 'The Country Life Book of Dogs' (Rizzoli, £50) by Agnes Stamp.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 2pm.

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If you have gut problems and/or middle-class parents over the age of 50 living in one of the home counties, chances are you have heard of Tim Spector. I have both and, as such, am a bit of a superfan. The British doctor and Professor of Epidemiology at King’s College London was awarded an OBE for his scientific contributions during coronavirus. In the past, his arguments against low-fat and fad diets may have fallen on deaf ears, but now his advocating for high-fibre, plant-heavy diets which limit ultra-processed foods is gaining a lot of attention.

The bestselling author and co-founder of the gut-health company Zoe has written a new book, Good Mood Food. It comprises all Tim has learned about achieving a better mood, more energy and long-term brain health through eating. He has written this alongside Dr Federica Amati and Kathryn Bruton, who compiled the recipes which are focused on being both easy to make and delicious to eat.

Did he learn anything new about gut health and our relationship with food in the writing process? ‘Yes, a lot of it was new. That’s why I like writing books, because I discover lots of new things and am perpetually curious,’ Tim says. ‘I discovered a lot about the brain. I knew there was a gut-brain connection before, but I didn’t quite realise how much the gut controls the brain rather than the other way round.’

The book, Tim says, is an important introduction into how crucial our food is for our brains. ‘I realised that our brains are not separate from the rest of our body… I want everybody to try changing their diet through whatever way, whether it's following five of the recipes [in Good Mood Food], whether it's signing up for the Zoe app for two weeks, whether it's buying some prebiotics…’

Tim has been researching gut health for a long time, yet it is only now that his findings are hitting home and even becoming ‘trendy’. Kefir, kimchi and kombucha have been popping up in supermarkets all over the country. ‘I think people are now realising that with fermented foods, for example, they are no longer just seen as quackery or marketing. Five years ago we weren’t really talking about ultra-processed foods as being particularly bad, and now we are, so I think there's definitely a big movement.’ Although he adds, somewhat bitterly: ‘It’s not coming from the government or the NHS, that’s for sure… but they're not calling me a nutter anymore. It’s quite refreshing’.

For Tim, real change is ‘not about a six-week diet, it’s about fundamentally altering the way you see food and how you want to live the rest of your life’. This is something he has done himself. When he first met his wife Veronique Bataille, who is French-Belgian, the pair ‘ended up fully eating her kind of food’.

‘I wasn’t a particularly healthy eater at the time, anyway. She was doing most of the cooking, and she’s a very good cook, but it was rather rich — butter and butter and cream.’ These days you’re more likely to find Tim chowing down on some Mediterranean Baked Eggs (Good Mood Food, page 72) or a Mackerel and Grapefruit Caesar Salad (page 110).

He has had a huge impact on how we eat today and has shaped the mainstream narrative about health foods perhaps more than any other scientist in recent history. During my research of Tim, however, I found that some were less easy to win over to his way of life than others. When speaking to The Times earlier this year, he confessed that his wife ‘doesn’t go along with my whims and thinks my research plans are crazy,’ adding, ‘when I’m away she eats steak and chips’. It’s as they say: you really can’t win them all.

Your aesthetic hero

I am a great admirer of Michael Palin. I’ve met him a couple of times and he’s a lovely guy. Fame hasn’t got to him, he has lived in the same house for 50 years. He is always creating new careers, staying curious and still working, and he looks really fit too!

A book you’ve found inspiring

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, because it’s about changing countries and places and cultures, moving between them, and that sort of suited my mood — I’ve lived in other countries, so I found that very interesting. And you know, that’s what I like doing. I spend time in Belgium, France, Australia, Spain. I love moving around.

A possession you would never sell

I would never sell my bicycle, I am very attached to it. It cheers me up and clears my mind.

Your favourite painting

I do like Seurat, especially Bathers at Asnières. I love looking at that one, especially when it's on such a large scale.

The last thing of note that you bought for yourself

I don’t buy much for myself apart from food, actually. I am always buying myself cheese. I’ve got two cheese shops near me. I am very lucky with where I live in North London. Going there and tasting a few and getting a cheese I haven’t had before is always one of my great pleasures.

An exhibition that has really impressed you

One of the lasting ones was by Gunter von Hagens, who was a German vivisectionist, who has just died. It was in Shoreditch somewhere and seeing those mummified bodies and where he had dissected out everything and taken away the fat, leaving just the muscle and the nerves… it was weirdly macabre but also incredibly beautiful.

The music that you work to

I often work to music, not all the time. When I do, it’s got to be familiar music, which is generally chill stuff from the 70s and 80s.

The last podcast you listened to

It would have been the Zoe podcast, slightly biased on that one, but I do catch up on the other guests. I also quite like The Rest is History — that’s always good fun.

Who would play you in a film of your life

Theo James from The Gentlemen. Make him a bit greyer at the temples.

What you’d take with you to a desert island

When I did Desert Island Discs I did actually say a fermenting kit. I’ll probably stick with that one. It’s that or a golf club, but I think the fermenting kit would be more useful.

What gets you up the morning

Looking forward to the day, because my days are pretty varied and I am infinitely curious. I have such a weird combination of doing science, TV, writing books and interacting with my colleagues at the university and at Zoe that I often don’t know what I am doing until I look in my diary, and it’s usually fun.

The items you collect

I would say cheeses, but I eat them all. I used to collect Napoleonic soldiers when I was younger, but now it is mostly interesting ferments. People send them to me.

A hotel you could go back and back to

They’re so many. I travel a lot. I went to the Six Senses Uluwatu in Bali. That was pretty special.

The most memorable meal you’ve ever eaten

A meal with my wife at Le Pont de la Tour restaurant next to Tower Bridge in London. We were celebrating my getting a job at St Thomas’s Hospital as a consultant. It's a really fancy French restaurant and we ate outside on the terrace, overlooking the Thames. It was sunny and, for me, it was the ultimate dream to get that job. I remember thinking: ‘You can relax now.’ Little did I know that I would change careers five times after that.

The best present you’ve ever received

My wife got me a voucher for skydiving. It was scary. Fun to do, but I’m not sure I’d do it again.

‘Good Mood Food’ by Tim Spector with Dr Federica Amati and recipes by Kathryn Bruton is out today, in all good bookshops.

Oxfordshire — £11.95 million

If you're going to centre your property on anything, it might as well be a 17th-century palazzo in unspoilt Oxfordshire. How handy, then, to have Newington House, which fits the bill perfectly.

Offering 10 bedrooms and 42 acres of land, there is plenty here for the discerning Home Counties enthusiast. The interiors are elegant and period, featuring panelling, intricate door casings, and classical French wallpaper murals, complemented by fine wooden parquet flooring and exquisitely carved marble fireplaces.

Outside, there are equestrian facilities, landscaped gardens, woodland, paddocks, lake, swimming pool, tennis court, walled garden, croquet lawn, rose garden and greenhouse. All in all, absolute paradise.

For sale via Savills — see more details and pictures.

Cumbria — £8.5 million

Few parts of the UK are as picturesque as the Lake District, and few parts of the Lake District are as perfect as Holbeck Ghyll. How do I know that? Because I once stayed there.

The property is a characterful and charming country-house hotel, offering a package of eight acres, 24 bedroom suites in the main house, and five further cottages, annexes and lodges. The icing on the cake, if any was needed, are the searing views of Windermere.

For sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details and pictures.

Oriel College occupies a large site in the very heart of Oxford, with its main buildings grouped around three quadrangles that extend in a single rectangular plot from the High Street in the north to Merton Lane in the south. The principal entrance, however, is to one side, overlooking Oriel Square, and attractively sequestered from the noise of the city. This year, Oriel celebrates its 700th anniversary and it’s still possible to trace the long institutional development of the college in the fabric of its buildings.

The founder of the college was a royal clerk, Adam de Brome, a modest landholder probably born in Suffolk. De Brome entered royal service as an administrator to Edward I and performed a wide variety of roles before his ordination as a priest in 1301. Thereafter, he acquired a series of church livings, including, in 1320, the valuable rectory of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, a church that was becoming a focus of university activity. In the same year, work began to what is now known as the Old Congregation House and the first university library, both attached to it.

De Brome was clearly connected with these works, later becoming involved in a controversy over the library books. This presumably explains why, on April 20, 1324, he acquired a licence to establish ‘a certain college of scholars studying various disciplines in honour of the Virgin’, comprising a provost and 10 fellows. Among the properties he collected to endow for this institution was Tackley’s Inn, comprising a hall, chambers and a row of shops on the High Street, and three lodging houses on Broad Street, including Perilous Hall. There was also a lucrative advowson of the church of Aberford, Yorkshire.

Towards the end of 1325, however, de Brome changed his plans. As a means of securing his endowment and adding to the prestige of the project, he gave these various properties to Edward II, who refounded the college in his own name: the royal charter is dated January 21, 1326. A few months later, the King was further persuaded to allow the new college to appropriate the rectory of St Mary the Virgin, adding its valuable tithes and dues to the revenue of the foundation. This rectory was a gift of Henry Burghersh, Bishop of Lincoln.

