The National Trust and Apollo magazine are presenting a panel discussion about the personal stories behind great historic houses.
Speakers include Simon Jenkins (journalist and chairman of the National Trust), Oscar Humphries (publisher of Apollo), Nicky Haslam (interior designer, who lives at King Henry’s Hunting Lodge), Robert Sackville West (who lives at Knole), Professor Maurice Howard (architectural and decorative art historian) and Robert O’Byrne (vice-president of the Irish Georgian Society).
The discussion will explore how historic houses have shaped the aesthetics, cultural politics or academic research of the various speakers.
When I was at Blickling Hall yesterday to give a talk I sensed something similar, what might be called Blickling’s ‘spirit of place’.
It is very difficult to define, but it has something to do with the characteristics of the surrounding rural Norfolk landscape, the Edwardian garden, the Jacobean proportions of the house, the materials, the surface textures, the various smells and fragrances, the fall of the autumn light through the windows and the layers of seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century furnishings and works of art.