Your Places or Mine

• THE DOLLAR PRINCESSES WHO REVOLUTIONISED THE BRITISH COUNTRY HOUSE

  Send us a textThe American girl was a phenomenon, charming, sporty, better educated than her European counterpart. talk on a wide range of subjects.  Around sixty American girls became peeresses at the turn of the 20th century.  ‘We are the dollar princesses,’ ran a popular song.Crossing the Atlantic was no longer as perilous as it had been in earlier days.  Huge fortunate had been made during the expansion of the United States after the Civil War.  From the 1870s, aristocrats began to experience a decline in the income from their landed estates, due to a prolonged agricultural recession.  Heiresses offered an alternative income stream.  Thus, in the late 1870s, Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh sailed into San Francisco Bay on his yacht The Lancashire Witch, fishing for pretty girls with ‘heaps of the needful’ to maintain his two country houses in England.  He landed Florence Emily Sharon, the daughter of the enormously rich, if notorious Senator Sharon, and they were married in 1880.  That marriage was not happy – nor was Consuelo Vanderbilt’s to the ither Duke of Marlborough.  But May Goelet had a delightful time with the Duke of Roxburghe, whose nickname was Bumble.  She liked shopping, he liked polo; their letters show that they were touchingly fond of each other.  Her fortune allowed Floors Castle in Roxburgheshire to be borught up to date with electricity, central heating and décor in the style of the Ritz.

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• RAMSGATE: THE MARSEILLE OF THE SOUTH EAST

  Send us a textIn this summer episode of ypompod, we got to the seaside – to Ramsgate, beloved of Queen Victoria and now home to the biggest Wetherspoon’s (in an elegant neo-Greek building called the Royal Pavilion of 1913) on the face of the planet.   Five miles to the east of Ramsgate, connected by a continuous yellow carpet of sand, lies Margate, which developed as one of Britain’s first seaside resorts in the mid eighteenth century.  Ramsgate did not get into its stride until after the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815 (a street is called The Plains of Waterloo).  By then, the Prince Regent had given royal approval to the seaside by building his Marine Pavilion at Brighton.  In 1821, as George IV, he took a ship from Ramsgate to visit Hanover (he was cross with Dover for supporting his wife, Queen Caroline, in the couple’s tragi-comic divorce battle); an obelisk commemorates the event, as does the name of the Royal Harbour.  A guidebook of 1846 pronounced that ‘of the three watering places in the Isle of Thanet, Ramsgate is considered as the most fashionable.’ Telescopes, donkey rides, German bands – Ramsgate had everything to delight the Victorian visitor.  At nightfall Mr Fuller’s ‘famed marine library’, came into its own – not only a repository of books but a musical hall, a bazaar and a very mild kind of casino, where a shilling stake might win you a cake of soap, a bottle of hair oil or a wooden spade.  Lumbering wooden bathing machines with a deep canvas hood at one end and a horse at the other would be trundled into the water and turned around, while drivers and horses splashed back to the beach; bathers then issued from beneath the canvas hood, which reached down to the sea.   The English seaside is now back in fashion – at least Clive thinks so. He and his family have a house in Ramsgate.  He’s happy to share the secrets of the town with John and anyone else who’s listening!

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• EWELME: A VILLAGE AND ITS VANISHED MEDIEVAL PALACE

  Send us a textWhere is Ewelme Palace?  It was one of the most splendid houses in the country when it was built in the 15th century but nothing of it now remains.  There are, however, some of the ancillary buildings and monuments that went with a great medieval estate.  Its chatelaine Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, is remembered by one of the most beautiful tombs in the country.  A granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, she became a great heiress when her first husband, the Earl of Salisbury, was killed by a cannonball while fighting in France.  Her second husband, William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, with whom she built what was virtually a palace at Ewelme, does not rest beside her.  Why not?   Having spectacularly enriched himself while ruling England in the place of the weak-minded Henry VI, he was instrumental in losing most of the English possessions in France; fleeing England, he was caught and had his head hacked off, his remains being eventually buried in Suffolk.  The 13 almsmen at Ewelme had a punishing schedule of prayers, intended to shorten the time William and Alice would spend in Purgatory.  You can see why they might have thought it was necessary.The 15th-century school house contains a primary school.  The almshouses, too, are still going, softening the blow of old age.  It’s true, not a stitch of the palace remains above ground, though it was of exceptional splendour and had some extraordinary features, such as an early use of cast iron.  Wholly and utterly gone – but don’t despair.  Ewelme was the subject of John’s doctoral thesis and there is no one who can talk about it with Clive in such fascinating and absorbing detail.  Prepare to be amazed by the story of this little known and now vanished palace and the village that went with it – now one of the most beautiful in Britain.

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• NATIONAL GALLERY: THE SAINSBURY WING AND A NEW CHAPTER

  Send us a textThe National Gallery, now 200 years old, occupies one of the most famous buildings in London, on the north side of Trafalgar Square.  This Greek Revival masterpiece by William Wilkins was designed to take account of the view of St Martin in the Fields from Pall Mall—so unusually it was conceived as having been seen from the side.  Clive and John discuss both Wilkins’s design and the Sainsbury Wing, added by Venturi, Scott Brown in the 1980s.  This extension followed the controversy of the Prince of Wales’s speech at the RIBA at Hampton Court Palace in 1984, in which he likened the previous proposal to ‘a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend’.With hugely more people visiting the gallery each year and the additional security needed in response to the Just Stop Oil attacks, the Sainsbury Wing has become the Gallery’s main entrance. As a result, the Venturi design has been revisited, subtly revised and delicately enhanced by the German-American architect Annabelle Selldorf.  At the same time, the gallery has been completely rehung under the director Gabriele Finaldi.  What do John and Clive think of the result?

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• MEDITERRANEAN CAPRICE IN SNOWDONIA: THE STORY OF PORTMEIRION

  Send us a textIn this episode, Clive and John discuss the holiday village of Portmeirion, an improbable, festive vision of the Mediterranean built on a wooded peninsula of Snowdonia, whose centenary falls this year.Portmeirion was the creation of the architect and card-carrying Welshman Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, who died at the age of 94 in 1978.  Clough, as everyone called him, was a conspicuous figure. Wearing an attention-seeking combo of tweed breeches and long yellow socks, he took a prominent role in the debates that raged over conservation, town-planning and the countryside. With a natural flair for publicity, he felt himself to be fully justified in playing the man of taste in a philistine world.A holiday stage set, Portmeirion included several old buildings which would otherwise had beendestroyed, and offered, with its piazza and campanile and apricot paint, a distillation of Mediterranean experience to an audience that had hardly been out of this country.But there was another side to Clough, whom his friend Christopher Hussey regarded as ‘a spontaneous Welshman with incredible energy and an intuitive love of the thick, rough stone of his country.’ To encounter this side of his being, it is necessaryto visit his nearby home of Plâs Brondanw, a few miles further inland.

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