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Knoblock’s Sussex retreat, the first Regency Revival country house, was written up by Christopher Hussey in a pioneering article of 1921 published in Country Life — which, as this book celebrates, went on to cover many of the major Regency country houses. Robinson, the great authority on the Wyatts, is the perfect guide to the period, here taken to cover the 30 or 40 years between the first madness of George III and the death of George IV. In his crisp, lucid and bracing style, he explains how ‘the English country house as we know it — the centre of a self-contained estate and the setting for house parties — is essentially a product of the Regency era’.
As well as being a master of architectural and decorative detail, the author has an acute sense of social history. He confidently explodes the myth that toffs didn’t go in for ‘trade’ — for instance, ‘the Norfolks’ fortune, which reconstructed Arundel Castle in Sussex, came from canal wharves, markets, coal, iron and ground rents in Sheffield, cotton at Glossop, some London ground rents and urban development at Littlehampton’. It is also satisfying to know that rice pudding was another Regency invention.
A lavish visual treat, this handsome volume would surely make splendid use of a Christmas book token. There are stupendous colour spreads on such illustrious piles as Windsor, Brighton, Chatsworth, Belvoir, Eaton and Penrhyn, but welcome space is also found for fascinating lesser-known houses like Asheridge, Trogothnan (I like the idea of its drive meandering for three miles), Dodington, Oakly and Luscombe, as well as two covetable ‘cottages’, Houghton Lodge and Endsleigh. Robinson is at his most robust in describing the charitable trust set up for Endsleigh in association with the Heritage Lottery Fund as ‘a disastrous failure’ and pointing out that ‘no official effort’ was made to save the integral contents.
Of Meldon Park, Northumberland, Robinson remarks that the staircase hall, an ‘over-scaled and grandiose central space’, is typical of Regency planning. Indeed it is so temptingly vast that some 20 years ago, as I recall, the old squire celebrated his 80th birthday by riding into it on his hunter, a cob called Nutty.
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