faulker071

It does something to me A regular reader of the English Buildings blog, or someone glancing at the tag cloud in the right-hand column, would realise quickly that churches are a major interest of mine. I visit churches a lot, and I seem to blog about a church at least once a month. Many things draw me to churches – sometimes it’s their long history, sometimes their architecture, sometimes specific objects or works of art they contain, sometimes what I can only call their atmosphere. The atmosphere I most eagerly savour is the kind that is summoned up by centuries of accumulated history. It’s what I find, typically, in small isolated country churches that have not been over-restored – churches like Inglesham in Wiltshire, to give just one favourite example. There’s something else I get from churches like that, and it’s signalled perhaps by the world ‘isolated’. In a world that contains, in my opinion, far too much noise, a church can be an almost silent place. I find quietude helpful, e...

Holkham: The social, architectural and landscape history of a great English country house by Christine Hiskey Published by Unicorn Press At the end of Holkham by Christine Hiskey are two photographs that for me sum up the turns and turns-about in the history of a great house. The pictures show the same room, the Statue Gallery, in the 1960s-70s and the 1980s. In the first picture, the room is dominated by a rather fussily patterned (but very beautiful) carpet and some chairs upholstered in bright red. In the second, the room has been restored to create the effect it originally made in the 18th century, with bare, polished floor boards and chairs covered in blue leather. The evidence for the blue leather on the chairs comes from the earliest inventories of the house and a fragment of leather caught under later upholstery. This coming together of documentary and physical evidence, this fine detail, characterises Hiskey’s fascinating account of one of our greatest houses, Holkham Hall ...