CLIVE ASLET’S TOP FIVE JEWELS IN ENGLAND’S CROWN
1 FAVOURITE FOR LANDSCAPE THE SOUTH DOWNS
Close your eyes, picture an English landscape and what do you see? Perhaps the South Downs. This is wide-open countryside, the sward nibbled close, traditionally, by sheep. There may be glimpses of the sea, or the trees of the Weald, a path stretching into the distance and skylarks singing overhead. These great sweeps of land are not only for striding over but also studying close. Look for lowgrowing plants, such as the early spider-orchid and horseshoe vetch, under whose leaves the Adonis blue butterfly lays its eggs.
2 FAVOURITE FOR NATIONAL IDENTITY EVENSONG AT CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL
Low sunlight is filtering through the stained glass; the congregation in the Gilbert Scott choir stalls stands up, the choir – a dozen men, a dozen boys – files in. Vocal lines soar like a flight of swallows. Until that moment, the architecture has seemed, despite the dusk, to be made of solid stone. It now dissolves. Is it the purity of the treble voices that’s doing it? No, it’s my eyes. The beauty of the sound makes them mist over.
3 FAVOURITE FOR ARCHITECTURE THE RADCLIFFE CAMERA, OXFORD
With the Backs, Cambridge is laid out on picturesque lines, in which landscape is paramount; Oxford is an architectural capriccio, densely crowded with many top-notch buildings. Primus inter pares – if I may be allowed a donnish expression – is the Radcliffe Camera. It is primarily a dome on a circular base of coupled columns: a reinterpretation on a bigger scale and with lusher ornament of Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome. You can see the dome from practically all over the city, and it’s a masterpiece: a library that’s both magisterial and magnificent.
4 FAVOURITE FOR HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION LITTLE GIDDING, CAMBRIDGESHIRE
Little Gidding needs a special adjective to describe it. Numinous? Gnostic? History seems to have imbued it with an almost palpable sense of spirituality. T S Eliot, visiting on a spring afternoon in 1936, made Little Gidding the title of the last of his great reflections of time and interconnectedness, Four Quartets. When Charles I came in 1642, he was surprised to find the church devoid of ornament but nevertheless called it a “happy place”. He made a present of some money that he had won at cards, while his boys were fed with apple pies and cheesecakes in the buttery. It has been a balm to other troubled spirits since.
5 FAVOURITE RUIN THE GRANGE, HAMPSHIRE
The Grange, in Hampshire, is a vision of Arcadia. From its plinth, a great Greek Doric portico looks out over golden fields of corn; the scene is all the more evocative for the semiruined condition of this Regency country house, built by the Cambridge mathematician-turnedarchitect William Wilkins for the banker Henry Drummond, enlarged by C R Cockerell for another banker, Alexander Baring. Wonderfully, the Grange Park Opera company converted it to an opera house in 1998, and so this great building has been reimagined, in the spirit of a stage production, faithful to the original work of art but given a new twist for our times.
The Real Crown Jewels of England: 100 Places that Make Us Great by Clive Aslet is out now (Constable, £20)