We will explore defining Englishness through England’s architecture and gardens, from stately home to cottage, including a critical walk around the exteriors of Selwyn College and the Sidgwick Site.
Dating back to 1130, the Manor, Hemingford Grey, is reputedly the oldest inhabited house in England, encapsulating the notion of the rural English home at one with its billowing, floriferous gardens. However, there is a more colourful, complex weave to the term English which we will analyse when exploring the houses and gardens of noted designers, artists, grandees and homemakers.
The classical English house and landscape was defined during the 18th century by the theatrical gymnastics of William Kent and formulaic intelligence of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, the latter’s skills illustrating the scope of the English Enlightenment. The sober Palladian architecture of Stourhead provides a suitably august house from which to explore its Saxon roots, sublime English setting – the archetypical jardin anglais – and acquisition by The National Trust. A horror of 19th-century industrialisation inspired William Morris to advise: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful. In a quest for the vernacular, the English Arts and Crafts movement was initiated, Morris’s Kelmscott Manor being an exemplar.
Trained as an artist, Gertrude Jekyll crafted her house and gardens at Munstead Wood with architect Edwin Lutyens who evolved ‘Wrennaissance’ architecture, each house buoyant in quintessential flowering English gardens. ‘English Country House Style’ was defined and perfected by a Virginian, Nancy (Tree) Lancaster from the 1920’s. In all the aristocracy must not be forgotten, not an Earl but with noble blood, Lady Vita Sackville-West and husband Sir Harold Nicolson who transformed the wreckage of Sissinghurst Castle into an enduring icon of the English house and garden. The television series Downtown Abbey has reinvented Highclere Castle into an English icon of international proportions.
