A city built on bones and ice

On a hike in Lycia, in southeastern Turkey, Alastair Sawday sprained his ankle and got left behind by his fellow walkers. He was hungry, so he knocked on the door of the first house he saw, rubbed his stomach, and was invited in for lunch. Afterwards, he says, “I wondered how an elderly Turk, rubbing his stomach, would fare at the door of any of my friends in England. Or even at mine.” After reading his warm-hearted book, I can answer confidently on the second question.

Sawday, who says he is steaming gently into his eighth decade, has been a teacher, a campaigner for environmental conservation and organic farming and an advocate of slow food. He worked with Oxfam on disaster relief in Turkey and helped to resettle Ugandan refugees in Britain. He has organised cycling, walking

Founded by the modernising Russian tsar Peter the Great in 1703 – to provide trading opportunities and a window onto the West – St Petersburg could not have been in a less favourable location: at the mouth of the marshy Neva delta in the Gulf of Finland, a mosquito-ridden marsh that is still icebound for part of the year. It was, writes Jonathan Miles, “a city created by a drunken man trying to walk a straight line”.

The early settlement, built at a time of war with Sweden, served both as a military fort – one of its first buildings was the Vaubaninspired Peter and Paul Fortress – and as the new imperial capital. The initial phase of construction in appallingly harsh conditions cost the lives of 30,000 men, and did little to impress the bellicose Swedish king Charles XII, who declared: “Let the tsar tire himself

and barging holidays. But he is best known for Alastair Sawday’s Special Places to Stay, a series of guidebooks (and now a website) that has been used by travellers everywhere from Wales to India; travellers hopeful, in his own fine phrase, of “staying somewhere that honours their humanity”.

The first guide, to France, appeared in 1994, featuring everything from farmhouses to châteaux (and the first of what would become habitual spoofs, one in Odeur-sur-Pestilence). From the outset, his team “reversemodelled” themselves on the AA guide and its preoccupations with “facilities”. What mattered to Sawday was character in the properties, and warmth in their owners. His summation of a place in Devon spells out what he and his inspectors always sought in those owners (who must pay to be listed): “Fingals, more a country- with founding new towns; we will keep for ourselves the honour of taking them later.”

In the event, St Petersburg never fell to the Swedes because of Peter’s victory over Charles XII at Poltava in 1709. This ushered in a period of frantic construction as Peter sought to expand the city and build a Baltic fleet. He faced opposition from his leading nobles, who were understandably reluctant to relocate to the new capital from the comforts of Moscow, 465 miles to the south east, and only complied when Peter threatened to take away their titles if they didn’t.

On reclaimed land outside the city he built the baroque palace of Peterhof with “fountains, terraces, grottoes and cascades” that “were more than a match for Versailles – an expression of Peter’s triumph over the northern marshes, an elegant vindication of his folly”. Embellished over the centuries by the architects who had the greatest

house party than a hotel, became a byword in the office for ‘dotty but wonderful’. Nothing ran on time; meals were unpredictable and would last for as long as the conversation. Children and dogs were welcome, and I am sure a pet chimpanzee would have had a privileged place at the table. If Richard [the owner] was seized by an idea he was off, perhaps dragging the guests with him out on to the river in his boat with a picnic. Behind it all lay generosity, a natural exuberance and a hunger for interesting encounters.”

Those three qualities are influence on the city – Rastrelli, Voronikhin and Quarenghi – it was only completed in the early 20th century, shortly before its occupation and virtual destruction by Hitler’s troops. Today the palace is known as Petrodvorets, to minimise the German association.

By Peter’s death in 1725, the city contained a “shipyard, a naval base, a port, an administrative centre, a court, a capital increasingly marked by solid and elegant stuccoed buildings, ordered gardens and straight, clean streets – the first pan-European city”. Among the more impressive structures was the Academy of Sciences (suggested to Peter by the German philosopher Gottfried von Leibniz) where students would be trained to carry out God’s will that “science should encompass the globe”.

It was an astonishing achievement in such a short period of time, but by pitting his

Saul David on the hubris behind St Petersburg, Russia’s window onto the West

equally evident in Sawday’s own book, which combines memoir, travelogue and the reflections of a quiet rebel (“Venice is different, and thrilling for it, reminding us that the motor car is not a beast we have to tolerate.”). There’s a cosiness to it, as if it were first drafted for circulation among family and firm.

Sawday, who was born in Kashmir, grew up in Suffolk and made his first trip to France in 1954, with his father driving the family’s Ford Consul into the nose of a Bristol Freighter at Lydd airfield. He has had a footloose life, and has good stories to tell of it.

In the Sixties, in a French B&B whose owner was a slow starter, he milked her cow himself to get a decent café au lait. In the Seventies, in London, he organised guitar concerts in his bedroom in a shared house, opening with the flamenco star Paco Peña. On the

In a French B&B, he milked the cow himself to get a decent café au lait