The Bishop’s gift effectively turned St Mary the Virgin into a chapel of the college and the fellowship had obligations throughout the Middle Ages to maintain certain chantries and devotions within the building (even when it had another chapel of its own). It also brought with it the rectory house, which faced the church on the far side of the High Street. This property developed into an academic hall with its own students under the governance of a principal, also the vicar of St Mary the Virgin. Known as St Mary Hall, it was only subsumed within the main college in 1902.

Between 1329 and 1392, the remainder of the present site was bought up or given to the college. Among the properties acquired was a large house known as ‘La Oriole’, facing onto what is now Oriel Square. It had been given by Eleanor of Castile, Edward I’s Queen, to her nephew James of Spain, who passed it to the provost and fellows in 1329. In return, he and his deceased aunt received prayers and the fraternity of the college. This gives Oriel a claim to be the first Oxford college to admit a woman, albeit posthumously. Yet it was also the last to receive women as undergraduates, opening its doors to them in 1985.

It is from ‘La Oriole’, of course, that the college takes its familiar name. Properly, it is: ‘The House of the Blessed Mary the Virgin in Oxford, commonly called Oriel College, of the Foundation of Edward the Second of Famous Memory Sometime King of England.’

The medieval collegiate buildings, incorporating a chapel and hall, stood on the site of the present entrance quadrangle. They are pictured in a woodcut view of the college of 1566 by John Bereblock, but little is securely known about them. The quadrangle we see today gradually took shape from 1619 and took two decades to complete; Dr John Prideaux, Bishop of Worcester and Vice Chancellor of the University, consecrated the new chapel in summer 1642, only weeks before Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham Castle and the kingdom slid into civil war.

Provost John Tolson, a theologian and college fellow with particular flair for fundraising, drove forward the project, adopting the idea of a benefactors’ book to record all donations. To alumni, he represented the college as ‘your decayed mother’, adding in one letter to Sir Thomas Cave of Stanford Hall, Northamptonshire that ‘our walls are tottering’. Writing to Sir Robert Harley in 1637, he explained that ‘we have adventured upon a great worke, no less then the fabricke of a new and well composed building out of the ruines of an old castle of ragges’. His various appeals cumulatively raised the impressive sum of £3,062.

The new quadrangle was laid out in what had become a standard Oxford plan, ultimately derived from the late-14th-century example of New College (Country Life, October 16, 2019). In conformity with the architectural taste of the period, however, here the design is strictly regularised and the buildings enlivened with a busy crown of gables. Facing the visitor as they pass through the vaulted gatehouse passage are the hall and chapel with identical Gothic windows (Fig 1). Between them is a projecting central porch with the figures of two kings — presumably Edward II and Charles I — and the Virgin and Child above. This grand façade is enclosed by lodging ranges on three sides.

The college hall preserves its 17th-century open-timber roof (Fig 2). At its centre originally stood an open hearth, the smoke escaping through a louvre in the roof, now glazed. The present panelling dates largely from 1710 and the windows contain modern heraldic glass commemorating benefactors and notable members of the college by Sir Ninian Comper (1864–1960). He undertook the wholesale restoration of the interior and the character of this has been respected during the most recent restoration of the hall by Richard Griffiths Architects, the work of which, from 2020, has included lime-washing the walls and the re-painting of heraldry.

The chapel follows a conventional collegiate plan with stalls running the length of the interior (Fig 5) and an internal screen dividing off the entrance area as an antechapel. Its fine eagle lectern was donated in 1654 by undergraduate Nathaniel Napier (although the lectern’s maker is unknown), and, in 1677–78, the marble floor was donated by two fellows, Samuel Short and Charles Perrot. The glass includes a window by William Peckitt that was donated to the college by the Duke of Beaufort in 1767. Peckitt had previously worked at New College and this depiction of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple originally filled the window above the altar.

In 2001, a stained-glass window was also installed in memory of St John Henry Newman, who served as a tutor at Oriel and as a chaplain between 1826 and 1831 and again from 1833–35. It fills the oriel of the Newman Oratory adjoining the chapel. The window was designed by Vivienne Haig and executed by Douglas Hogg through the generosity of Norma, Lady Dalrymple-Champneys.

When Oxford became the royalist capital in 1642 (Country Life, September 21, 2022), the newly completed college was conveniently placed between the lodgings of the King and Queen respectively in Christ Church and Merton. It became the home of the Lord Treasurer, Francis Cottington, the Dean of the Chapel Royal and 35 other royal servants and officers. It also operated as the office for Mercurius Aulicus, the mouthpiece of Royalist propaganda. Several fellows were removed from the college during the Commonwealth and, following the Restoration in 1660, the figure of the Virgin and Child above the hall door had to be returned to its place.

The development of Oriel’s Second Quadrangle reflects the changing social character of Oxford during the 18th century. Sharing chambers (or ‘chumming’ as it was termed) became increasingly unacceptable and demand grew for private accommodation. At Oriel, this prompted the gradual enclosure of the former garden between the 17th-century First Quadrangle and St Mary Hall. The first stage of this transformation was the construction of the Robinson Building to one side of the garden in about 1720. It was designed and built by William Townesend, a member of the distinguished dynasty of masons responsible for much of Oxford’s 18th-century architecture.

A decade later, the Carter Building was erected through a benefaction of Provost George Carter. Stylistically, the two buildings form a harmonious pair. Detached within the garden for almost a century, they were conceived in a Jacobean idiom, echoing the architecture of the First Quadrangle. In 1818–19, the two ranges were incorporated into a more coherent quadrangle. These works followed Henry Hakewill’s remodelling of the Provost’s Lodgings in 1815–17, during which a new hall and stair were introduced and part of the Carter Building adapted as the provost’s study.

Completing Second Quadrangle is the Senior Library (Fig 4), designed by James Wyatt following the bequest of a substantial collection of books by Edward, Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh Abbey. Begun in 1788 and completed in 1795, it was Wyatt’s third major Oxford commission and forms a striking contrast to the antiquarian character of the Robinson and Carter Buildings. The interior is being restored.

Beneath the library were two common rooms (Fig 3), among the earliest purpose-built examples in Oxford, reflecting the growing importance of collegiate sociability in the later 18th century. The east common room retains a chimneypiece designed by Richard Westmacott. In 1970, its interior was redecorated under the guidance of the celebrated designer John Fowler and at the instigation of college fellow and historian Prof Hugh Trevor-Roper.

The Third Quadrangle has a distinct character, reflecting its origins as the separate institution of St Mary Hall. The timber-frame and rendered house to one side was erected in about 1743 by the then principal of the hall, William King, who evidently intended even more ambitious works. The building is referred to today as the ‘Dolls’ house’. The quadrangle was enlarged from 1826 by Daniel Robertson, whose Gothic Revival additions brought greater architectural coherence to what had long been an assemblage of buildings of different dates. The final stage came with the construction of the Rhodes Building, designed by Basil Champneys and completed in 1911.

Funded through the benefaction of Cecil Rhodes, it replaced the ancient High Street frontage with a substantial range of student accommodation in an assured Edwardian Gothic style. Although intended to harmonise with its historic surroundings, the building was not universally admired. In 1930, Evelyn Waugh famously observed that ‘a very small expenditure on dynamite should be enough to rid us for ever of [...] the High Street front of Oriel’. Whatever its early critics may say, the Rhodes Building now forms an integral part of the college’s architectural composition, and, to those who pass along Oxford’s busy High Street, it is the public face of Oriel.

Find out more about Oriel College.

Sunday lunch: accept no substitute. ‘It really is the captain’s table at the end of a long week,’ declares chef Richard Corrigan of a weekly tradition he still vigorously upholds. ‘Beef is the king. The mere mention of a roast in the oven sends the kids scurrying up the hill for a late lunch. I will always cherish it — I think it is the most beautiful expression of living and eating and it’ll never change at my table.’

Corrigan is not alone in his wistful, romantic adoration; the Sunday roast remains sacrosanct on these shores. Still, rarely do two plates look the same. Disagreements abound over precisely what should make the cut. Everyone seemingly agrees on roast potatoes, even if — in Sunday-lunch terms, at least — they’re a modern addition, not becoming a staple of the British diet until the early 19th century. Regardless, they need to be right.

‘Soggy potatoes are a definite no-no; they need to be crisp roasties, every time,’ maintains Sally Abé of Teal in east London. ‘Good gravy is absolutely non-negotiable,’ adds Saturday Kitchen chef Elliott Grover. ‘Proper roasting juices, with plenty of depth and enough of it — there’s nothing worse than being precious with the gravy.’ What about the famous Yorkshire puddings? ‘Absolutely essential with every roast in my opinion,’ offers Abé. Chef and restaurateur Jason Atherton isn’t so convinced. ‘Yorkies should only ever be with beef,’ he counters firmly. The jury’s out.

