From national parks to majestic cathedrals and even the Thames Barrier, Clive Aslet celebrates the special places that make England unique
Everyone remembers the night last year when Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire. It seemed this monument, unchanging throughout all our lives, might disappear from the world altogether, or else limp on as a blackened ruin. People of all countries mourned, and for the French it was nothing less than a national disaster. Part of their soul had died. Luxury goods companies, as well as president Macron, immediately pledged millions towards the restoration. Thankfully, the damage turned out to be less than feared – but wow, what a shock it gave us all.
This made me think: what would it take for such emotion to be generated here? What are the places that would make the British feel benumbed and belittled if they went up in smoke? I decided to write my own personal list. The result is a book called The Real Crown Jewels of England. My preliminary list filled up quickly. Alas, I had to drop hopes of including Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – they have too many of their own treasures. England alone has so many great cathedrals, ancient sites and iconic structures such as the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Then, just as I was about to set out and revisit Durham, Newcastleupon-Tyne (for the bridges) and Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire, along came Covid. Travel was off-limits. Gates clanged shut to the public. The nature of the exercise changed. It became a journey of the mind, remembering the places that I love but could no longer visit in person because of lockdown.
WHAT CONSTITUTES CROWN JEWEL STATUS?
Great age is a consideration. Think of Stonehenge, or – less obviously – the crypt of Hexham Abbey, a numinous space, stage-managed by St Wilfrid who created it in the seventh century AD so that pilgrims had the experience from moving from the darkness of a tunnel into the light of a sanctuary lit by candles. It is built of stones taken from the Roman fort at Corbridge on Hadrian’s Wall, some of which still bear their Latin inscriptions. Through very ancient buildings like this a spark passes between the past and present. During the pandemic, I’ve felt comforted to think of the crises such structures have witnessed in the course of their existence – plague, invasion, civil war – and how they’ve endured them and survived. Now they tell the tale.
Another criterion was Englishness. We live in an increasingly homogenous world. You travel only to find you have arrived somewhere pretty much like the place you left. This puts a special value on the things that can be experienced in one place and one place only. Although other countries have ancient yews and olive trees, nowhere has such numbers of 500-year-old oaks that are awe-inspiring in their venerable deformity. Only English gothic produced the perpendicular style with its forest canopies of fan-vaulting and daring expanses of stained glass, seen in King’s College chapel in Cambridge and York Minster.
Bluebell woods do occur elsewhere, but not in such numbers as here (in the French countryside, some bulbs are eaten by wild boar); the Spanish bluebell – erect, not drooping, and a weaker blue – is an invader we must beware of. Every spring the woodland floor looks as though a fragment of the empyrean has fallen to earth and the sky is now beneath the trees. My point is not nationalistic. Things that are nationally unique have a special savour, whichever country they belong to. Life would be impoverished without them. Our hearts would be heavy if they were gone.
The White Cliffs of Dover, the Houses of Parliament, even the red telephone boxes that no longer have telephones in them (some have been ingeniously converted to house defi
Other countries have more carefully tended cities, but countryside is what we do well
brillators or mini tourist bureaus) – these are the symbols that we know ourselves and by which we are known. There are other places we could not live without. For Londoners, the Thames Barrier is a critical defence against rising sea levels, whose steel gates are now closed increasingly often. What a beautiful piece of engineering it is too. As an island country with a fretted coastline we have many glorious beaches in the West Country, Northumberland and along Dorset’s Jurassic Coast, but only Ramsgate Sands was depicted, in all its busy seaside life, by William Powell Frith: the painting is now in the Royal Collection, bought by Queen Victoria who had spent holidays in Ramsgate as a girl.
If you climb to the top of the tower on Leith Hill in Surrey, you can see the Shard: it is that close to London. And yet the Surrey Hills remain recognisably as the architect Sir Edwin Lutyens knew them at the turn of the 20th century. How fortunate we are that England has managed to preserve so many beautiful places, in the teeth of the modern world. They are part of us. To lose one would be like losing a limb.
CREATING AN ENGLISH ARCADIA
If you were blindfolded and dropped by parachute into a randomly chosen rural location (at night, so you couldn’t read the road signs), you would, at first light, soon be able to tell where you were, because each small parcel of the country has its own personality. France is, relatively speaking, a big place, with broad landscapes whose character does not change for miles and miles. England is cosy and diverse. Nobody could mistake Swaledale for the South Downs. Devon lanes, Dorset’s Stour valley, or less obviously, the mudflats of the Isle of Sheppey, which are teeming with birdlife and boast the only farmer-run national nature reserve in the country – these are some of the brightest of crown jewels. We pride ourselves on our landscape. Other European countries have more carefully tended cities, but the countryside is what we do well.
The English have a particular way of seeing. It originates in the 18th-century aesthetic of the picturesque, which produced the glorious landscape garden of Stourhead, and morphed, via Ruskin – who found an escape from the ugliness of the Industrial Revolution on the banks of Coniston Water in the Lake District – into another homegrown phenomenon: the arts and crafts movement. The Cotswolds were the locus classicus of the arts and crafts. It was a sleepy place when the likes of etcher F L Griggs arrived at Chipping Campden at the turn of the 20th century – and being an obsessive and tenacious character, he ensured that the old wool town was not merely preserved but enhanced to make it a living work of art.
