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

Castle Howard in Yorkshire is one of a select group of country houses which must be seen as complete works of art.  Visitors to the great domed palace, set in the gentle landscape of the Howardian Hills north-east of York, may be bowled ov...

Picnic hampers, black tie, world-class opera — it’s the season for Glyndebourne, the festival that sired the happy, uniquely British phenomenon of country house opera. This week Clive and John discuss the house from which it all began (still ce...

The Tower of London is one of the great sights of the capital, a place that is as steeped in history as it has sometimes been, through the numerous executions it has witnessed, drenched in blood.  In this week’s episode of Your Places or M...

In his mid 20s, Lutyens fell passionately in love with Lady Emily Lytton, daughter of the Earl Lytton, a diplomat and Viceroy of India who had really wanted to be a poet.   He pursued her ardently, writing letters that were romantic, delig...

Sir Edwin (Ned) Lutyens’s old friend Edward Hudson founded Country Life in 1897.  A London printer, he was not a countryman, but commissioned three country houses as well as the Country Life office in Covent Garden.  Convinced of Luty...

The first of a series on the early-20th-century architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, this episode examines the relationship between the young Ned — gangly, witty, shy — and the craftswoman turned gardener Gertrude Jekyll, his senior by 25 years.  ...

Clive and John discuss one of the most spectacular medieval buildings in Britain, Westminster Hall. Originally built by William the Conqueror’s heir, the voracious William Rufus, it was a structure of immense ambition — said to be the biggest h...

One of the greatest of HM the King’s many enthusiasms is architecture.  He made his first pronouncements on the subject in 1984 with the famous ‘Carbuncle’ speech and has been championing the causes of tradition, community, Classicism and ...

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