Of the meat itself? Anything goes. The crucial thing is to get the condiments right. ‘Homemade horseradish is the only thing to go with beef,’ believes Corrigan. ‘Mustard goes well, too,’ notes Abé. Grover suggests ‘mint sauce with lamb, apple sauce with pork,’ before advising, ‘Nobody needs a deconstructed roast with 12 little components and a smear of gravy. Keep it generous, keep it recognisable and make every element really bloody good.’

Thus: meat, potatoes, veg and gravy. The same as it’s been for decades — or is it centuries? In a country founded on the bedrock of myth and legend, it feels apt that one of our most beloved meals should emerge from a shroud of folklore. The story of the Sunday roast is not the pub tale landlords winkingly deliver to tourists of a meal originating with medieval peasants on their way to church laden with a joint. In this yarn, before settling down for the priest’s sermon, the peasants would give the meat to the local baker to cook with potatoes and vegetables in still-hot bread ovens, collecting it on the way home to share at the family table. Unfortunately, there is no evidence that it’s true.

Neither did the roast emerge from the greed of the ceremonial guards at the Tower of London. Established as the Yeoman Warders by Henry VII in 1485, their Beefeater nickname is often flimsily cited as proof of the nation’s ancient devotion to beef on the weekends. Some insist the roast goes back far further, to Sundays in the fields, where workers would roast an ox and feast on cuts chiselled right off the carcass.

What is known is that, although the meal took time to find its shape, Sundays have long been kept as a day of rest. This observance wasn’t left entirely to the Church: in 1444, a law emerged in London prohibiting professional cooks from boiling, baking and roasting on Sunday mornings. Still, it’s unlikely that medieval peasants were getting much in the way of roasted meat, given the process then was extravagant and time-consuming, requiring cuts to be cast on a spit and turned constantly beside a fire to ensure the skin didn’t blister as the inside stayed raw (the instant-barbecue conundrum of its day). For most, meat was boiled and stewed, but, even for the wealthy, a roast was an occasion long before it was attached to a Sunday.

However, those earliest spit roasts produced something now considered indispensable — the juices and fat running from the meat. These would collect into a literally named dripping pan beneath the spit, forming the foundations of gravy. Centuries later, Sam and Georgie Pearman, who run the Country Creatures pub group in the Cotswolds, describe essentially the same principle: ‘We make our gravy from scratch, boiling the bones from the carcass, adding all the delicious meat juices and then straining it to create a really rich, flavoursome gravy.’

Slowly, roasting and Sundays began to entwine, perhaps because the time required for the former was only available on the latter. By the 17th century, the diarist Samuel Pepys was coming home after church for ‘a good dinner of roast beef’. The wealthy Pepys’s tastes cannot be taken as an indicator of the broader English diet, but his accounts from the 1660s foreshadow what would be commonplace less than a century later.

By the early 1700s, roast beef had become not only a staple of the British diet, but a totem of national identity. In 1731, English satirist Henry Fielding wrote The Roast Beef of Old England song into The Grub-Street Opera; shortly afterwards, Richard Leveridge took the patriotic lyrics (‘When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman’s food/ It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood’) and put them to a tune that became such a hit that it inspired William Hogarth to paint a picture of the same name. To this day, it is still sung by the Royal Navy before formal mess dinners.

The 18th century not only popularised roast beef, but one of the defining extras: the Yorkshire pudding. Six years after Fielding’s song, ‘dripping pudding’ appeared in the Georgian handbook The Whole Duty of a Woman. A decade later, it was renamed after God’s own country in one of the most successful and influential cookbooks ever printed, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.

The recipe was much then as it is now, with instructions suggesting a pancake-like batter set beneath the meat, so the drippings mixed in. The meat, then, physically created the pudding’s flavour: it was not a side. In fact, sometimes, the Yorkshire was served first and the meat was left to finish. ‘Traditionally, a Yorkshire should be served with the sediment from the beef roasting tray and honey as a starter, while the beef is resting,’ agrees Atherton. ‘My great-grandmother would always do this when we were growing up in the North.’

The pudding seemed to tie the meal together and, during this time, the idea of Sunday lunch firmly took shape as a ritual. Economically, it made sense: one substantial meal could feed a hungry working family, with leftovers stretching into the week. In 1834, Parliament debated Sunday observance, with MPs arguing that the weekly Sunday dinner was crucial to working families, many of whom relied on local bakers to cook it — which is probably where that particular rumour comes from (and makes sense, given that all households having ovens was still a long way off).

In his 1867 collection of essays Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes, social commentator Thomas Wright describes Sunday dinner as ‘by a long way the most important culinary affair of the week’. A couple of years before, Mrs Beeton’s Dictionary of Every-Day Cookery showed the Sunday dinner settling into a recognisable form: roast meat, potatoes, vegetables and the appropriate trimmings. Beef came with Yorkshire pudding; elsewhere, her Sunday tables featured roast mutton, lamb, veal and even sucking pig.

By now, the roast was no longer synonymous with beef so much as a way of organising the Sunday meal. Beeton’s roast fowl came with its own established ritual: brown gravy and ‘a tureen of well-made bread sauce’. Here, she was reaching back centuries to the medieval habit of thickening sauces with bread — its pairing with roast poultry would outlast almost all the other sauces made in the same way.

With the dish now firmly a national staple, it is little surprise that products emerged to cut down on labour: soon, there was Paxo stuffing (1901) and Bisto gravy (1908). The public was spared ready-made Yorkshires until Aunt Bessie came along with them in 1995. Roast-dinner devotees are lucky that the Victorians were so keen on them. Two World Wars swept away much of the elaborate domestic machinery of Victorian Britain, but the roast persevered.

Rations during the Second World War certainly threatened its existence, but, in a curious way, reinforced it, too; some house-holds chose to stack up the meat allowance for Sundays only and cherish the roast more than before. Potatoes and other vegetables increasingly filled out the plate to compensate. Meat was the final major food to come off ration, in July 1954, at which point the Sunday roast could finally begin to flourish again. Intensive farming forced the price of chicken down: in 1950, poultry accounted for 1% of the meat eaten in Britain; by 1980, it made up a quarter. Suddenly, beef wasn’t always the headline act.

There were other changes, too. Families shrank, Sundays loosened their mooring lines to the church and overworked parents became less willing or able to surrender an entire morning to getting lunch on the table. Pubs increasingly took on the work instead. Corrigan suspects it may be more common to eat out now on a Sunday than tackle the whole thing at home. Perhaps — but what is clear is that the essential idea has proved remarkably difficult to kill.

‘The roast is alive and well,’ asserts Abé. ‘There’s something very timeless about it. As soon as the colder weather arrives, people start craving that comforting Sunday roast again.’ Yorkshires may or may not be permitted and cauliflower cheese will always be a point of contention, but the reason for gathering around it has altered remarkably little.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Forget name and fame. Choosing a portraitist by reputation alone is the quickest way to make an expensive mistake, because no amount of renown can make up for a mismatch between the painter’s style and the patron’s taste. ‘There’s no point commissioning an artist who paints with very wild and vibrant colours when you’re quiet and sober and don’t want your pictures jumping off the walls,’ says portraitist Nicky Philipps.

Confident sitters know this and trust their instincts: ‘I was starting out, 28 years ago, and one of the wealthiest girls in the world came to my stand at my first-ever art fair,’ says Sara Stewart, the founder of Fine Art Commissions, an agency that connects sitters and painters. ‘She commissioned a young artist I had just taken on — it was £500 for a full length. She could have paid £20,000, but she chose that artist because she liked his style and that should be what it is all about.’

Even before finding the right painter, however, the very first step to a commission is figuring out why to do it and what a portrait actually entails. ‘There are wrong reasons,’ cautions Stewart, ‘principally, when someone is given a portrait as a present and doesn’t actually want it.’ In those cases, what invariably seems to happen is that the sitter doesn’t enjoy sitting, the artist faces an uphill struggle and the picture ends up in an attic. It is also important for prospective sitters to understand from the outset that a painted portrait is very different from a photographic one. ‘As well as being a record of their appearance, it’s the artistic interpretation by whichever painter you choose,’ notes portraitist Isabella Watling.

Indeed, suggests another painter, Jamie Coreth, people should approach a commission as if they were buying a picture from the artist, rather than their specific likeness: ‘They are first and foremost commissioning the painter’s artistic judgement. From my standpoint, it is important to be given the freedom to pursue ideas and to follow creative instinct. The best ideas can be missed if the brief is too controlling. Give the artist time and space to do their thing, with vision and excitement. I know from experience that, if I am happy with a painting, it’s often a result which the sitter will be happy about, too, and I am happiest with works where I have been able to realise an original vision for it.’

