Your Places or Mine

• Albi Cathedral: The Greatest Brick Building in the World

  Send us a textThis week John and Clive are bowled over by Albi Cathedral, a towering, outwardly austere edifice of rosy brick which is ‘quite unlike any other medieval structure that you will see – a work of abstract modernism made in the 13th century’.  They discuss the background to its construction, in particular the merciless crusade against the Albigensian Heresy which takes its name from the city.  Externally the cathedral appears to be as much a fortress as a religious building, expressing the authority and power of the Roman Catholic Church.  It was a big influence on some late Victorian architects looking for a new direction for the Gothic Revival, as well as surely on Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. Scholars have called it the largest brick building in the world.Unlike most cathedrals, which have doors at the West End, Albi is entered from a late Gothic porch that could be a gatehouse on the side.  The external walls are buttressed by semicircular drums of brick that go the full towering heights of the buildings. The interior is equally unexpected – a vast space whose roof is a single span of over 60ft.  There are no aisles but the walls are lined with chapels. In contrast to the exterior – ‘Brutalism in brick,’ as John calls it – they are decorated by Renaissance artists from Italy in a scheme that remains almost entirely complete.  Each one is composed of a geometrical scheme.  There is a terrifying fresco of the Last Judgement at the West End.  The choir is separated from the nave by a wedding cake-like screen of stone filigree, which miraculously escaped destruction during the French Revolution.   Why was Albi constructed as it is?  That’s something to talk about – as  John and Clive do!

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• Magnates and Mansions: Who Were The American Millionaires That Loved the British Country House?

  Send us a textPhipps, Carnegie and Old Westbury GardensIn its turn of the 20th-century heyday, Long Island could boast no fewer than 900 country houses.  Since then, most have disappeared, leaving Old Westbury Gardens in a unique position – the only house to have survived complete with its collections, garden and archive.  Clive has just been there and shares its wonder with John, asking why the American country house is such a different beast form its counterparts in the UK.  The story of Old Westbury Gardens is romantic.  Jay Phipps, son of Andrew Carnegie’s partner Henry Phipps, built it for his English bride, Margarita Grace – who loved the life she had known growing up at Battle Abbey in Sussex and was only persuaded to marry him when he offered to create something similar on the other side of the Atlantic.  Westbury House, as it was originally known,  was therefore as English as possible.  And yet there are many differences from prototypes in the UK, revealing the difference between English and American priorities. Andrew Carnegie was another builder of country houses.  John ponders why this should have been. The ensuing chat illuminates the values of the plutocracy in the Edwardian age, an age of super wealth and (sometimes) philanthropy.

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• A Spymaster's Lair: The Unmissable Splendour of Hatfield House

  Send us a textClive has just been to an event at Hatfield House, the palace to the North of London which stands as a monument to the political gene of the Cecil family.  John is more than equal to discussing this great country house and its treasures, which the present Marquess and Marchioness of Salisbury are subtly making even more special.In the 16th-century, Robert Cecil inherited it from his father Lord Burghley, whom he followed as Queen Elizabeth’s chief minister.  It was Cecil who did more than anyone to negotiate the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne on Elizabeth’s death as James I.  James stopped at Cecil’s house of Theobalds on his stately journey south to claim the crown.  Sickly and, like the King, somewhat misshapen, Cecil became James’s first minister, a position bolstered after the role he played in uncovering the Gunpowder Plot; he was created Earl of Salisbury. James had little affection for the old palace at Hatfield, which had been little used since Queen Elizabeth had spent her girlhood there.  On the other hand, as an addict of hunting he enjoyed his visits to Theobalds, expressing his admiration by the backhanded means of proposing a swop.  At Hatfield, Cecil showed his disgust for the old building by demolishing three-quarters of it, and building the present house to the designs of Robert Lemyinge, who had begun life as a carpenter.  Help was enlisted from the Surveyor of the King’s Works, Simon Basil, and the great Inigo Jones – too late, presumably, for him to do more than sprinkle some Italianate stardust on the south front of an otherwise old-fashioned pile.Hatfield has always been a political house and so it remains.  The present Lord Salisbury, great-great-grandson of the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, was responsible, as leader of the opposition in the House of Lords, for the coup of negotiating the survival of 91 hereditary peers when Tony Blair reformed the upper house in 1999.

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• Cathedral on Fire: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Notre-Dame

  Send us a textIn 2019 a devastating fire consumed the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, one of the towering symbols of French identity, and it seemed that one of the greatest cultural monuments in Europe had, literally, gone up in smoke. But after only two short years, it has now been restored and John has been to see – and celebrate – the result.  The old Notre Dame had evolved over many centuries and lived through dramatic times.  Sacked during the Revolution, it was returned to glory for Napoleon’s coronation.  John not only discusses these aspects of its history with Clive but probes the contribution of the great 19th-century restorer Eugene Violet-le-Duc, a rationalist whose approach was unlike that of his English contemporaries, John Ruskin and William Morris. Whereas the latter believed that old buildings bore witness to the lives of the masons who created them, and that every ancient stone was therefore sacred and irreplaceable, Violet-le-Duc held that a cathedral such as Notre-Dame could be returned to an ideal medieval state.  So he ruthlessly swept away later work.  Not all that he did was bad.  As Victor Hugo attests, the state of the cathedral in 1831, when The Hunchback of Notre-Dame appeared, was lamentable.  Viollet-le-Duc, working there for 20 years, put it back in shape; but much of the decoration and roofline – the spire that has fallen, for example, as well as the gargoyles and carved monsters on the roof – were his.  Now a new layer of history has been added to the great medieval edifice. What does John make of it?

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• The Story of the Bayeux Tapestry: A Threaded Tale of Heroes and Conquerors

  Send us a textAn extraordinary cultural loan is about to take place: soon, while its home in France is being improved, the Bayeux Tapestry will be displayed in the British Museum for two years.  This will give members of the British public, along with visitors to London from overseas, the chance to get up close to one of the founding documents of England’s story.  One of the foremost medievalists in the country, John is in a prime position to lead the discussion with Clive on this unparallelled work of art.The survival of the so-called tapestry – really a piece of embroidery – is itself remarkable. Only one section of this ancient textile has disappeared; the rest of the 224ft composition remains almost incredibly intact. Where was it made?  Who stitched it?  Who composed the design?  These questions cannot be answered with certainty.  There is a likely candidate, though, for the patron who commissioned it.  This was William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who was also Earl of Kent; he may have ordered it for the consecration of his cathedral in Bayeux.  If the origins of the Bayeux Tapestry are obscure, the story-telling is not.  John and Clive delight in the vivid and economical narrative, as well as the information it coincidentally displays about palaces, boats, horses, feasting and Norman armour.   Although celebrated in its time, the tapestry was largely forgotten until ‘rediscovered’ by an 18th-century monk.  Later, Hitler regarded the Bayeux Tapestry as an object he was anxious to display in Berlin but luckily the liberation of Paris occurred before he was able to take it out of the country.

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