We put a high value on nature, wild or tamed. We create arcadias, be they around country houses such as The Grange in Hampshire or in London square gardens. Victorian cities, with their millions of coal fires, were so polluted that we created suburbs – all of which follow an ideal of leafiness whose ineffable expression is Hampstead Garden Suburb. It’s significant,
Architecture is the inescapable art. It is not hidden in art galleries, which you decide to visit
there, that “garden” was part of the name. We are also a nation of gardeners, whatever the space available – a balcony or a window box are enough of a canvas to paint some flower picture on. (I once worked with an editor who grew tomato plants in his office, oblivious to the effect of the grow bag on the walnut veneer of the early 18th-century bureau beneath it.) Late Victorian England developed a style of gardening – painterly, bosomy, uncorseted – that remained the image of terrestrial perfection for more than a century. This was our thing. You can still see it at Gertrude Jekyll’s Munstead Wood. Derek Jarman even managed to magic plants out of the shingles that surround Prospect Cottage, at Dungeness: an extreme garden because of its unpromising position, a garden of consolation because of the circumstances in which it was made, after Jarman had been diagnosed with HIV.
Allotments are gardening democratised; they have an ethic and an aesthetic of their own. And it is not only spaces specifically reserved for plants and vegetables that are gardened in England, but whole landscapes; the lace of damson blossom that decorates the Lyth Valley in Westmorland every spring is the result of the conscious actions of farmers, over the generations, in planting and looking after the trees. Do they do this purely for the value of the damson crop? I doubt it.
WHERE BEAUTY AND HISTORY MEET
Beauty is a criterion for inclusion. There has to be Salisbury cathedral, built of a piece, unlike most medieval cathedrals, and seen across water meadows, as it was when John Constable painted it. Of all the lovely villages in the West Country I chose Blisland; Sir John Betjeman raved about the church of St Protus and St Hyacinth, carved with such labour out of the adamantine stone, where the painted screen, made in the 1890s, brought him to his knees. Bevis Marks Synagogue in the City of London, built by the Quaker carpenter Joseph Avis and other largely nonconformist craftsmen, many of whom had worked with Wren, transports visitors back to the world of 1701. The Heaven Room at Burghley, the walls heaving with gods and goddesses, is sublime, superlative. Wormsley Park is not the only country house to have a
CRITICAL DEFENCE The Thames Barrier is beautiful as well as functional
cricket ground but I defy anyone to go there on a sunny afternoon and not feel it is a bit of heaven – quite different from the Burghley House interpretation. Forget the eye of the beholder. Beauty is all the better for being shared.
History is told in places as well as in books. We do not know exactly what happened during the centuries that Maiden Castle was an active settlement: the structure is the only document we have – but it is the biggest hill fort in this country, if not Europe, with a warty, knobbly profile that resembled, thought Thomas Hardy, “an enormous many-limbed organism of antediluvian time… lying lifeless and covered with a thin green cloth”. Great and glamorous personages passed through Kenilworth Castle – Simon de Montfort, who held out for six months against the king, in the longest medieval siege; John of Gaunt, who made Kenilworth into a palace, and Queen Elizabeth, who was spectacularly entertained there by her favourite, Robert Dudley.
The Great Fire of London, remembered in The Monument, dramatically ended the City of London as a medieval entity; and yet the medieval street plan lived on. It brought out both the best and the worst of the 17th century. Apsley House still breathes the spirit of Old Nosey, the victor of Waterloo: a man who despised his own troops but husbanded them as a resource (Napoleon was more profligate with human life). Just as the Napoleonic Wars shaped Britain’s destiny in the 19th century – there would have been no far-flung Empire if she had lost – so the Second World War was the defining episode of the 20th century, the second act of the tragedy that began in 1914. Coventry Cathedral is a symbol of resurrection in more than the religious sense: a nation rekindled the flame of civilisation that had so nearly been extinguished on the battlefields, in the concentration camps and beneath the thousand bomber raids. St Pancras Station and its associated hotel are another story of revival: the great red-brick cliff of Victorian gothic that rises above Euston Road was empty for many years. Hurrah for the Eurostar, which rushes us so effortlessly to Paris.
Architecture is the inescapable art. It is not hidden away in art galleries, which you must make a conscious decision to visit. It provides the background to daily life. We see it, move through it, live among it. When Whitehall Palace burnt to the ground in 1698, William III had the southern window of the Banqueting House blocked up to prevent flames reaching the interior. And so that great testament to the genius of Inigo Jones survives, replete with the ghosts of the court of Charles I – if not that of Charles I himself, who was beheaded just outside. At Greenwich Hospital we salute Sir Christopher Wren, a dry stick whose architecture nevertheless provided England with its own version of the baroque: we have always felt comfortable with the result. The Radcliffe Camera (James Gibbs) is Oxford’s most handsome building – which is saying something. In Sir William Chambers’s Somerset House we have a magnificent space, created for civil servants but equally if not more happy in its new use as a public space and arts hub.
Holkham Hall is a supreme example of English Palladianism – albeit nothing much like the work of Andrea Palladio. The partnership of the 1st Earl of Leicester and William Kent is beguiling. Sir John Soane’s obsessions made him a genius, and fortunately he left us the Soane Museum to prove it. In Sir Edwin Lutyens we have an architect who defined his age through the romance of his country houses, the universal reach of his monuments and the epic buildings created for the Empire at its last gasp.