Portraiture, believes artist Isabel Douglas-Hamilton, is a collaborative process: ‘It gives me permission to study the sitters and really get to know them, and allows me to make 1,000 different decisions about who they are. I don’t want to capture a definitive version of that person, I want to capture their presence.’ Assuming they are happy with all this, sitters should plan their commission as far ahead as possible: ‘Artists have pipelines, so you might have to wait a year,’ says Douglas-Hamilton — and this is without considering the time it will take to paint the picture or the fact that the final varnish happens some 12 months after the painting is completed. ‘If you have, say, a big birthday at the end of 2027, now would be the time to think about commissioning,’ recommends Philipps.

What happens next, however, slightly differs, depending on whether this is a private or a corporate portrait. Livery companies or universities will usually want any new picture to fit in with their existing collection, so this will to an extent dictate a sitter’s choice of artist, medium and portrait size. Private commissions have more latitude, which is at once thrilling and potentially paralysing. Size is perhaps the easiest to determine: ‘My portraits are always life size, so the sitter has to decide between a head and shoulders, a three-quarters or a full length,’ says Watling.

Guiding factors in picking what to go for are budget, wall space and the amount of detail you would like to include. ‘With head and shoulders, you can’t have a backdrop,’ explains Philipps. ‘There’s nothing worse than people putting a painting or something on the wall behind their head. It interferes with the person and the character. If it’s a full-length picture, that’s a different story. I painted somebody in America sitting at his desk with the object that made his career: false hips, you know, the titanium thing that goes into a leg.’

The choice of medium and artist can often be linked, although many portraitists are equally happy to produce a painting or a drawing. There are advantages to both media, according to Stewart: a painting has great wall presence; a drawing is timeless and generally quicker.

Identifying the right portraitist, on the other hand, is often what first-time sitters find most challenging. As Stewart pointed out with her wealthy-patron example, sitters should pick a painter to whose style they respond naturally, much as they would if buying curtains or furniture. The problem is that art is often wrapped up in an intellectual mystique that tends to make people anxious and leads them to question their own opinion. ‘My job, first and foremost, is to make sitters feel relaxed and trust their own judgement,’ Stewart explains.

Knowing what kind of artworks patrons already have and love and what their houses look like is a great starting point, but she also has another ace up her sleeve: rather than asking people what they like from a portfolio of paintings, she asks them to point out what they don’t. ‘That’s the most revealing and the most helpful. You can get a better idea of what style they would be happy to live with than if you ask them what they enjoy.’ This kind of preliminary research makes all the difference: Philipps recommends looking at a wide range of artist portfolios and narrowing them down into a shortlist.

However, finding the right painter isn’t only a matter of identifying the style that best suits the sitter’s taste. Personal rapport is what turns a good commission into a great one. ‘[People] need to be furnished with all the idiosyncrasies, availability, price, everything of that artist, so that there are no unwelcome surprises,’ believes Philipps.

Coreth recalls as one of his favourite commissions a portrait that required several trips to paint his sitter at home: ‘We spent a lot of time together and became great friends as a result. The better we got to know each other, the clearer I felt about how to paint the portrait in a way that resonated as true to the individual.’ This is why, notes Stewart, ‘you have to work out the chemistry — whether the sitter will get on with the artist. Being an agent is a little like being a creative psychologist.’ For example, conversation is rather like Marmite for artists — some love it, some hate it — so Stewart would never pair up a sitter who dreads silence with a portraitist who likes to work quietly.

Philipps falls into the talking camp, because she finds that it helps dispel nerves: ‘I like to chat to sitters as much as possible, particularly at the beginning, because that creates the dynamic, the vibrancy of the sitting.’ Her secret to breaking the ice is to share ‘some unbelievably ludicrous stories about art’, such as, she laughs, when, at one important art show, a sculptor presented a head positioned on a plank: ‘It was so heavy that the men who took it past the judges had to bring it in two bits; the head came in first, followed by the stand with its little peg — and the judges rejected the head and took the plank.’ This helps sitters relax, which in turn opens the door to a better portrait. ‘Most people are stiff and nervous. They don’t know what they’re in for and they’re terrified of their image being in the hands of some stranger, so the best thing you can do is to chat, have a fun, jokey time, and then they will sink into themselves. They will tilt their head one way or the other and then you’ll find a more interesting pose.’

What if they don’t stop chatting? ‘Then, you just ask them to be quiet when you’re painting their mouth,’ as, indeed, Philipps once did with Elizabeth II.

These days, laments Stewart, there has been an increase in people asking for portraits from existing photographs. In her view, that kind of commission is very hard to do well, as the artist needs to be able to compose the sitter under the correct light: ‘I recommend people to choose artists that paint from life if they have time and want the full “sitting” experience, but the key thing is that they should have at least one sitting from life.’ Indeed, Philipps asks even members of the Royal Family for a sitting, preferably more.

Sometimes, people are hesitant to be painted from life because they are very self-conscious. This happens more frequently with women than men, particularly older ones, for whom, says Philipps, it is often sufficient to ‘put in front of them a glass of whisky, ask them to talk about themselves and they’re away’.

The more bashful sitters should not fear, however, as portraitists are adept at making people feel at ease. ‘One thing that is very useful is to find something they’re good at,’ believes Philipps. ‘I had one girl who sat; she said she had come from her cello practice and I said “Oh my gosh, so clever! I would so love to do that!” and I could visibly see her coming at me at a different level. Those little human touches — they really help.’

Other prospective sitters are concerned about the toll that being painted from life might take on their days. It is true that a commission should allow enough sitting time. ‘I wouldn’t want the portrait to feel performative and I hope getting to know the sitters allows them to be at ease and be themselves,’ says Douglas-Hamilton. ‘I think the worst thing you can do, if you’re commissioning a portrait, is expecting it to be done to a very quick deadline — you might as well just get a photograph, at that point. You want to give the artist time to really get to know you.’

One of her favourite commissions was a portrait of a young man, Victor Hope, who she painted against the backdrop of an elaborate interior. ‘You almost don’t notice the sitter at first — he is completely engrossed in reading and then there’s a dog at his feet, which gives an atmosphere of leisureliness, calmness. It’s like you’re entering into their private world.’ That said, ‘you don’t have to sit for 40 hours for a great portrait,’ reassures Stewart. Every picture is a law unto itself, but, as a rule of thumb, Douglas-Hamilton mentions three to four sittings, each lasting one to two hours, for a small oil head and shoulders. Philipps also tends to do two-hour sittings. She has done longer ones on occasion, but, crucially, a good portraitist can read the room: ‘If people are getting tired or fed up, you just stop the sitting.’ Watling suggests bored sitters ‘listen to something on earphones’.

Thorough preliminary research and a solid relationship with the painter of choice should go a long way towards ensuring patrons will like the resulting portrait. To assuage any residual fears, many artists, such as Douglas-Hamilton, will show people a sketch: ‘What I would do with a commission as big as the Victor Hope one, I would do a small, intimate oil sketch, then show it to the people who’ve commissioned me and say: “This is my idea for the big painting. What do you think?” I’ll never embark on a huge painting without them knowing roughly what my commission or my composition idea is.’

Many artists, even those as experienced as Philipps, are open to feedback from sitters, either directly or, more often, through an agent such as Stewart: ‘I don’t want to have something in the picture that bothers them,’ Philipps explains. ‘That would be awful. I’m not such a diva to think I get it right the whole time.’ If a sitter is being especially sensitive about a facial or body feature, she will endeavour to sort it out. ‘There are various mechanisms you can use to un-highlight something, if necessary. It doesn’t happen very often, but I wouldn’t want to stand there and tell people to get over it, because they wouldn’t. They’d put the painting in the attic and the whole thing would be pointless.’

This article first appeared in the October 14, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

'It’s not for the faint-hearted,’ points out Emily Erlam as we gaze over the vast perennial meadow at Shillies Barn in Suffolk. Luckily, her client possesses the sort of steadfast attention and resolve that these dynamic, shifting tapestries demand.

A former teacher and trained horticulturist, Sue Goodge had lived on the Suffolk farm for three decades, gardening in a cottage-garden way with roses and scented plants. She had never employed a designer before, but her decision to renovate a 300-year-old barn needed fresh eyes. Faced with an ocean of grass and keen to whip it into a Hauser & Wirth-style flower field, she chose Erlam to realise her vision. It was an inspired decision. Setting a garden into the context of bucolic pasture and old farmyards requires careful, rigorous spatial planning. ‘It’s hard in the countryside to create sinuous journeys without affecting loads of space,’ explains Erlam. ‘It’s about where the garden starts and ends, and how to connect it all’.

The garden, which is just over two acres and with fields and woods owned by Goodge on either side, wraps around the barn and its outbuildings in a series of interconnected spaces, moving from colour-saturated to calm then back again. You approach through a sunny, west-facing parterre, where potting sheds and the new kitchen form two ends of a protected C shape. The layout is quite traditional, with paths herringboned in white Suffolk brick and beds mirroring each other, but the planting is structurally ebullient.

Multi-stemmed Prunus x yedoensis and prolifically flowering species lilacs add height, domes of Euphorbia griffithii ‘Fireglow’ and lavender lend weight and a rumpus of tough perennials, such as Stachys byzantina, froth about at their feet. Eschscholzia californica, Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’ and bronze fennel tuck themselves between everything, dialling up the zest. Artemisia ludoviciana ‘Silver Queen’, although a bit of a thug, brings a neutral metallic calm that beautifully knits together the rusty oranges, coppers and pinks.

The tones are eminently suited to the terracotta and silvery shades of a barn conversion. ‘We don’t usually work on a front garden so intense,’ muses Erlam, ‘but the planting slows you down. By the time you reach the house, you’re already immersed.’ What used to be ‘a tractor turning space, with delivery vans roaring up to the front door’ has become so engrossing that guests are often late to arrive, distracted by wandering the warm, glowing courtyard.

Walking around the potting shed and a small pond to the other side of the courtyard, the perennial meadow stretches out down to a new retaining brick wall that abuts the barn halfway down. It is a neat way of organising the previously sloping site, providing clear division between colour and the calm lawn below. ‘I’m quite formal, but you don’t experience that,’ notes Erlam, who divided the rectangular, carpet-like space into five beds with curving gravel paths weaving in between. Each bed was given a plant community of its own, yet operates as part of a wider group, with patterns repeated across the whole stretch.

Erlam is scientific about heights and widths as ‘every species makes such different forms’. She begins by selecting a three-plant combination for each season and then layers further additions on top. ‘You get to know the species you are comfortable with. I like my designs to be 70% workhorse and 30% more dramatic and fun plants that may or may not work out.’ Eremurus or echinacea, for example, won’t last in every garden, but here they’ve thrived. Her top workhorses include Sesleria autumnalis for edging and semi-evergreen backdrop, mixed with Origanum laevigatum ‘Herrenhausen’ and Allium ‘Summer Beauty’.

Veronicastrums and iris are her choice for form and structure, surrounded by her favourite ‘dirty, washed-out colours’. There are plenty of gauzy pinks and dusky purples, but Erlam has also stirred in a spectrum of rusty reds: Bistorta officinalis ‘Superba’, Penstemon digitalis ‘Husker Red’, Sanguisorba officinalis ‘Red Thunder’ and deep-burgundy Panicum virgatum ‘Shenandoah’.

‘I love that there’s so much shape and colour from the foliage,’ she notes of the crimped edges on the burnets, the buttery autumn shades of Amsonia hubrichtii and the dramatic charcoal-black stems on the Baptisia ‘Purple Smoke’. The darker plants work particularly hard with what we used to call sedum, now Hylotelephium ‘Matrona’, acting as an eye-catcher across the tawny colour palette. The Russian sage, (formerly Perovskia) Salvia ‘Blue Spire’ and the purple moor grass Molinia caerulea subsp. arundinacea ‘Transparent’ throw contrasting pools of light. The visual effect is like a bolt of worn-in Donegal tweed, with multiple bruised, smoky threads pulled together.

‘It’s about being among it and seeing a plant through all seasons. There’s something to see for 10 months in the year,’ says the designer. The meadow rises and falls in different peaks, slowly building to a late-summer explosion with strong autumn/winter silhouettes. It moves beautifully in its exposed, windy site and copes admirably with all sorts of challenging aspects, including the heavy clay soil.

Erlam prepared the site with layers of grit and sand, then planted up using about five plants per square metre, all in 3½in pots, to give optimum coverage. Some plants went in when the garden was under snow, electric fences had to be assembled to deter muntjac and clay means a constant threat of winter waterlogging and summer drought. Goodge’s farming background instilled a firm belief that irrigation is a last resort. ‘Sue is very brave: I would have been all over it with a hosepipe,’ says Erlam, ‘but her decision has given it a ruggedness that suits the site.’

The success of any New Perennial planting ultimately depends on a great gardener to keep the balance. Goodge records every movement of her new garden, noting the shifts and changes. ‘Constant assessment is part of why I love it,’ she agrees. ‘The aim is to understand the garden enough to really garden it. We’ve been very bold, we’ve gone bigger than we thought and I love it. It’s the area we spend most time on, but that’s why I wanted a garden.’

Cheshire — £3.35 million

Knightswood has a cinema room that measures 27ft by 19ft — striking proportions therefore to match the rest of this very 21st-century, 8,200sq ft home that is set in 19½ acres of Cheshire countryside with far-reaching south-westerly views.

Built in 2020, natural light floods in through the myriad windows, not least in the impressive open-plan entertaining spaces. Knightswood is also a haven for those who live and breathe horses as there is both a bespoke stable block and a manège. Its eco credentials are impressive, too: heating is provided by a ground-source heat pump and it has an EPC rating of 81.

The driveway runs to about an eighth of a mile — plenty of time for visitors to become suitably impressed before they reach the door. Outdoor enthusiasts will surely love the gardens, the swimming pool built into a terrace, woodland, a private lake and ponds.

For sale via Gascoigne Halman — see more details.

West Lothian — £3.7 million

Michelangelo meets modern-day artistry in the Category B, six-bedroom Ormiston Castle in Kirknewton, a Scots Baronial property that dates from 1851 and was designed by David Bryce for Archibald Wilkie. Now brought firmly up to date thanks to a multi-million-pound renovation programme, a couple of the High Renaissance Italian’s masterpieces from the Sistine Chapel are reproduced on the ceiling of the 1930s Art Deco-style cinema, which also has star-constellation fibre optics and immersive surround sound.

The castle, sited on the outskirts of Edinburgh, has six reception rooms and is run as a hospitality business, with significant income-generating potential. The grounds, which include woodland, run to 15 acres and include fenced paddocks for horses, which can also be housed in the stable block.

For sale via Strutt & Parker — see more details.

Hampshire — £2.5 million

Fabulous and yet functional, the beautifully renovated Dragon House makes an impression from the get-go. Built in the late 16th century, this Grade II*-listed six/seven-bedroom, four-storey home is steeped in history, being one of Peterfield’s most eminent landmark properties. Newly renovated, the changes have ensured the integration of modern twists with historic features, including plenty of exposed timber beams.

The cosy, comfortable cinema room adds an extra layer of luxury, bringing the big-screen experience straight into the new owners’ living space and meaning no need for trips to Cineworld. Although this house with three to five reception rooms is located in the heart of the historic town — and only a seven-minute walk from the main-line railway station — its half-an-acre of walled gardens offer a hub for privacy. Dragon Cottage is self-contained, but adjoins the main house.

For sale via Knight Frank — see more details.

East Sussex — excess £3 million

Grade II-listed Bedford House on Brighton’s beautiful Marine Parade, within the East Cliff conservation area, has seen a plethora of stars pass through its front door, not least big-screen performers Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh. Another, actress Margaret Leighton, even has a suite named after her.

Thought to have been built for the Duke of Bedford, this six-bedroom property with four reception rooms became home to the painter Cecil D’Oyly John, playwright Sir Terence Rattigan (Leighton’s great friend) and later comedian Tony Hancock’s theatrical agent brother, Roger. It was the latter who created the first cinema room.

‘The star of the show at Bedford House is the fantastic cinema room. It is Art Deco inspired with exceptional attention to detail,’ says property agent Matthew Higgins of today’s room. The main entrance has a sweeping staircase that Rattigan installed in the 1960s to impress his famous guests.

For sale via Fine & Country — see more details.

Surrey — £3.75 million

‘For me, Wood Rising offers the perfect balance between a modern home, featuring excellent amenities such as a cinema room, gym and luxury fittings, and traditional English architecture,’ says agent Charles Broadbent-Combe. He is talking about the recently refurbished six-bedroom property situated on the Wentworth Estate, where the triple-height galleried entrance and dining hall, complete with exposed beams, has attributes that are likely to prompt gasps of admiration from visitors.

In fact, timber has been used to great effect throughout this property, not only lending warmth to many rooms, but giving a sense of time past. Eight reception rooms mean that this could be a true party place, with the drawing room the perfect spot for mixing and mingling before the French doors are thrown open for summer soirées on the terrace. The garden runs to about three-quarters of an acre. Virginia Water’s shops and railway station are about half a mile away.

For sale via Savills — see more details.

This article first appeared in the October 28, 2026, issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

Hero house

It take a lot to get me, a south-westerner to the bone, to the north of England — no one in their right mind could enjoy those dismal motorways — but this trip to an unsung part of Co Durham was truly worth it.

The Durham Dales (the Co Durham part of the North Pennines National Landscape) are much bypassed en route to the more famous Yorkshire Dales, Lake District or Northumberland coast.

Most general knowledge of Barnard Castle, off the busy, panoramic A66 between the A1 and the M6, is limited to the fact that Charles Dickens visited in 1838 to research bleak northern boarding schools for Nicholas Nickleby and, more recently, a government adviser famously drove there to test his eyes during covid. In fact, it’s a delightful town that is home to one of this country’s great art collections, of which more anon.

We stayed at North Farm, Walworth, a seven-bedroom, five-bathroom farmhouse pleasantly isolated in footpath-riven farmland, yet only a 10-minute drive from the A1. The house is owned by the writer Philip Eade — his biographical subjects include the young Prince Philip, Evelyn Waugh and Sylvia, ‘Queen of the Headhunters’ — and has been decorated as cheerfully and dramatically as one would expect from the imaginative interior designer Rita Konig; look it up in Jeremy Musson’s book English Country House Interiors (2011, Rizzoli).

I travelled there with three old and good friends and there were no arguments about bedrooms; all, from the Hyacinth Room to the ointment-pink room to the one with the four-poster (mine), are charming. Nothing is too ‘matchy-matchy’ (this is a compliment); it’s a home, not a showroom, with a happy atmosphere.

There is, as one would expect from the owner, an eclectic abundance of books and plenty of squashy chairs in which to read them. The four-oven Aga had been lit in the beguiling kitchen.

Outside, sheep grazed beside the drive and sunshine filtered through a laden apple tree in the mellow walled garden. We only spent three nights in North Farm, but it was home from the first moments.

Seven nights at North Farm costs from £2,989. Visit the Crabtree and Crabtree website for more information and to book.

Need to know

Walworth Castle dates from the 12th century and was finished in its present form in about 1600. It was then owned by Elizabeth Jenison, widow of Thomas Jenison, the Auditor General of Ireland; on April 14, 1603, she entertained James Vl of Scotland when he was on his way to his coronation as James l of England.

The castle later passed to the Aylmer family and then the Eade family, who owned it during the Second World War when it was a prisoner-of-war camp. It became a girls’ school and, finally, a hotel.

What to eat

• Rural pubs are the order of the day — and very friendly they are, too, as well as good value for money — unless you want to drive into Barnard Castle, Durham or Darlington. The recommended local is The Fox Hole in nearby Piercebridge; it lived up to expectation. As in most northern pubs, it helps to go there hungry as the helpings are generous: the bowl of mussels in the excellent seafood-platter starter (for two people) was a meal in itself
• There is, admittedly, something faintly quaint about the Tavern bar at the Walworth Castle Hotel — we were pretty much the only people in there, as the hotel residents seemed to be eating elsewhere — but there was a kindly welcome and the two-minute walk after a five-hour drive was blissful, as were the steaks and bottle of Fleurie

What to do

Learn The Bowes Museum is a fantastical place that seems to have been magically translocated from the Loire Valley in France; it is the legacy of the 19th-century collectors John Bowes and his French artist wife, Joséphine, and is stuffed with porcelain, Flemish and Italian paintings and much more; its most famous exhibit is the mechanised silver swan, which lives up to its billing and is mesmerising. The gallery was wonderfully uncrowded on our visit, too.

Sit back and listen The girls’ choir was on duty at Evensong at Durham Cathedral(above); its rendering of Brahms’s Geistliches Lied floated Heaven-wards and was exquisite. The cathedral’s most famous treasure is the shrine to St Bede in the Galilee Chapel, but there was much interest in the tributes to the Durham Light Infantry: the great uncle of one of our party headed a horrifyingly long list of the fallen in only one day of carnage in the First World War.

Step back in history We easily whiled away several hours at Raby Castle — coffee, a tour of the tranquil, 18th-century walled gardens remodelled three years ago by Luciano Giubbilei, lunch, walking in the 200-acre deer park and watching frisky fallow bucks clash antlers, tea and, oh yes, the spectacular castle itself, with its impressive art collection and breathtaking central hall complete with a stuffed longhorn bull’s head.

The castle was built in the 14th century by the Neville family and later seized by the Crown when Charles Neville sided with Mary, Queen of Scots in the Rising of the North.

In 1626, Henry Vane the Elder, a courtier of James l, bought it; he also met a sticky end. More peaceful, affluent times followed and, in 2016, Vane’s descendant, Harry, 12th Lord Barnard, and his wife, Kate, inherited Raby, beginning a new era of transformation and thus assuring the future of this most magical place.

Walk the Weardale Way (or bits of it) This varied trail of some 75 miles, via Lumley Castle, Bishop Auckland and Stanhope, runs from the Bede Memorial Cross at the mouth of the River Wear in Sunderland to the Kill-hope Lead Mining Museum.

This feature originally appeared in the October 28, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.

On August 26, 1645, 140 people in the village of Bury St Edmonds, Suffolk, were rounded up and imprisoned, accused of witchcraft by their own neighbours. The following day, 18 were executed.

In the eyes of their accusers, these witches had used sorcery to sour beer, destroy crops, and even murder townsfolk they’d quarrelled with. Partly because of the works of the region’s self-appointed 'witchfinder' General Matthew Hopkins, Bury St Edmonds wears the dubious crown for holding the largest witch trial in English history. The terrifying antics in Suffolk even helped fuel the Salem Witch Trials in America, less than 50 years later.

England’s witch craze was a period of great fear, paranoia, and death that spanned the 16th and 17th centuries and resulted in the executions of at least 500 people. It hit its peak during the English Civil War (1642-51).

‘There were a lot of religious, social, economic, and legal stresses at the time,’ says Malcolm Gaskell, author of Worlds of Fear and Wonder: Living with the Supernatural, Past and Present.

Nearly a century earlier, Henry VIII had passed the Witchcraft Act (1542), making witchcraft a crime punishable by death. It was his appropriation of common land from the Catholic Church, however, that contributed to rising costs and unemployment. The influx of gold and silver from Spanish fleets had driven living costs up, while the Little Ice Age meant it was colder, damper, and harder to grow crops. At a time when the untimely death of a family cow could cause its owners to immediately slip into hunger, disquiet was rife across England.

‘People were looking for a quick and easy answer,’ says Diane Purkiss, author of The Witch in History: Early Modern and Late Twentieth Century Representations. ‘What they came up with is witches.’

The very superstitious James VI and I also played a part. In 1589, he narrowly avoided death while sailing through a storm on his way back from Denmark with his new bride, Princess Anne and blamed the violent weather on evil forces and witches. Once back on dry land he instigated the North Berwick Witch Trials in which local healer Agnes Sampson confessed, under torture, to throwing a cursed cat into the sea in order to create the conditions. Shortly after becoming the English King in 1603, James enforced an even stricter Witchcraft Act and re-released his book, Daemonologie, which detailed the existence of widespread witchcraft, sorcery and evil forces.

The idea of magic, spirits and fairies existed long before James’s proclamations, says Marion Gibson, author of Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials: ‘In Pagan times, early Christian missionaries spoke about local people venerating hills and streams, and using charms, prayers, and folk magic.’ The English often talked about supernatural entities, which they believed were the restless dead, she adds.

During this period, people would pray upon local herbs and flowers, and candles, for their own success and to bring harm upon their rivals. According to Gibson, the general consensus was that magic caused as much good as it did bad: ‘Before the witch hunts, there was bad and good magic. It was more of a balance. When people started to think that all magic was bad, that’s when they decided to get witches and punish them.’

During the religious turbulence of the Middle Ages, believers began to think that the devil was recruiting his own followers to undermine Christianity. Those people — in particular marginalised figures at the fringes of society — were witches, says Gibson. Ninety percent of the people accused were women who didn’t fit the era’s social expectations. They were almost always poor, usually childless, unmarried, homeless, elderly, argumentative, especially with their neighbours, disfigured or employed as midwives or healers. ‘There were no nurses or doctors in this period,’ Gibson reminds me. ‘If your child, dog, or sheep is sick, you might go to see a cunning woman, who would suggest some kind of magical remedy.’ If the treatment didn’t work, the healer was quickly blamed.

In 1582, a midwife called Ursley Kemper was found guilty of murdering a baby in St Osyth, Essex. The reality was that after Kemper had successfully cared for Grace Thurlow’s sickly first born child, the pair fell out. When Thurlow picked a different midwife for the birth of her second child, and that baby died after accidentally falling from their cradle, Thurlow accused Kemper of murder through witchcraft. Local magistrates even manipulated Kemper’s 8-year-old son, Thomas, into testifying against his mother, while further evidence was that Kempler kept two cats, a lamb, and a toad as pets.

Then in 1645, 14 women from Framlingham, Suffolk — many of whom were widows living on Church handouts were hanged for witchcraft. In the same year, Essex’s Elizabeth Clarke was accused seemingly because she has one leg, was a single, unmarried parent and because her own mother had previously been found guilty. ‘This is neighbours bringing neighbours to the attention of authorities,’ emphasises Gaskell. ‘It’s not between rich and poor. It's between the poor. They're the ones that live with each other. They're the ones where there's the greatest competition. That's often where the animosity is bitterest.’

The accusations were complicated by overly pious parishioners, who believed labelling their neighbors as witches proved how close they were to God. Some of the accused also insisted they really were witches, says Purkiss, because — after years of being ‘unseen in society’ — the label gave them ‘a moment in the spotlight where they were the most important person in the room.’

While the commonly held belief is that the witch craze took place in rural areas, there were trials in London and Newcastle — where the governor used the services of renowned Scottish witch-picker John Kincaid to hunt for sorcerers. At least 16 people were executed on evidence he provided and Scotland became a much-feared place. Despite having a fifth of the population of England, it executed three times as many people. Those numbers, however, pale in comparison to Germany, which is believed to have executed more than 7,000; Switzerland and France are both estimated to have done away with about 5,000.

The brutality of the Civil War went some way to tempering England’s bloodlust. ‘People had seen too much religious fighting and killing and a greater period of tolerance was ushered in,’ says Gibson. And, around this time, scientific discoveries and knowledge were forcing people to think differently about the world. While individuals continued to be accused, most were acquitted. In 1736, James I’s Witchcraft Act was repealed.

The depiction of witches in William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Robert Burns’s Tam o' Shanter, Wilhelm Meinhold's The Amber Witch and Roald Dahl’s The Witches has created an enduring, though not very positive, legacy. ‘They’ve become sort of domesticated into children's stories,’ says Gaskell. ‘If you invert everything we think is good, you create the figure of the witch.’

Even though the witch craze unfolded centuries ago, counties across England are increasingly choosing to pardon and honour those who died. Visitors to Colchester and Lancaster are able to experience how victims were treated by walking around the cramped, damp and dimly lit stone-walled dungeons beneath their castles, where the accused were barely fed, sometimes tortured, and left to rot as they waited to be tried. Newcastle recently erected memorials. The landscapes in Essex and Suffolk are largely unchanged. ‘These are really great places where you can imagine where the history took place and the atrocities that happened,’ says Gaskell.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 2pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

Inspired? Read all about the 'indomitable rise of cowboy core', here, and Ralph Lauren's new Western-inspired watch collection, here.

Overlooking rolling hills and ancient hedgerows, a former brickworks in Wiltshire has been reimagined as a new country house made from rammed earth — a mix of clay, crushed aggregates and brick from demolition waste on the site — and local limestone aggregate.

The pioneering building was designed by architects Tuckey Design Studio and decorated by Todhunter Earle. Sally Storey of John Cullen created the lighting design to celebrate the expressive building materials and support the rhythm of daily life.

‘Our client loves gardening and spends a lot of time outdoors, so she was very clear that it was important to be able to see what she was doing both during the day and when it was dark outside,’ explains Storey. ‘Our lighting scheme was integrated to celebrate the warmth and texture of the natural materials, to complement the architecture rather than compete with it.’

The display shelving on the back wall is softly backlit using concealed linear strips, injecting warmth and atmosphere into what is essentially a highly practical area. John Cullen Vorsa 40 directional spotlights are barely visible between the ceiling beams, introducing focused light on the sink, work surfaces and on the central table, ensuring the space is functional and feels connected to the rest of the house.

Using two different colour temperatures in the lighting — warmer on the back wall and brighter in the functional elements — softens the appearance of the space.

In the centre is a Victorian mill table, from JMR Antiques, Bristol. It complements the stain-washed timber joinery by Orwells Furniture. The terracotta floor tiles are from Terres Cuites de Raujolles.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

It's the stuff of dreams: a beautiful, historic, five-storey castle for sale in Scotland with a £120,000 price tag.

Baltersan Castle dates to the 16th century; a tower house built on an L-plan in the Ayrshire village of Carrick, a place which has historic links to Robert the Bruce, who was Earl of Carrick long before he became Scotland's freedom-fighting king.

The castle was built two and a half centuries after Robert died: it was erected in 1584, commissioned by John Kennedy of Pennyglen and his wife, Margaret Cathcart. It's a building full of architectural interest, and a rare survivor — very few tower houses from the era are still standing, and even fewer that, like Baltersan, has a wealth of sophisticated architectural touches. For all that, you won't be surprised to hear that the castle is designated Category A by Historic Scotland.

And what of those flourishes in the building? The agents, Galbraith, have done a fine job listing them: there's a secret chamber, a number of discreet keek-holes, fine moulded stonework, intricate doorways and fireplaces, carved stone waterspouts, gun loops, iron grilles, heraldic stonework and much more.

It's a fascinating place — but it's also, plainly, a wreck. The walls are still standing to more or less their original height, but the floors themselves have long gone. Baltersan is believed to have been lived in and used until the second half of the 18th century — Robert Burns is said to have visited at one point — since when it's gradually fallen into the state that it's now being sold in.

Even in ruin it has continued to inspired. John Keats and Robert Louis Stephenson are both said to have visitied, while the iconic architect and designed Charles Rennie Mackintosh came to the castle and sketched many of its details. The resulting drawings are held in The Mackintosh Collection in the Hunterian Art Gallery in Glasgow.

Baltersan was owned by a man named James Brown for more than three decades, and he made many efforts to save the castle. Planning permission applications to save the building, restore it, and turn it into a guesthouse have been made, granted and lapsed; Galbraith note that the last approval was granted by South Ayrshire Council in 2007. Whoever takes it on will have to go through the process again, though past approvals are invariably a good sign, particularly for those embarking on a sympathetic restoration effort.

The problem, of course, is that such projects require huge resources. Brown was still looking for investment when he ended up selling to current owner Angelo Ovidi in 2024, and after being unable to bring his own £2 million restoration plans to fruition, Ovidi too is now passing on the baton.

'Baltersan has inspired architectural and artistic interest over several generations,' he says.

'I fell in love with the castle, its setting and its history when I first met James [Brown] and have been passionate about its restoration ever since. My hope is that new owners will recognise its unique character and significance, breathe new life into the property and allow it to stand proud once again.'

What awaits those new owners, then? We asked Tim Moulding, one of the most well-respected country house building and renovation experts in Britain. Amazingly, Moulding's family have been in the building business since Baltersan Castle was still standing more or less intact — Moulding & Co was founded in 1798.

'There is something wonderfully romantic about rescuing a ruined Scottish castle, but the reality is that you're not buying a house in need of renovation. You're taking on a major conservation and reconstruction project,' he says. 'The purchase price is likely to be the least significant part of the investment.'

The first steps in the project are to establish the structural integrity of the surviving masonry, since 'a building that has stood without a roof for centuries will have suffered prolonged exposure to the elements. You need to understand the condition of what's left before contemplating how to rebuild what's missing.'

Even as you undertake that work, the equally important job of finding the right people needs to be tackled: 'the successful restoration of a building like this depends upon assembling the right team from the outset, particularly a conservation architect, structural engineer and contractor with genuine experience of historic masonry and traditional craftsmanship,' says Tim.

As for cost? The £2 million budget Ovidi had in mind is probably in the right ballpark, but depending on the final plans it could easily surpass that. 'Projects of this nature are notoriously difficult to cost accurately, and a generous contingency is absolutely essential,' adds Moulding.

'I would be very surprised if a comprehensive restoration to a high residential standard didn't run into several million pounds.

'Ultimately, this is unlikely to be a conventional property investment. It requires someone with the passion, patience and financial resources to become a custodian of an important piece of architectural history. For the right person, the rewards could be extraordinary.'

Ah, yes — the rewards. Saving Baltersan would be a wonderful thing to do, and it would leave the next owner with a castle to be proud of. There's something else to bear in mind too: the castle is set amid unspoilt countryside, but isn't so remote as to make getting there a problem. This is the heart of South Ayrshire, close to the market town of Maybole and the world-famous golf links at Turnberry, an hour or so from Glasgow, and less than half that to the airport at Prestwick. On the down side? There's little land included — only around half an acre — but there is an access track noted on the agent's details.

'Baltersan is much more than a romantic castle ruin. It is a story, a place and a piece of Scotland’s heritage,' says Natalie Fotheringham of Galbraith in Ayr, handling the sale.

'The surviving fabric and extensive research archive provide an unusually clear understanding of the original house, while its commanding setting and historic grounds add to its appeal.

'For a new owner, the opportunity is therefore not simply to rebuild a castle but to safeguard and restore one of Ayrshire’s most significant historic buildings and create the next chapter in its history.'

Ralph Lauren the man has always been good at uniting the most unlikely groups of people. Who else, when you think about it, could create not just clothes, but really good clothes for an English country-house owner, an East Coast WASP and a Texan billionaire — at the same time?

He did it again, in 2008, when he made a serious move into watchmaking, partnering with luxury goods conglomerate Richemont who own IWC Schaffhausen, Piaget and Vacheron Constantin — the world's oldest continuously operating watch manufacturer — among others.

On the surface of it, the American West, which has long been a part of Lauren’s design vocabulary, isn’t the natural companion to Switzerland’s centuries-old, strictly governed horological processes. However, come together they did with the launch of the original American Western Cushion collection, in 2018, to mark Ralph Lauren the brand’s 50th anniversary. The 42-millimetre case was available in antiqued sterling silver or 18-carat rose gold, inspired by the vintage concho and rodeo belts that Lauren collects, wears, makes and sells.

Now, the Western Cushion’s been rereleased with some important updates, including to the case, which has shrunk by four millimetres — enough to feel more refined without compromising the wearer’s ability to appreciate the delicate engraving. The most notable change is that the watch is available in three iterations: off-white lacquer, the closest to the original one’s vintage sensibility, a more-modern black lacquer and natural turquoise, a material which some Native American tribes regard as sacred, or a piece of the sky fallen to Earth.

But for all its cowboy credentials, this is an accessory with a decidedly international outlook. Its leather strap is hand-tooled in Texas, then burnished in Italy, while the silver case and buckle are hand-engraved and aged in New York City. The face is stamped with Roman and Arabic numerals, complemented by Breguet-style hands (Abraham-Louis Breguet was French). The movement, meanwhile, is made in Switzerland, by Piaget, exclusively for Ralph Lauren.

For Lauren, it has always been about bringing together the best of all worlds.

The Ralph Lauren American Western Cushion collection is available from $26,000. Visit the Ralph Lauren website for more information

In the long, candlelit drawing room of the Villa Diodati, five exiles from England listened to the rain thrashing against the tall balcony windows. Thunder rolled symphonically across the black waters of Lake Geneva and lightning crackled above the Jura Mountains, the yellow flashes sending shadows leaping through the darkness.

It was July 1816 in Switzerland. Far off in South-East Asia, a massive volcanic eruption in 1815 had sent up vast ash clouds that had called a halt on summer. The sky was dark, the air chilled, crops failed and famine loomed. Many took it as a sign of the end of days. The tempestuous weather mimicked the personal lives of the English quintet —George Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Godwin, Claire Clairmont and Dr John Polidori.

Lord Byron was fleeing a broken marriage and a raft of scandals that fully vindicated his former lover Lady Caroline Lamb’s assessment that he was ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’. Shelley, too, was on intimate terms with controversy. A vocal atheist, he’d narrowly avoided a severe prison sentence for sedition as a student, caused a minor scandal when he eloped with the 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook and a greater furore when he ditched her and their two children to escape to continental Europe with the teenage Godwin.

Godwin’s stepsister Clairmont was pregnant with Byron’s child, or so she said. His Lordship was not entirely convinced, believing that she had also slept with Shelley. Polidori was Byron’s travelling physician. Dark haired, vain and intelligent, he entertained romantic notions of a literary career, an aspiration his employer took a cruel delight in publicly mocking. Belittled and lampooned, the unhappy medico had conceived the notion that Byron was draining the life out of him. Had the tabloid press existed in Georgian England, we can assume the group would have filled front pages.

In the grand, porticoed house with its views of the glimmering lake and brooding mountains, a mood of febrile morbidity took hold. In the flickering light as the storm raged, the company spoke of somnambulism, re-animation, the harnessing of electricity and the German horror tales of the Fantasmagoriana. As midnight passed, Byron recited from Christabel, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gothic poem of witchcraft, in a voice that had been likened to that of the Devil tempting Eve. Shelley turned deathly pale, shrieked and ran from the room, later describing an apparition of a woman with eyes in her breasts that had sprung up before him.

These incidents and conversations, the dark skies and the anxious, claustrophobic atmosphere inside the mansion would foster the creation of two literary figures who would haunt the nightmares of future generations: Frankenstein’s monster and a sophisticated and seductive feaster on human blood, the vampire.

Confined beneath sombre skies, beset by rivalries, resentments and sexual intrigue, the quintet determined each to write a ghost story. Clairmont shared her stepsister’s love for the fantastical, but, overcome with worries about her future, seems not to have contributed. Byron made a desultory effort, but was distracted by thoughts of a new poem inspired by a recent visit to the dungeons of the nearby castle at Chillon (where, characteristically, he had carved his name on a stone pillar). Shelley’s tale was played out as a single dramatic recitation and is lost for ever. Godwin’s story was sparked by a nightmare in which she saw a ‘pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together’ and then, ‘on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life’.

Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, would be published in 1818. Widely derided as nonsense by critics at the time, the novel’s reputation and influence would grow until its fame far outstripped that of the poetry of Shelley or Byron. Then there was poor Polidori. His tale, The Vampyre, was an act of revenge upon the man who mocked and bullied him, Byron.

The vampire of Eastern European legend is a soil-encrusted, red-eyed and semi-human fiend. Polidori transformed it into something more mesmeric, charming and amorally evil, a man whose voice chilled the listener even as it seduced them, whose ‘love was death’. His suave vampire, Lord Ruthven (so plainly modelled on his employer) would be the godfather of Count Dracula, Edward Cullen and others.

The Vampyre might have brought Polidori the literary fame he sought, but alas an unscrupulous publisher issued the story not with his name on the cover, but that of his nemesis, Byron. His Lordship was a celebrity before the word had meaning, so, naturally, it became an immediate sensation. Polidori fought to have his authorship acknowledged, but nobody listened. Thwarted and humiliated, he apparently took his own life with poison, haunted to the end by those cold dark days in that villa on the stormy shores of Lake Geneva.

This article first appeared in the October 21, 2026 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.

The Country Life Quiz is published every weekday at 2pm.

Missed a day? Want more quizzes? Catch up on previous editions, here.

The entrepreneur and gallery owner Edward Strachen stands beside an 18th-century lead cistern. The cistern came from Cefn Mably, Glamorgan, formerly the seat of the Kemeys family. It bears the arms and initials of Sir Charles Kemys, 4th Bt, as well the date 1713, the year he became High Sheriff of Glamorgan and also the MP for Monmouthshire.

The Cefn Mably estate was united with that of the Tyntes at Halswell by marriage in 1735 and both continued in the ownership of what became the Kemys Tynte family until the 20th century.

Cefn Mably was described by Country Life in 1908, at which time this cistern stood in the kitchen. Soon afterwards, in the 1920s, the contents of the house were sold up and it was carried to Halswell.

In December 2013, Halswell House was placed in a bankruptcy sale. The house and its many handsome outbuildings were offered in some six lots, comprising 12 separate freeholds, reflecting some of the flats and tenancies created after the estate’s break-up in 1950. By good fortune, at that very moment, Strachan had grown weary of his valiant attempt to acquire another desperately endangered country house, Piercefield, Monmouthshire, from the Reuben Brothers. He arrived at Halswell House as the auctioneer began the sale in the traditional manner, first offering to sell the property as a single lot. Happily, there was only one other bid and he bought it in minutes.

When Strachan and his wife, Alyona, bought Halswell, the cistern was awkwardly embedded in a wall. As part of their painstaking and ongoing restoration of the whole property — a major project is completed every year — they hope to make it a feature of the courtyard garden.

The hall and the many outbuildings and other garden features have already been progressively repaired. A scaffold roof was erected over the Elizabethan house, which survives behind the grand Baroque entrance front. This made it possible to relay the roof, replacing timbers and oak wall plates that had rotted as a result of persistent leaks. It was also an opportunity for extensive tree-ring or dendrochronological dating, which provided a consistent range of 1590–1600 for the earliest substantial parts of the building. The new render, a harmonious pink thanks to the use of local clay and sand, corresponds with older mortar.

Strachan’s first work, howeverm was to restore the roofless tempietto standing above the pond to the left of the main front, which is fed by a spring that rises 50 yards above.

A visitor in about 1900, H. M. Vaughan, describes a cistern in an upper corridor at Cefn Mably that had always been filled with claret for the benefit of thirsty guests. ‘As the one object we have inherited from Cefn Mably,’ comments Strachan, ‘it would be nice to think that this was it.’

This feature originally appeared in the October 21, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe

Where was it?

Near Towcester, in Northamptonshire.

A quick description

We built the house from scratch. Living in London with small children, we wanted to move to the countryside for two reasons: so that they could grow up running through fields and so I could do more interesting work than putting up fences (I was a landscape contractor at the time).

How did you find the plot?

We went to stay with my parents-in-law. They mentioned that the farmyard next door was for sale, so we took a look. It was a concrete courtyard with tumble-down barns, but we thought we could do something with it, and the idea of having grandparents close by appealed.

What did you build?

We took down the existing structures to re-use the bricks and the roof slates — although no sooner had we assembled the slates than they were all stolen. The house was L-shaped and had six bedrooms, all sitting within the original courtyard.

Any mistakes?

We ended up with a house that was too big for our budget, which enforced some economising, such as the number of radiators installed. Until we could afford to fix that, we had to run from the Aga to an electric blanket at night during the winter.

Favourite aspect?

The fact that we could walk through a gap in the garden wall to [my wife] Celestria’s parents’ house and the woods. We loved the garden, too.

Best memory of living there?

We managed to finish the house, including removing the ducklings that had settled in the unoccupied end, just before the birth of our youngest child.

What happened to it?

We sold when all the children left home and we moved to Oxfordshire.

James Alexander-Sinclair is an award-winning garden designer. He co-presents a podcast 'The James & Joe Garden Show' with broadcaster Joe Swift, which is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify