Ad Conservandum Arcadiam: Why the Hudson's Heritage Awards on 29th November Matter

November 24th 

This Thursday will see the winners announced of the 2012 Hudson’s Heritage awards at a lunch ceremony at Goldsmith's Hall in London.

Spear's, the global wealth management and arts/culture magazine I founded, is proud to be Associate Partner of these awards which have quickly become regarded as ‘the Oscars of the UK heritage industry’.

Thursday's awards will be presented by Hudson’s founder Norman Hudson OBE, (right) along with judges Lady Lucinda Lambton, Loyd Grossman (chairman of the Heritage Alliance) and Jeremy Musson (former architectural editor of Country Life) and heritage consultant Simon Foster. Inaugurated last year, the awards were created to celebrate achievement and success in the UK heritage industry at a time when heritage tourism is a growing sector within the UK economy, with growth at 2.6% - more than manufacturing.

The Hudson’s awards fill a much needed gap in the heritage sector for industry awards – with the only competition being the HHA’s Restoration and Best Garden awards, sponsored by Sotheby's and Christie’s respectively.

The Heritage Angel Awards, inaugurated last year by Lord Lloyd Webber, have also helped to recognise new benchmarks of excellence in the heritage sector. But the Angel awards are more for artisans and conservation 'heroes' rather than the owners or managers of Britain's just 1500 or so historic houses and gardens open to the public (either owned privately or by English Heritage and the National Trust).

The success of both the Hudsons Heritage Awards at Goldsmith's Hall on 29th November (below) and the Heritage Angel Awards demonstrates the growing importance of the heritage sector in the public consciousness. This is also born out by the rapidly expanding membership growth of the National Trust and the increase in heritage site visitor numbers across the UK. One in three people now say that they want to see a heritage site when taking a weekend break. This is partly because people are spending less money travelling abroad and are preferring to enjoy the unique heritage open to the public on their own doorstep.

As shown by the success of our Spear's Save Britain's Historic Landscape Campaign, which was acknowledged by the Prime Minister in a letter to Spear's from Downing Street following publication of the new NPPF planning reforms, the heritage industry is critical to UK economic recovery. Heritage tourism is bringing in over £20 billion to the economy and the sector is one of the few growing parts of the economy. Within this £20 billion, historic houses, castles and gardens directly contribute over £8 billion to the economy - including local employment - according to English Heritage. 

Yet the Coalition government - despite Cameron's splashy £27m Britain is GREAT global marketing campaign around the Olympics - paradoxically seem to be doing their best to undermine the heritage sector and heritage tourism by not giving it the critical support and tax incentives it urgently needs.

The last Budget inexplicably introduced VAT on repairs of historic buildings (historic houses open to the public used to be exempt from VAT on essential repairs) and the new NPPF has axed the old Planning Policy Statement 5 (PPS5) protection given to historic houses and Grade 1 and Grade 2 * buildings in favour of what some think may amount to a much diluted form of heritage protection.

We shall wait and see what sort of protection this gives. In the last week there was an encouraging rejection of a wind farm close to Grade 1 Scales Hall in Cumbria by a Planning Inspector on the grounds that 'in terms of visual impact' the turbines would  have 'significant and adverse effect' on both the historic setting of the Grade 1 heritage asset and the Hall's 'living conditions'.

This encouraging Decision was made after referencing English Heritage's guide to what does constitutute 'adverse impact on setting' on page 8 of 'Heritage and the Historic Environment'. It also backs up the previous precedent set in March 2012 by the Inspector who also sited these EH guidelines in ruling that a similar 'adverse' effect on a Grade 1 historic setting would result from a proposed wind farm (Bicton) within a mile of Grade 1 Kimbolton Castle in Huntingdonshire - the former royal palace of Catherine of Aragon, re-modelled by Vanbrugh and boasting no less that three Grade 1 buildings, including a Gatehouse by Robert Adam. Upton Cressett also has three Grade 1 listed buidings, as well as three Scheduled Ancient Monuments (SAM status) within half a mile of the Hall, making it one of the most heavily statutory protected heritage assets in the Midlands. 

What is needed from the new minister with responsibility for Heritage, the Rt Hon Ed Vaizey, is consistency when it comes to protection of heritage assets of 'exceptional merit' (the definition of Grade 1). This is why Spear's will be pushing hard for the re-introduction in Parliament over the next year of the Heritage Protection Bill which received so much support when it was introduced in 2008 during the Labour government.

It was only kicked into the long grass because of the Credit Crunch. But cross-party support was strong and Mr Vaizey should have an open mind about listening to the case for giving greater clarity to the planning system when it comes to safeguarding the quality of heritage tourism that contributes so much to our economy and British identity.  In particular with regards to the protection of our 'exceptional' heritage - that is Grade 1 or Grade II* buildings. 

Only around 2.5% of the approx 400,000 listed buildings on the National Heritage List are Grade 1 listed. Since 45% of these are churches, that leaves only a tiny percent of Grade 1 buildings - open to the public - which are still lived in historic houses. Research has found that such privately owned historic houses (usually members of the Historic Houses Association who are fond of using the line 'much loved family home' in their Hudson's entries) are amongst the houses that the public most want to visit as they have a special atmosphere that the National Trust cannot replicate.

In the Spear's submission to planning minister Greg Clark over the NPPF reforms, we argued that special heritage protection should be introduced for our exceptional Grade I and Grade II * buildings that contribute so much to our economy as well as being open to the public. This added statutory protection, as enshrined in the proposed Heritage Protection Bill, would mean that councils, HHA owners, the National Trust, English Heritage and local campaign groups wouldn't have to waste millions - let alone the time - every year fighting developers through a planning system that remains inconsistent when it comes to protecting our priceless heritage. 

The Heritage Protection Bill would give much needed clarity to the system - and save tens of millions every year on legal fees and planning battles which only bitterly divides local communities and exasperates council tax payers as vast sums are spent fighting court battles that should never have been allowed to reach Appeal stage. But developers rarely give up when there is a subsidy to be milked. 

Ed Vaizey - whom I know from his key-note talk on philanthropy at a Spear's event - is a straight speaking, intelligent and persuasive man. I hope he will have the good sense to re-open the compelling case for the support and re-introdcution of this much needed Bill. There remain too many whimsical and arbitrary planning Decisions that undermine the Govt's commitment to its 2012 'Britain is GREAT' heritage marketing campaign. 

Various worrying examples of anti-heritage planning decisions  - admittedly all pre-NPPF publication - include allowing an executive housing development close to Grade 1 Great Coxwell Barn in Oxfordshire  - one of England's most important medieval structures, described by William Morris as 'unapproachable in dignity'; or the highly controversial decision to allow a wind farm on the very site of Naseby battlefield. Another disturbing example of inconsistency is the damage that could be done to the historic setting of the National Trust's Grade 1 Lyveden New Bield in Northants  - an architectural masterpiece with one of the greatest Elizabethan gardens in England. This Decision has recently been 'called in' by the Secretary of State, rightly, as it seems to breach the 'historic setting' protection clause that was included in the final NPPF.

Judging by the above, protecting heritage may not be a top priority for George Osborne or the Govt right now - over, say housing development or negotiating green energy pacts with Nick Clegg inreturn for other political favours. Lets hope Mr Vaizey makes heritage protection a priority. 

This apparent sidelining of heritage and tourism by the Coalition seemed confirmed by the recent re-shuffle in the summer when the ministerial portfolio of 'Tourism and Heritage' was effectively abolished when minister John Penrose was replaced by Ed Vaizey, below, who now has responsibility for  'Heritage and the Built Environment'.

The good news is that Mr Vaizey is one of the few Government ministers - a sharp minded former barrister, lover of the Arts and supporter of the Armed Forces - with the ear of Cameron/Osborne. It is essential that Britain's heritage is given the Govt support that the Prime Minister has repeatedly said he believes is critical to keeping Britain 'GREAT'.  

Against this challenging backgound, the Hudson's heritage awards - handed out by Norman Hudson, the Godfather of the UK heritage industry  - are critically useful in giving a boost to a sector that is currently not getting enough support from the Govt.

Privileged Oxbridge types like David Cameron (Eton), George Osborne (St Paul's), and Nick Clegg (Westminster), may be wary of being seen to be 'elitist' but there is nothing elitist about protecting and
promoting the rich heritage that makes Britain's historic houses and gardens, open to the public, unique. These 1500 or so historic buildings contribute well above their weight to our tourist economy, making our rich heritage - from Downtown Abbey-like 'Treasure Houses' to small moated manor houses at the end of lonely valleys - the envy of the world. A recent survey carried out by Visit Britain found that 'the main reason' that visitors now come to this country from abroad is because of our 'historic houses and heritage'.

Yet the threat of a new Mansion Tax - compounded with the new VAT on much needed repairs on our crumbling castles and historic houses (a £400 million repair backlog) will only add further financial misery to the often struggling owners of historic houses that open to the public.

One of the reasons we have such a rich and unique architectural heritage is that, unlike France - and indeed most of Europe - we do not have any legacy of the Napoleonic Code (Code civil des Français) which was introduced under Napoléon I in 1804. The code prohibited any privileges based on birth, promoted religious toleration and specified that government jobs should go to the most qualified. Historian Robert Holtman has argued that the Napoloenic Code is one one of the few documents that has influenced the entire world.

But not having such a code inflicted on Britain has certainly been a major factor in ensuring that the English country house has become one of Britain's most successful cultural exports, whether it is in the form of Downtown Abbey or such blockbuster heritage exhibitions as 'The Treasure Houses of Britain' which famously opened in Washington in the 1985, being opened by Ronald Reagan, not long after Brideshead Revisited on PBS was also causing a serious outbreak of Anglophilia across America.

Private art collections can be extremely powerful weapons of cultural influence. As the super wealthy Egyptian businessman and philanthropist Shafik Gabr has had the insight to understand with his new 'East-West: The Art of Dialogue' and accompanying travelling show of Orientalist art (from his own vast collection)  that is acting as the advance guard of his new East-West cultural initiative, great art can have more power to transform hearts and minds than any corps of diplomats of jet setting politicians or fake tanned $500,000-a-speech peace envoys.

The centre piece of this new cultural exchange programme is led by a new travelling scholarship programme for young 'global leaders' aged between 24-30, who will be known as Gabr Fellows. To call Gabr's Washington based cultural understanding initiative 'The Art of Dialogue' is clever as it is often an understanding of the 'Art' that then leads to a more productive and sophisiticated political or cultural dialogue.  Gabr owns one of the great Orientalist collections in the world and the artists whom he is putting to work as 21st century cultural ambassadors include such 18th and 19th century East-West visionaries and traveller artists as Jean-Léon Gérôme or the Scottish artist David Roberts (two of whose drawings hang at Upton Cressett).

My point here - if you were thinking what on earth 18th century Orientialist traveller artists have to do with why our historic houses and their collections matter so much today -  is that back in 1985, the 'Treasure Houses of Britain: 500 Years of Private Patronage and Art Collecting' became a blockbuster show not only because of record visitor numbers but perhaps more importantly because it was (under the curatorial aegis of the late John Carter Brown and Gervase Jackson-Stopps, architectural advisor to the National Trust) a brilliant example of ambassadorial art and winning cultural diplomacy.

The seminal show took six years to assemble, but its legacy is still talked about in museum and heritage circles today - a true milestone in acknowledging the rich and unique role that the cult of the country house and private collecting has played in providing Britian with its unique heritage.  The 'Treasure Houses' show is often mentioned alongside the equally seminal 1974 'Destruction of the English Country House' exhibition at the V & A museum, which helped so much to restore the place of the historic house in the public consciousness as exceptional architecture worth saving rather than demolishing.

The 1974 show also demonstrated what Evelyn Waugh meant when he wrote in 1959 (in a new preface to Brideshead Revisited) that English country houses were our 'chief national artistic achievement'. But he warned that as as architectural breed they were in danger of extinction, or 'doomed to decay' like the monasteries of the 16th century because of punitive inheritance and income taxes,  along with the rise of cultural philistinism. 

Fortunately this has not happened as was seen by the success of the recent 'The Future of the Country House' conference at the National Geographic Society in London organised by Giles Waterfield, chairman of the Attingham Trust - to mark the 60th anniversary of the American funded Trust, dedicated to the study of the 'country house studies'. 

It was an exceptional conference with brilliant cast of speakers, ranging from the Duke of Buccleuch to Julian Fellowes, Miranda Rock (Burghley) to Dr Christopher Ridgeway (Castle Howard) although I did wonder secretly whether it would be remotely feasible  - or even thinkable - for the 1985 exhibition 'The Treasure Houses of Britain' to have been put on in Obama's America today. I very much doubt it, especially if American public arts funding was required, as it very much was - thanks to Ronald Reagan - in 1985. 

The Attingham Trust is an unashamedley Anglophile - as well as Flemishophile - academic institution and is very much in the mould of the style of uncompromisingly elitist American curating - led by the late Dr John Carter Brown, Director of the National Museum of Art in Washington  - that dreamt up the 'Treasure Houses of Britain' exhibition which Brown began planning from 1979.

The exhibition was never just an exercise in Anglophile curatorial social climbing and snobbery, however. It was always designed to help the UK heritage tourism industry by way of encouraging Americans to visit Britain. And in this it succeeded. Nor was it ever just a golden blockbuster travelling Antiques Road Show. Yes, some dealers cynically argued that the glossy 'Treasure Houses' exhibition book - some 400 plus pages - was the greatest 'for sale' catalogue ever printed, with any catalogued piece given a timely provenance should any aristo suddenly feel the urge to sell. Yet in reality considerable effort was put in by Gervase Jackson-Stops and other advisors to ensure that the owners didn't simply view being in the catalogue as an opportunistic chance to sell.

Admittedly it didn't stop a few. A fair number of the pieces featured in the 1985 Treasure Houses catalogue have been sold since 1985  - but lets gloss over this delicate point for a moment. Our heritage has to survive - and one reason why perhaps so many pieces have been sold is because there has been increasingly less  Govt support and funding since the 1980s - for the privately owned heritage sector.

This is another reason why the Hudson's Awards on Thursday, 29th November at Goldsmiths Hall are so important. Private owners have been forced to sell paintings and heirlooms because the state regards the heritage sector as capable of surviving - as it always has done. One bit of good news, however, is that the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) will be accepting applications from private owners of historic houses open to the public from April 2013, which is very much welcome news and a move in the right direction. 

The real point of Treasure Houses of Britain was that it was an exhibition designed to mutually help US-UK realtions both politically, culturally and diplomatically - just as the Cold War between West and East was starting to thaw. The idea was to use the stage set of the exhibition to underpin and re-establish perhaps the deepest level of political and cultural bonds between America and Britain since the war. Relations between Britain and America had been wounded at the outset of the Falklands War, when America appeared to do nothing at the outset of the war for fear of damaging US relations with South America.

But by 1985, with victory in the Falklands having helped Mrs Thatcher secure a second election in 1983, Angolphilia was restored between Britian and the US, with Reagan's personal friendship with Mrs Thatcher prevailing. Reagan himself had just won re-election himself in November 1984 so the exhibition - partly financed by American public arts funds - worked as a cultural showcase that sealed the Special Relationship. Even the star wattage of the Prince and Princess of Wales - who flew into attend the gala dinner - were eclipsed by the sheer dazzling beauty of the rare exhibits (all privately owned) that had travelled over in crates (c/o British Airways) from Britain's finest historic houses - great and small.

The American media was transfixed, ogling and fawning over British taste accordingly. The subsequent outbreak of Anglophilia across America - helped by the Thatcher/Reagan Mid-Atlantic romance, along
with the rising media cult of Princess Diana - caused the exhibition to be extended due to popular demand. The bulky 'Treasure Houses' catalogue - a hard copy of which sits on the tassled ruby velvet Ottoman in the entrance hall here at Upton Cressett - is almost identical in glossy style and content to Mr Gabr's own new 450 page (£120) book catalogue surveying his collection, along with essays by eminent Orientalist critics, entitled 'Masterpieces of Orientalist Art'.

Both serve very similar purposes. Just as Mr Gabr's collection stretches to hundreds of paintings, enough to fill a museum, so the 'Treasure Houses' show comprised of 700 art objects from more than 200 country houses in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland which showcased 500 years of British collecting from the 15th century to the late 20th century. No less than seventeen period rooms were constructed to display the objects, transforming the National Gallery of Art into nothing less than the interior of a grand panelled country house itself.

Critical to the success of the show was the idea that the public was not just seeing some very fine 'art' or portraiture - with works by Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez, Anthony van Dyck, Canaletto, and John Singer Sargent - but more importantly that they were experiencing what made the English country house different from both its American and more importantly perhaps European counter-part, where the great collections - largely because of 18th century Napoleonic Code and no culture of primogeniture - have invariably been broken up, and sold off (often to British aristocrats on their Grand Tours).

Another aspect of the great English collections that exist in stately homes Blenheim or Chatsworth is that the collections are always being added to with the best contemporary or modern art, sculpture or craftsmanship - from Richard Oates rugs to Adam Dant murals. The latter are now indeed included as part of the Grade 1 listing at Upton Cressett so they cant be removed as Dant discovered to his horror after the murals he painted in his room whilst staying as a scholar at the British Academy in Rome were whitewashed over after he left.

Good examples of houses were the already great collections are being continually added to are Chatsworth, which also hosts a contemporary sculpture sale, and Sudeley Castle, where the co-heir is Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, formerly of Gagosian and now heading up the Pace gallery in London.

My point here is that the great cultural export of 'The Treasure Houses of Britain' show in Washington - which did so much to promote the cult of the English country house, and the idea of the country house being a crowning pillar upon which Britain's rich tourist heritage is built - worked because far from just including English furniture, paintings or craftsmanship, the great 'heritage' of this country is really a testament to the international and deeply diverse European collecting tradition (as well as fusion of European architectural influences) that has always made Britain such an international cultural stage set. 

The Treasure Houses of Britain show included examples of French sculpture by Praxiteles, Canova, as well as our own Henry Moore; furniture by Kent and Chippendale but also by Meissen, Sèvres, Chelsea, and Oriental porcelain; and drawings, tapestries, jewellery, armour, silver, and other decorative arts from across Europe, Asia and America itself. The photo above is of the Dining Room at Chatsworth. 

It is perhaps no coincidence that Inigo Jones, the great early 17th century architect of the Banqueting House - the son of a clothmaker from Wales - began his career as a stage set and theatre designer, working on many plays with the playwright Ben Jonson. Indeed, my own theory about the reason that the English country house has become so successful a cultural export over the last 500 years is that the English country house is exactly that - the world's greatest stage set for social mobiliy and cultural validation ever evented.

The opportunities for social mobility in Britain have always been the envy of the world; and our rich collections reflect that spirit of mobility. Thomas Wolsey who built Hampton Court Palace was the son of a butcher from Ipswich. Shakespeare was the son of a debt ridden glover from Stratford Upon Avon. But thanks to a world where the country house or royal place was not just a worldly stage which allowed for social validation but also a literal stage set - plays such as Macbeth and the Tempest were first performed on stage sets built inside the Great Hall of various royal places - Shakespeare was able to rise from grammar school obscurity to be chief playright for the King's Men, with his own coat of arms, and was actually one of those (dressed in silk robes) holding the majestical coronation canopy under which James I was crowned in Westminster Abbey.

Britain, with its buccaneering trading history and spirit of opportunism and adventurism that helped create an empire has always flourished as a global city. Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe in 1580, the year Upton Cressett was encased in brick and the Gatehouse (photo left) was built.  

The story of Britain can be told through the story of our great houses, and the families of those who built them and lived in them; and often it is only the houses that survive to tell the story. Upton Cressett has only had two families living at the Hall for more than 45 years since thr 13th century - the Cressetts and the Cash family. The Cressetts married into the Upton estate in the 13th century and the hamlet has been known as Upton Cressett ever since. The Cressetts or their descendants still owned the estate until 1919; after it changed ownership various times between and after the two wars, becoming an unoccupied, overgrown and crumbling farm property in the 1960s, and it was not until 1970, when my father moved in with his young family and began restoring the house that Upton Cressett became a family home again.

But this never changing cycle of building, dilapidation, neglect, re-building and restoration is what again makes the story of the English country house so unique. The country house is like a character in a rich history play that can never quite manage to be killed off - it may say nothing, and be silent for years, but then an owner will come along who will restore the house to its former glory or architectural spirit and its story will continue, and it will take on another life and another social narrative.

TS Eliot was haunted by this idea in Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets, whose title is taken from a manor house in Oxfordshire that he once visited before the war with a woman to whom he became close called Emily Hale (not his first wife Vivien) in 1934. After they walked in the manor's rose garden together, the 'moment' became embedded within his private and poetic consciousness and he used the memory in Burnt Norton (below), a house that was so-called because it had once burnt down in a fire and been re-built.

In the subsequent poem East Coker - named after the Somerset village where Eliot's family originated from, and where his ashes are buried in the church - Eliot deals with this recurring theme of architectural, spiritual and family re-birth; or as Eliot puts it 'old stone to new building, old timber to new fires'. 

In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass...

Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.

 Originally called Norton House, the mansion owner, Sir William Keyt, had also died in the fire, which he reportedly started himself in 1741. Hence the importance of the idea of the 'fire' and 'rose' becoming entwined into one - and time past and time future being fused into one moment - a timeless present - at the end of the Four Quartets sequence. 

So with no other countries having anything that can compare to such eclectic and relatively complete collections (there has always been the need to flog the odd Old Master or set of Chippendales to pay for a new roof or school fees) it suddenly becomes much easier to understand why our soi disant English 'heritage' appeals so much to tourists from around the world; for in visiting our great houses - or even much more modest homes such as Upton Cressett, where, for example, we have a three quarter length portrait of a young Charles II painted in exile in Holland by the Dutch Golden Age painter Adriaen Hanneman, a contemporary of van Dyck. English heritage does not really mean the heritage of England, it means the Heritage of the World.

Which is why the Hudson's Heritage Awards on Thursday, at Goldsmith's Hall, are so important. The awards reward and acknowledge the great traditions of collecting and patronage (Spear's is sponsoring the award for 'Best New Commission') both inside our great houses, such as Castle Howard (left), and in their landscaped and formalised historic gardens that also give the public such pleasure - at a time when private owners of historic houses are
also struggling with overdue architectural repair bills, a proposed Mansion Tax and punitive VAT bills and inheritance tax.

Yet farmers and land developers - including wind farm developers who are intent on destroying our historic landscape - get rewarded in subsidies for simply truffle hunting for the latest 'stewardship' scheme, or EU hand out, whilst their land value rockets in price all thanks to the goldmine of the EU subsidy racket - which Germany has to agree to to keep the French on side, whose whole economy is based on subsiding their farmers.

The very worst offenders are the morally and aesthetically (but not financially) bankrupt landowners who want to ruin our beautiful landscape and the quality of life for local villagers by attempting to milk the planning system for their own selfish commercial gain.  Wind farms are the worst, but other blights include waste plants, the wrong sort of housing development and a general wish to bulldoze our Arcadian countryside and parkland in favour of social housing and towering pylons; or as Richard II despairs: 'Dispark'd my parks, and
fell'd my forest woods/From my own windows torn my household coat'.

If our heritage is not protected, the fate of our great houses, gardens and their historic settings and landscape - so much the envy of the world - will become like the ruined nation that Shakespeare warned as threatening the 'other Eden' of England in Richard II when a dying John Gaunt makes his famous speech: 'This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England... / Is now leas'd out--I die pronouncing it-- / Like to a tenement or pelting farm'.

Upton Cressett Upgrade - First Class result by English Heritage

November 8th

Ever since the National Heritage List was first published on-line about a year ago, giving the impression that Upton Cressett Hall and Gatehouse was a ruin and unoccupied as a home, I have been working with English Heritage - the government's heritage protection body - to correct the record. Please see http://list.english-heritage.org.uk. 

With under 50 or so surviving 15th or 16th gatehouses in the entire country - and even fewer with the main houses still attached - it would seem obvious that Upton Cressett's 'spectacular' (Country Life) 1580 turreted Elizabethan gatehouse - which was described by Simon Jenkins in the 'Best Houses of England' as an 'Elizabethan gem'  - should be given the correct level of statutory protection that its exceptional architecture deserves. Secondly, the old 1951 listing was simply woefully inaccurate in many regards, in particular with regards to the dating of the Great Hall and the architecture of the main medieval house. As Sir Nickolaus Pevsner said in his post-war 'The Buildings of England' entry for Upton Cressett, the house deserves more 'serious study' - and that is exactly what English Heritage have been doing over the last eight months. 

The church of St Michael has stood beside the Hall since the 11th century. It is maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust and is open every day of the year with free entry.  When the regional Director of the CCT came to visit the church the other day, she could not believe that St Michael's was only Grade 2 - well, not any more. 

The trigger for my mission to get English Heritage to re-assess the entire hamlet of Upton Cressett was a planning 'scoping report' by a wind energy developer called Share Energy, in conjunction with a local farmer, who had chosen (based on a desk-top survey and never having bothered to visit us) the ancient hamlet of Upton Cressett as a potential site for an industrial wind farm which would ruin the entire historic setting. 

Following a year of correspondence and field site inspections and meetings at Upton Cressett with senior members of English Heritage's Designations team, I was delighted to be informed last week that Upton Cressett Hall and Gatehouse - which won last year's Hudson's Heritage Award for 'Best Hidden Gem' heritage destination in the UK - has now been awarded Grade 1 protection status by English Heritage following a year long special project by the Government's heritage statutory protection body.

Included in reasoning for the Grade 1 listing is acknowledgement of the exceptional series of 16th century inspired murals at Upton Cressett completed by the Jerwood Prize winning artist Adam Dant (collected by HRH Prince of Wales, and whose work is held by the V & A, Tate Britian and the Met in New York).  Basing his designs on the original vibrant murals that covered the Hall in the 16th century,  Dant (right) took nearly two years to complete the works which were featured over four pages in Country Life. 

The 12th century Norman church of St Michael, adjacent to Upton Cressett Hall, has also been upgraded to Grade 1 status which now makes the 'historic setting' around the intimately connected group of buildings at the settlement of Upton Cressett one of the most important and heavily protected heritage sites in the Midlands.  

Now have three Grade 1 listed buildings and three Scheduled Ancient Monuments at the settlement of Upton Cressett, within a small radius of less than a mile or so.  I hope this new statutory designation sends out a clear Government-endorsed message that Upton Cressett is one of Shropshire's special heritage assets and deserves full protection so the asset can be enjoyed by both tourists visiting Shropshire and the local community.

Upton Cressett is a moated Elizabethan brick manor with historic gatehouse and Norman church set in an unspoilt and romantic landscape near the Shropshire market town of Bridgnorth. The house has long been admired by architectural critics including Nikolaus Pevsner, John Betjeman and Simon Jenkins. Shropshire Magazine described the hamlet as 'one of the most important Tudor houses in Britain' and a 'true Shropshire jewel'. When the house re-opened to the public in 2011 after two years of restoration, over 600 visitors came on the opening weekend.

The manor was the historic home of the Cressett family for centuries, before my father Bill Cash MP and our family began living there in 1970. The Hall and gardens have been open to the public and for group visits since the 1970s. In addition to its Tudor architecture and twisted brick chimneys, the house is famous for being where young King Edward V (eldest son of Edward IV and one of the Princes in the Tower) reputedly stayed on his fateful journey to The Tower of London after the royal party left Ludlow for London in April 1483.

Professor Hancock, author of "Richard III and the Murder in The Tower" gave a talk in the summer endorsing the long held Shropshire tradition that the young king did stay at Upton Cressett manor in 1483. Prince Rupert of the Rhine, commander of the royalist troops, also stayed during the Civil War when Sir Francis Cressett (although we have now have doubts whether he really ever was knighted) was Treasurer to Charles I.  Others who have stayed at Upton Cressett include Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who stayed in the Gatehouse.  

There are approx 500,000 listed buildings on the National Heritage List of which approx 2.5% are listed Grade 1; of these some 45% are churches meaning that there are less that there is a only a tiny number of Grade 1 houses which are still historic homes in the entire UK. Upton Cressett is very much lived in as a family home and we enjoy opening to the public so that others can also enjoy the extraordinarily rich history of the place. 

Grade 1 is defined as having 'exceptional architectural merit'. English Heritage states that achieving Grade 1 status on the National Heritage list is to be regarded with exceptional ‘importance’ in the planning process. 'Designation allows us to protect and celebrate England's historic buildings, monuments, parks, gardens, battlefields and wreck sites, by highlighting their special interest in a national context. It identifies an asset or site as having significance within the historic environment before any planning stage that may decide its future'.

Backed up by a community of over 300 local supporters from our Stop Bridgnorth Wind Farm (www.stopbridgnorthwindfarm.org) campaign group, the group of which I am co-chairman with Dr Chris Douglas of Grade 1 Morville Hall, and also supported by local MP Philip Dunne, I sincerely hope that this extra new heightened heritage protection will be the end of the saga which has bitterly divided the Shropshire Hills community around Morville and Bridgnorth; and that by this Christmas the community of Upton Cressett and Criddon  - where the proposed wind farm was to be located, right in the middle of the old historic Upton Park - the close knit community can all go back to getting on with each other again in harmony. 

The Notification letter of Grade 1 status received by Mr Cash states that the new Designation was, as stated above, precipitated by a wind farm proposal around 1.6km from the Grade 1 historic Gatehouse at Upton Cressett.  The chosen proposed position of the towering industrial turbines – each much higher than Nelson’s column – was in the middle of the ancient Upton Park deer park within clear view of the first floor and second floor windows of the Gatehouse, thereby destroying both the approach and the historic setting of Upton Cressett. The towering wind turbine site - where a wind mast is currently erected - is less than 1.6km from the now Grade 1 Gatehouse. 

Fortunately there has been a very clear and unambiguous planning decision precedent relating to preserving the historic setting of a proposed wind farm close to a group of Grade 1 buildings built by Sir John Vanbrugh and a Grade 1 Gatehouse set earlier this year (March 9^th) when a Government Planning Inspector named Paul Jackson threw out an Appeal for a wind farm proposal by Broadview Energy that was around 2.6km to Kimbolton Castle in Huntingdonshire, the former royal palace of Catherine of Aragon. 

The local Council had refused the proposal on the grounds of damaging the historic environment and local community feeling but Broadview had appealed the Council’s decision.

Kimbolton Castle, like Upton Cressett, boasts three separate Grade 1 listed buildings within the castle grounds which is now a school. The Inspector described the historic grouping of buildings as  of ‘very significant heritage value’ and ruled that viewed from the Robert Adam Grade 1 gatehouse the ‘turbines would be a modern , elevated, intrusive features in the countryside to the north seen from many parts of the grounds that would be difficult to avoid in interpreting the setting of these buildings’.

Under the new National Planning Policy Framework planning reforms, special protection to the ‘Historic Setting’ of listed protected buildings of exceptional merit was included by the government after lobbying by heritage campaigners, including the Historic Houses Association and the National Trust.

Mr Jackson, the Inspector at Kimbolton, (left) took his definition of ‘setting’ from English Heritage’s own guide to planners, entitled The Setting of Heritage Assets. The historic setting, he stated in his reasoning for turning down the Appeal, ‘embraces all the surroundings in which the asset may be experienced’.

The heritage importance of the historic hamlet of Upton Cressett has never been in doubt but until now the listing information was out of date. In English Heritage’s Notification letter, about the reason for upgrading to Grade 1 status the government heritage protection body stressed the ‘group value’ of the importance of the buildings as a whole within an intimate setting. ‘The functional. physical and historic relationships between Upton Cressett hall, its gatehouse and the former church of St Michael .. mean that the house has important group value with these buildings which contributes to its own significance’.

The late Duke of Grafton, (below left) president of Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), visited Upton Cressett in July 1953 with James Lee-Milne of the National Trust and afterwards wrote to then then owner Sir Herbert Smith, referring to Upton Cressett's hamlet as 'one of the most interesting group of buildings I have ever seen.. Upton Cressett is of national importance'.  Nikolaus Pevsner, in the Buildings of England (below right), described the Hall as a 'remarkable Tudor house of brick’.

Following the heightened heritage protection announced last week by the Secretary of State for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, with immediate effect, the new heritage minister, the Rt Hon. Ed Vaizey MP, has been invited by my father, Bill Cash MP, to visit Upton Cressett, as well as to visit the vibrant heritage tourism at Ironbridge, another popular Shropshire attraction.

Mr Vaizey's office has indicated he would be interested in visiting Shropshire, one of the jewels of the UK's flourishing heritage tourism industry, and we look forward to showing him why the landscape around the Bridgnorth and the Shropshire Hills is worth preserving from industrial development. 

The landscape around the Shropshire Hills has inspired writers and poets ranging from AE Housman to the 1930s poet Louis Macniece as well as providing inspiration for PG Wodehouse - who was brought up near Bridgnorth - who described the countryside around Bridgnorth as the 'Paradise of England'. When the poet John Betjeman came to visit in 1938 with the painter John Piper to write his entry for the Shell Guide to Shropshire he described Upton Cressett as 'this remote and beautiful place'.

The historic landscape and ancient buildings around Upton Cressett have been unspoilt and untouched by developers for well over 800 years.   In addition, the hamlet includes an important part of the Jack Mytton Way, Shropshire's flagship tourist trail for riders, walkers and cyclists. I also sincerely hope this puts an end to any misconceived and dangerous idea of straddling the Jack Mytton Way at Upton Cressett with two giant industrial wind turbines that would also be located in the middle of the old Upton Cressett Park in full view of the windows looking out of the Gatehouse at Upton Cressett, as well as destroying the approach and historic setting of the ancient hamlet.

As any planning law consultant or lawyer will spell out, the Grade 1 Kimbolton Castle and gatehouse ruling by the Planning Inspector clearly sets a precedent for any Council or Inspector at Appeal. If having three Grade 1 listed buildings and three Scheduled Ancients Monuments within a mile radius doesn't protect the hamlet from inappropriate industrial development, then there is almost no point in Britain having the National Heritage List'.

The new Designations for Upton Cressett went live on the National Heritage List website from last week. Local MP Philip Dunne has been outspoken from the very start of the controversy which began when local farmer Clive Millington teamed up with wind energy developers Sustainable Bridgnorth (based in Highley) and Sharenergy (based in Shrewsbury) to select the now heavily protected heritage site of Upton Cressett  - and a leading Shropshire heritage jewel - to propose a turbine development. After visiting the site last year, Mr Dunne said that Upton Cressett was 'simply the wrong place' for such a development.

 In its official Designation notification letter to owner Mr William Cash English Heritage acknowledged that the previous 1951 listing was in need of updating as it erroneously gave the impression that the Hall and Gatehouse were unoccupied and 'dilapidated'.  There were also errors about the importance of the architecture of the Hall and Gatehouse which have now been rectified by tests which date the Great Hall roof structures to between 1420-40.

Part of the reason that the proposed development was not contested at the initial consultation stage by Shropshire Council was that the heritage information relating to the site as provided to Shropshire Council by the developers Share Energy was inaccurate, outdated and incomplete, relying on a desk top survey from an office in Wales rather than actually visiting the site. Relying on a 1951 listing report, the developers - who have still never visited inside the grounds of Upton Cressett despite my having issued an invitation - believed that the house was unoccupied and derelict, and did not even mention the Grade 2 * Hall, Gatehouse or Church in their preliminary application.

Extraordinarily, the desk top survey developers at Share Enegry and Natural Power tried to erase the existence of Upton Cressett's Norman, medieval and Elizabethan buildings away. All they mentioned was the old moat and some medieval fish ponds. The new Designations correct the record and shows how lucky this country is to have dedicated professionals such as at English Heritage.

It is a statutory and legal requirement that English Heritage must be consulted with regards to any planning application relating to the historic setting of a Grade 2 * building or listed historic park. But English Heritage were not consulted because the developers simply chose to ignore the existence of Upton Cressett Hall, Gatehouse and Norman church.

As a result of the misinformation provided by Share Energy the initial 'scoping' consultation went unnoticed under the radar of Shropshire Council's historic environment department, opening up the way for a potential Judicial Review as the correct statutory consultation procedures were not carried out.

As of today, I am personally sending copies of all the new designation notifications by English Heritage to both Clive Millington and Share Energy so this time they cannot attempt to mislead the Council. I sincerely hope that for the sake of the Shropshire landscape, and the riders, walkers, heritage lovers and tourists who come to the Shropshire Hills and Upton Cressett, that common sense will prevail and the proposed application will now be dropped for the sake of the community which has become deeply and bitterly divided ever since the application was first proposed.

In addition to the Grade 1 listing status awarded by English Heritage to Upton Cressett, the ancient settlement - extending to Upton Cressett's medieval village which was enclosed in the 16th century by Thomas Cressett into a famous Shropshire deer park - added heritage protection to the ancient landscape around Upton Cressett, and the adjacent hamlet of Criddon (formerly part of Upton Cressett Park), was granted by English Heritage with the award of Scheduled Ancient Monument (SAM) status given to the Medieval Settlement at Upton Cressett.

The important Roman Settlement at Upton Park Farm, close to the Hall, was also awarded Scheduled Ancient Monument status. The Roman site at Upton Cressett has been regarded in archaeological circles for many decades to be one of the most important Roman sites in the Midlands after Wroxeter because of the extensive amount of Roman and Bronze Age finds brought up during ploughing over the last forty years. 

Dr Roger White, the respected Birmingham University senior archaeologist who also sits on the Advisory Board of English Heritage, and who has led the field excavations at Upton Cressett for over 20 years, said the award of Scheduled Ancient Monument status to Upton Cressett's Roman site was well merited because of the importance of Upton Cressett to the Wroxeter hinterland project which he has also overseen. 

English Heritage were provided with photographs of the Upton Cressett 'hoard' finds discovered over the years by the Pugh family, who farm the land. For years, the valuable museum-quality Roman finds  - including axe heads, coins, large pottery fragments and jewellery - were proudly exhibited in the kitchen at the Pugh family farmhouse.  

Jonathan Roberts, the Sheffield based archaeologist who first alerted Dr White in the 1980s to the 'Upton Cressett hoard' owned by the Pugh family said of the Scheduled Ancient Monument award. 'Ever since my first field walking survey of Upton Cressett, it was obvious from what was being revealed during ploughing that it was an important Roman trading site - and very possibly the site of a Roman Fort, all connected to the Roman road network running along the Corvedale. I am delighted that the site and surrounding historic landscape now will be fully protected as it is of critical importance for educational and archaeological purposes'.

There is also an interesting royal footnote to the saving of Upton Cressett and its Norman church  - whether it be from industrial developers, local farmers unappreciateive of the rich history and heritage surrounding their land,  thieves stealing the exceptional panelling and wood carvings in the sixties or just the bulding suffering from weather and sheer neglect. 

When the beautiful Norman church of St Michael was only given a Grade 2 listing 1951 listing the church was an overgrown wreck with many features hidden from view. The listings officer was also not aware of the fine 12th century medieval frescoes in the church, the exceptional quality of the Norman chancel arch or the Norman font which was reportedly was transported to Gordonstoun school in the sixties when HRH Prince Charles was there, apparently because the Duke of Edinburgh wanted the young prince to be surrounded by beautiful objects reflecting England's ancient history.

At the time, the church of St Michael was derelict and anybody could have stolen the Cressett brass or the famous Norman font, so it was just as well that the Redundant Churches Fund - as it was then called - decided to move the font and brass and other objects - such as the stained glass - away to other locations for (temporary) safe-keeping.

It is not known who suggested the Upton Cressett font from St Michael's as a suitable object to be moved to Gordonstoun whilst the young prince was at the school but it is very likely to have been Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, the journalist, scholar and church conservationist who set up, in the fifties, the 'Friends of Friendless Churches' with himself as Chairman. This organisation came out of a falling out Ivor-Thomas had with the Historic Churches Preservation Trust with which he had been closely involved in setting up and gaining initial government funding to save the worrying number of historic churches that were being demolished. Bulmer-Thomas's new body saved at least 17 churches from further ruin or the wrecking ball.

In 1969 Bulmer-Thomas was made the first Chairman of the Redundant Churches Fund, which he ran for seven years during which it went on to have hundreds of Churches in its care. He was also secretary of the Ancient Monuments Society in the late 1950s. Interestingly, Upton Cressett was a church that Bulmer-Thomas was personally involved with saving being one of the very first churches that the Redundant Churches Fund saved in the late 1960s, with Bulmer Thomas being aware of the hazardous state of St Michael's from a much earlier date. The story of the saving of the church of St Michael - as well as the hall by my parents - shows how, despite the hard work, a fervour for saving the best of Britian's heritage is worth while.

Our past is what makes Britian te envy of the world, and why heritage tourism contributes over £20 billion to our economy. Indeed, heritage tourism - whether it is a small Norman church like St Michael's or Blenheim Palace - is one part of our economy that is growing as people begin to understand why our unique historic landscape and buildings are worth protecting. Thank God for English Heritage. 

NOTES:

 William Cash is available for interview and can be reached on 07703 52 501 (mobile) or 01746 714 308 (Home). Email is williamcash@uptoncressett.co.uk. 

 Any queries relating to English Heritage’s decision to re-designate Upton Cressett Hall and its ancient hamlet should be directed to Toby Sargent in the Department of Culture, Media & Sport’s (DCMS’s) press office. Toby’s email is toby.sargent@culture.gsi.gov.uk .

 More information about the history and architecture of Upton Cressett hall, Gatehouse and the Norman church of St Michael can be found at the website: www.uptoncressetthall.co.uk

 More information about the Stop Bridgnorth Wind Farm Campaign can be found on the website www.stopbridgnorthwindfarm.org.

 Dr Chris Douglas, who lives at nearby Grade 1 Morville Hall, (National Trust) and who is co-chairman of the Stop Bridgnorth Wind Farm group can be reached via William Cash. 

Horse & Howlers

SEPTEMBER 1

With the final judging of the Spear's Book Awards coming up in a few weeks, I've been doing a lot of reading here in the country. I'm one of the judges for the Fiction category, with a shortlist that comprises of  Absolution by Patrick Flanery, Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger’s Child, Capital by John Lanchester and At Last by Edward St Aubyn. In addition I've got a large pile of other random books heaped up by my bed that I dip into in the middle of the night - usually from around 4am to dawn - which is my preferred reading time.

One I've been enjoying very much is Harry Mount's A Lust for Window Sills, a man very much after my own aesthetic heart. When I am lying in bed reading in the near darkness as dawn creeps through my curtains, I can all too easily identify with another Harry - Harry Flashman, the 19th century bounder and soldier who reflects at the end of his colourful life, with his best years behind him, that the only true achievement in his ife he is proud of is that he has replaced a pair of Georgian windows in his house to their original casements.

I am not sure whether this medically qualifies me as an official insomniac - from the inverse of the Latin 'Somnus', The Roman God of sleep - but I have recently read that having irregular sleep habits puts you in the 'high risk' heart attack category. Well, so be it - I'm not going to give up reading through the night for health reasons. It's my 46th birthday today as I write with my father telling me that I was born whilst he was enjoying a 'good English steak' in an old City 'tavern' across from St Barts hospital in the City of London on the 300th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, which started on 1st September 1666. If I do have a heart attack induced from reading too much through the night, I'll view it as a good as any a way to go.

What has been raising my literary blood pressure, however, during the night are the number of literary howlers that I have come across just in the last week or so. I don't know whether it is because publishing houses can't afford proper proof readers any more, or whether they don't use sub-editors, but what is more worrying is that the sort of mistakes I keep coming across are not spelling typos but evidence of ignorance that could only have come from the author and which one is left truly puzzled as to how they ever passed unnoticed by their editor, the sub0editor and the proof readers.

The first was a week ago and the culprit was William Fiennes, (pictured above) author of The Music Room, his moving and haunting memoir of being brought up in one of England's best known castles. The book was shortlisted for a Spear's book award and Fiennes is a previous winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and somebody who was brought up surrounded by Old Masters and the 17th century decorative arts at Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire.

On p. 187, he writes about flicking through an old house sale catalogue from 4t July 1837, when the contents of the castle was flogged off at auction. The auctioneers were called Enoch & Redfern and he then rattles of various treasures that the house used to contain, ranging from Nankin china sets to pieces of the Beauvais Tapestry, to portraits attributed to 'Velazquez, Van Dyke and Spagnolettii....'

Did somebody say Van Dyke? As in Dick Van Dyke, the actor best known for Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I think Fiennes means Anthony van Dyck, the Dutch court painter to Charles I, whose haunting self-portrait painted shortly before he died in December 1641 won the Spear's 'Masterpiece at Masterpiece' prize at our Spear's Masterpiece breakfast back in June. The portrait is definitely a work by van Dyck, which is how the dealer Philip Mould (who owns the painting) calls the artist, as well as the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, and the Rijksmuseum - the National Gallery of Holland in Amsterdam. Its a wonderful book but a mistake like feels like walking into one of the castle's grand bedrooms during a tour and finding the sheets crumpled up and the bed unmade.

Writers are only human and mistakes are all too easily made but whilst it is forgivable to an extent in a newspaper when sub-editors are on pressing deadlines and they have to proof thousands of words per hour it is less forgivable when mistakes - 'misprints' - as they are often referred to appear between hard covers by a respectable publisher. Evelyn Waugh was sufficiently embarrassed when the word 'Burgundy' was misspelled (another word that is often spelt wrong) in the first edition of Brideshead that he flagellated himself and his publisher by drawing attention to his error in his Preface to the revised 1959 edition, which is now the Penguin Classic paperback text.

PD James has a reputation for writing with scrupulous forensic accuracy in her crime novels. So on p. 13 of The Private Patient, bizarrely about a murder that takes place in a Tudor manor that used to be owned by the Cressett family (exactly like Upton Cressett, where I live) I was surprised to see that the large central mahogany table in the waiting room of the smart Harley Street plastic surgeon Mr G. H Chandler-Powell is littered with copies of Country Life and Horse and Hounds...

My girlfriend is an avid reader of Horse & Hound, the correct title, which may not decorate the library tables of the House of Lords - where PD James sits when not at her writing desk - but Horse & Hound is one of the best known magazines in England with a weekly circulation of 245,000. Horse and Hound is also the world's oldest equestrian magazine. Surely somebody at Faber and Faber must have been familiar with the magazine, or at least her own publisher, Stephen Page, to whom she dedicates the book after 46 unbroken years as a Faber author.

But the time I felt my heart palpitate dangerously with literary shock was when I recently received a book through the post called Top 100 Attractions: Wales. The editor was doing a sequel called England: Top 100 Attractions and wanted to know if we wanted to be considered for the book. I asked to be sent the Wales edition. When it arrived, I opened it up and the first word I read was 'Forward'. Not the Foreword. That was enough. I wish the book every success but a major spelling mistake in the first word of any book does not inspire the reader with confidence.

Anyhow, since it's my birthday and I'm just about to uncork the first of several bottles of Bandol rose, which I intend to share with my girlfriend on the Gatehouse lawn here on one of the sunniest day of the year, I hereby give absolution to the above literary sins. I only hope that the shortlisted Spear's novelists have better editors.

Update on Wednesday, April 10, 2013 at 10:17PM by William Cash

Can a critic recommend a hotel that one can never go back to? The reason I doubt I will ever return to the wedding cake palace of the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat is not the cost (and the hotel is not cheap). Nor is it to do with any aesthetic failings in the impeccable taste of the designer Pierre-Yves Rochon who picked out the exquisite lemon patterned curtains in our balconied suite overlooking the sea, and who masterminded the decorative renovation of the hotel as part of its 100th anniversary.

These celebrations included selecting new Robbe & Berking Art Deco collection silver cutlery for the dining room, alongside Neptune porcelain from Haviland commissioned to represent the gods of the sea. Keeping up this marine theme, the interior of the restaurant now features a mural in the style of Jean Cocteau. Other classic features of the hotel have remained - such as the old brass gated lifts and the beautiful lobby featuring a baroque chandelier by Tisserant of crystal doves enclosed by a silver lantern that reflects the light coming in from the Gustave Eiffel-designed Rotunda.

Nor is my reluctance to return anything to do with the imperiously precise cuisine of Michelin-starred chef Didier Anies, who also bears the title Meilleur Ouvrier de France, who supervised the menu of one of the most memorable dinners of my life. Or even the charming (but slightly annoying) habit of the little singing local birds – their flecked breasts the colour of a Meissen porcelain parrot – who swooped down at the breakfast table, dive-bombing off the branches of Aleppo pines, to raid the basket of fresh croissants and fly off with a corner of toast, freshly spread with beurre d'Echivé (the best in France) and little pots of jam.

No. The reason I will never go back to the Grand Hotel is sentimentality, stabbed with romantic nostalgia. For a few luxuriant and blissful days last September, when the Vilebrequin beau monde had packed their Louis Vuittons and sun-oil away, and the season was winding down – save for an athletic London hedgie by the pool - I enjoyed one of the best holidays of my life with a woman I loved.

How we laughed into our glasses of Bandol rosé when said Mayfair hedgie stood up by his sun-bed by the deserted pool, put down his Blackberry – which he had been clamped to - and put on his Olympic swimming hat and Speedo goggles to do his marathon lengths. To impress who? As he crawled away, we ordered our second bottle of rosé of the morning. It was still 11.45 am.
   
    
BUT WHAT IS it with me and the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat? Despite it being one of my favourite hotels in the world – and justly the only hotel on the Cote d’Azur awarded ‘Palace’ status - we seem to have a doomed relationship. Like Charles Ryder returning to Brideshead in the war, (and the Grand was used as a troop hospital during World War Two) ‘I had been there before’; yes, I had stayed at the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat back in 1991, some 21 years before, while working as a young reporter on The Times covering the Cannes Film Festival, and also moonlighting as a fledgling hotel critic.

It was a memorable stay – but for all the wrong reasons. Unfortunately the first night I was meant to be staying in the hotel I ended up in Cannes police station for most of the night. I was driving back to the hotel with a blonde California film producer/girlfriend and a drunk French driver had collided into us at some traffic lights. The Grand Hotel manager was most accommodating, I recall, when I checked in around 2.30 am looking as if I’d just been pulled out of a giant cactus tree in the neighbouring gardens of the Rothschilds' Villa Ephrussi.

Service then – as now – was impeccable. Dinner was served in our room at around 3am without any fuss and a bottle of champagne was delivered to the room with the manager’s compliments. A few months later, I moved to LA to work as The Times’s Hollywood correspondent and moved in with the said thirtysomething film producer. We never returned to Cannes: she died a year later.
   
   
OUR STAY AT the Grand some twenty one years later was branded into the memory vault for all the right reasons. This was the holiday – ironically – that was to take things from ‘holiday romance’ to official romance. Around that awkward romantic bend when the present suddenly turns into a future. The happy details remain as clear and beautiful as the hotel’s crystalline water of the infinity pool that stretches out towards the rocks and the edge of the sea like a giant dripping silver oyster salver.

Unquestionably, Le Cap restaurant is one of the very best on the Cote d’Azur. Dinner was a Proustian assault of the culinary senses. Whenever I stay in a serious gastro hotel, I always ask for the menu to be sent up to the room before dinner so that I can read it – ‘study’ might be a better word – lying on the bed after a bath.

My girlfriend (who was not a foodie like me although the Grand helped with a temporary mini-conversion to the cause) used to find the habit a bit unusual at first as I would lie on the bed in a towelling robe and say things like, ‘Darling, how about Le Loup de Mer aux Herbes Fraiches or Le Turbot Cuit Epais sur l’Arete? That’s for the fish course – or do you want to start with La Langouste Rose Tiede?' 

My French accent is not good, so I cannot blame her for not knowing quite what was being ordered but at the end of the majestic six course dinner – even with the little birds swooping down to pluck at our bread rolls - she did turn to me and say it was ‘probably the best dinner in my life’. I think she also said it was the best holiday of her life as well.
   
    
IT WAS CERTAINLY a better holiday than either of my two honeymoons so that was promising. By quite a margin. Towards the end of dinner, after we had enjoyed Le Souffle aux Fraises and Glace à la Reglisse, followed by La Charlotte Glacée Framboise (I loved that ‘Charlotte’ was my girlfriend's middle name), she was swirling down an Armagnac. I said: ‘If we get married, I promise to include a return trip to the Grand as part of our honeymoon. And we’ll stay in the same room.'

She looked up to the brilliant Cote D'Azur stars and smiled back. She was wearing a cream chiffron evening dress that shone as luminously as her eyes in the garden candlelight. I took another scoop of the Charlotte Glace – it tasted of pure happiness.

Alas, it was only to be a holiday romance. The little birds - and the crystal doves for that matter - can sing for other honeymoon couples. There will be no Room 204 Revisited.

The Late Tudor Priapic Style and the Battle of the Hampers

AUGUST 31

In the 'Battle of the Gatehouses' which I referred to in my last blog - with billions of UK heritage tourism spend at stake - The Landmark Trust have been leading the heritage mini-break musket charge from the front for years now. As HRH Prince of Wales admits in his foreword to the most recent Handbook, 'I have always been a particular enthusiast for the work of The Landmark Trust...The Trust has carved out a distinctive niche in the field of historic buildings preservation.. not only in restoring old buildings, but inspiring others by demonstrating what can be achieved'.

Ouch. This is a clear stab with the royal sword here - reminding people that it was The Landmark Trust who first pioneered the idea of offering people (cultured, civilised people to be more exact) the chance to holiday in beautifully restored historic follies, towers, chapels - often orphan or 'bastard' homes (i.e a gatehouse without a manor or house attached). The Landmark Trust idea (offering a 'quality of peace and reflection I find nowhere else' as LT director Peter Pearce puts it ) was so successful that it has now been copied by the Vivat Trust.

Most of the other rival companies offering luxury cottages or homes with historic character owe a debt to The Landmark Trust for setting the standards high. The Landmark Trust's famous guidebook - which is a beautifully produced book of historical shots, ranging from an 'original Lutyens lock' at Goddards, in Surrey to an oak chair at Appleton Water Tower in Norfolk - looks as if Home and Gardens had suddenly been taken over by the National Trust.

The only problem is that - like the National Trust itself - the Landmark Trust has become a bit fusty. People dont want to holiday in a museum, or a house preserved in Lutyens aspic, and the first volley of assault on the LT's monopoly on 'heritage mini-breaks' has been the 'Hamper Wars'. Before a Landmark Trust guest arrives, the Housekeeper leaves out a 'welcoming tray with Old Chelsea china tea'. But these days people expect more than having to make themselves a cup of tea.

When you arrive for a mini-break at our Gatehouse (above right), which can be booked through Rural Retreats, guests get a wicker hamper which is filled with fresh fruit, local Shropshire cheese, Twinings tea, a bottle of wine, luxury coffee, freshly baked cottage or granary bread ('not sliced'), free range eggs, a fresh lemon, fresh orange juice, (not from concentrate), and more. The attention to 'sourcing' detail with regards the 'Hamper' with Rural Retreats is exactly the sort of detail that Landmark's conservation architects pride themselves in shaping the clay blocks that were sourced for the restoration of the Manor Farm at Pulham Market, in Norfolk.

I used to leave guests a bottle of local Shropshire wine to enjoy on arrival as we used to have our own Upton Cressett wine label but sadly the Morville vineyard that produced for us no longer operates. Yet for the connoisseur class of heritage guest that use Rural Retreats, a bottle of local plonk simply wont do.

On the 'Hamper' list of requirements it is clearly stated that it is verboten to buy any 'supermarket economy labels'. A 'local newspaper' is also to be included. There are particular instructions for the cheese: 'not pre-packed and enough for each guest to have a piece; and avoid cheap supermarket wine. 'Ask guests’ wine preference when they call for key collection' owners are told. 'If in doubt, opt for dry white'. Added to all this, 'the owner is free to add extra goodies at their own discretion and you may wish to discuss this with them'.

In the 'Hamper Wars', The Gatehouse, Upton Cressett versus, say, Shute Gatehouse (Landmark Trust) we have to win hands down. But where the real heart of the battlefield is the quality of really historic character that people get when they book a mini-break in a restored historic retreat. When I signed up for Rural Retreats, they came a made a full inspection - not for Elizabethan lice, or even Lefroy brooks bathroom luxury - but to check that the place had enough 'historic character'.

Built by Richard Cressett in 1580 - our turreted Gatehouse - see photo - has been described as an 'Elizabethan gem' by Simon Jenkins, and is riddled with history. Like the Landmark Trust gatehouses that we battle with for the title of 'Best Gatehouse' to stay in the UK, we offer not only giant fluffy giant bath towels but also a 'History Sheet' for guests on arrival. For the history of our Gatehouse, see: www.uptoncressetthall.co.uk; for, the 'History Sheet' on our arch Shropshire rival, the Bromfield Priory gatehouse (below) near Ludlow see: www.landmarktrust.org.uk.

The problem with the 'Battle of the Gatehouses' is not everybody agrees on what a Gatehouse actually is. When John Goodall, architectural editor of Country Life, and the author of The English Castle, his splendid tomb of a coffee table book which won a Spears book award last year, came to do a piece on Upton Cressett he kept referring to the gatehouse as 'The Gate'. I looked at him a bit oddly before he added: 'It was always called The Gate - no self-respecting domestic manor house or castle in the 15th or 16th century would ever not have a Gate'.

Gatehouses were to the middle ages what architecturally designed 'pool houses' are to contemporary Los Angeles. If you are a mogul building a new designer house in Bel Air, you are a nobody if you don't have a pool house. When I lived in LA in the 90s, it was common for the owner to actually live in their pool house as it was so often better architecture and more comfortable. Likewise, in the 13th century and 14th century, Gatehouses sprang up all over the country as a result of castles changing from having a single 'keep' to having its fortifications strengthened by having what is known as 'an outer curtain wall'. Since the entrance was the part of the castle that was most vulnerable to siege, a 'gate' was built which had added solidity and also architectural features such as a look out tower, otherwise known as a 'belvedere'.

Originally this was to watch out for unwanted visitors but by the 16th century it was more likely to be used for looking out for deer in the parks that were often laid out opposite the gatehouses. That is certainly the case with our Gatehosue at Upton Cressett whose top floor window looks out directly across the entire old Upton Cressett Park - a famous Midlands deer park laid out in 1518 by Thomas Cressett where Charles I is reported to have hunted. The entry for Upton Cressett in 'Castles and Old Mansions of Shropshire' (Frances Acton, 1868) states that 'Saxton, in his map of 1676-8, gives a park here'.

That is was a 'deer park' was confirmed when I recently dug around in the Shropshire archives - which are stored in tens of thousands of boxes in a secure facility in the heart of medieval Shrewsbury - and came across a parchment lease from the reign of Charles II (1672/3) relating to a lease from Elizabeth Cressett (widow of Edward Cressett who was a staunch royalist who had 14 children and was killed in the Battle of Bridgnorth in 1646) relating to the 'Parke' at Upton Cressett - 'now being stocked with deer'.

One reason that so few old deer parks or historic parks still exist today is that they were rarely laid out originally for economic reasons. As the social historian P.A Stamper puts it in his 'Historic Parks and Gardens of Shropshire' a 'park conferred prestige and drew attention to the owner's social rank; many in the later 16th century were made or extended to embellish new or remodelled houses....It was also conceived as a wide surrounding paradise, almost invariably furnished with deer, the intended sport of the owner and his most favoured guests. (fn. 36) From the mid 16th century, moreover, there was clearly a growing appreciation of the aesthetic pleasures of a parkland view.

Thus at Lilleshall Hall - a huge 16th century estate of 30,000 acres that was built around the ruins of Lilleshall abbey in Shropshire - a special balcony for guests to watch the hunting - overlooking the park - was added to the lodge before 1679. Indeed, we have always been somewhat baffled as to what the purpose of the huge second floor chamber was in our (disproportionately tall to the manor opposite) gatehouse here at Upton Cressett. I now think that it seems very likely that it was built partly as a look out tower but also as a hunting 'VIP viewing area' with guests being invited up to enjoy the sport like being invited to a hospitality balcony at the Monaco Grand Prix, or to watch the Palio in Siena.

From the 15th and 16th century onwards, gatehouses were built more for trophy architectural reasons - to show off wealth and status and the quality of your brickwork and diapering. The same applied to chimneys in the Tudor era - which is why Hampton Court has both a magnificent gatehouse and no less than 241 red brick chimneys. Built around 1514 for Thomas Wolsey’s palace, the intricate cut brickwork of the early chimneys - the first of their kind in England - were symbols of ultimate 'super-rich' Tudor wealth. After Henry VIII took over Hampton Court in 1528, he added more chimneys by way of architectural statement - simply designed to impress. When people look up and admire the eight twisting Tudor chimney-stacks here at Upton Cressett, I refer to them as the 'Late Tudor Priapic' style. There's an architectural term you wont find in Pevsner.

The Tudor Life - if you can get here

AUGUST 30 

This morning I received an email from The Landmark Trust - who do up architectural follies, gatehouses, moated keeps and other heritage oddities for holiday lets - inviting me to 'Experience the life of a Tudor Squire. But without the lice'.

Our Upton Cressett's 16th century gatehouse - built by Richard Cressett in 1580 - is a rival to the Landmark gatehouses as we both offer mini-break heritage holiday lets.

Guests at Upton Cressett's Gatehouse know that if they sleep in the guest bedroom suite on the first floor they are sleeping in the same bed that Lady Thatcher slept in (with Denis) when they came here as guests of my parents when she was Prime Minister in the 1980s; and that some 350 years earlier, Prince Rupert of the Rhine had slept in the same room.

The next floor up is the former Elizabethan 'banqueting' room - a sort of after party room for VIP guests following dinner in the Great Hall where they listened to the lute and ate figs and cheese - which we now refer to as the Library Bedroom as it is where our Upton Cressett Foundation writers are put when they move in for a month to write their books.

If somebody makes an enquiry who sound  like the type that might struggle to know who Prince Rupert of the Rhine actually was (Commander of the Royalist troops in the Civil War, and nephew of Charles I) - or Lady Thatcher for that matter - I'll probably let on that Elizabeth Hurley has stayed in the Gatehouse.

For all the 'Tudor experience' marketing talk, one thing is certain. You dont want to offer guests a genuinely Tudor experience in winter. Shropshire can be pretty cold. Which is why all our bathrooms have under-floor heating and there are working log fires in the dining room and also in the Prince Rupert sitting room. 

Last January, when a new Midlands Ice Age seemed to be breaking out, and we had several weeks of snow on the ground, we had Dr Roger White, the distinguished archaeologist and English Heritage board advisor, to stay in the Gatehouse as he finished off one of his books on Wroxeter.

I dont know about experiencing Life as a Tudor Squire - as they didnt have Calor gas heaters in 16th century England - but Dr White certainly experienced the full force of a Tudor Winter after it got so cold that the heating pipes on the top floor actually froze for two days and the bearded academic was reduced to wearing a duffle coat as he worked at his desk flanked by three Calor gas heaters on at full blast. Then he went home to near Broseley over the weeekend and it snowed even more. When he showed up on Monday morning, he arrived in a borrowed farm tractor fully fitted with ice and snow clearing equipment.

Landmark Trust, whose patron is HRH Prince of Wales, are cleverly using 'The Tudor Life' as a marketing gimmick to lure guests in with the idea that in their restored gatehouses, keeps and water towers, they can escape from the modern rat-race world of internet cafes, Travel Lodge Inns, video games and hi-tech gyms, to enjoy the simple life in a heritage property - renovated but with all luxury comforts.

The genius loci of a well restored building - it is inferred elliptically - can help towards the restoration of a guest's well being; or their inner sense of aesthetic and even moral balance. Good architecture, heritage and local craftsmanship - from oak carved newel post finals to restored mullion windows - is actually good for you. The Tudor Life is a better life - sans 60 inch TV screens, Burger King and microwaves. 

'Every building we look after has undergone careful, expert restoration' state the Landmark Trust. 'At Wortham Manor we evicted numerous occupants — among them woodworm, dry rot and death-watch beetle. So today our guests (not the insects) feast once more in the great hall. Just click through to check its availability. And enjoy a break in a building that's as Tudor as it can comfortably be'.

The idea is not to be the most 'modern', 'avant-garde' or 'four star' in terms of amenities, decor or design - but to see who can offer the most purist heritage experience. Not so much whether your bed linen is from Fritte in Rome but rather is the quality of the bees wax polish on the creaking old Tudor oak floorbaords good enough. Whilst every Gaggia coffee machine is the same; no Elizabethan garde-robe is. 

If you want a truly Victorian experience, then you need to go down the road from Upton Cressett to Acton Scott in Shropshire where Rupert Scott - scion of the old county family who runs the Acton Scott 19th century 'working farm' - has come up with the ingenious (and economical) idea of converting an estate worker's cottage into a truly Victorian experience - offering no plumbing, central heating, TV or mod cons at all. Its back to basic Victorian living; sans Lefroy Brooks bathroom taps and Megaflow water tanks.   

But it was this afternoon when I knew that Upton Cressett was going to win any 'Tudor' competition between historic gatehouses to see who could offer their guests the most 'authentic' 16th century experience.

I was just finishing a tour of the house (not exacgly a group: a couple from outside Birmingham) when a member of staff came running up to me and said that I needed to call the police. 'Emergency!' she said. 

The reason? Part of an ancient tree in the old park had fallen down at the bottom of our narrow cul-de-sac road - which John Betjeman described in 1938 as 'one of the loneliest' in the country leading to a 'remote and beautiful place' - making it impossible for visitors to either leave - or arrive.

In 40 years of living at Upton Cressett, Ive been snowed in many times. When my girlfriend first came to visit here back in January, her (rear-wheel) car had to be spun around on the sheet ice at the bottom of the lane by St Michael's Norman church by myself and our neighbour, Mark, so that she could face the right way and leave the place. Otherwise she would have been here for a week.

But when you are the local TV aerial guy (as happened today - see photo above) and need to reach other customers, the authentic 'Tudor Life' with a road blocked off due to 'forestry' problems, is another matter.  Or at least I thought it would be. But when I asked the driver, who was sitting patiently in his van by the fallen tree waiting for the Council to arrive with chain-saws and lifting equipment, whether he wanted to come back to the hall for a cup of tea, he declined.

He said he was 'very happy'. And he was. Instead of worrying about reaching his next client, there was no need to rush: there was nowhere to go. He could unscrew his Thermos flask, pour himself some tea and relax. Nature had intervened. Up until the 1970s, Upton Cressett was certainly - as the former Poet Laureate John Betjeman wrote - a 'lonely' place and being snowed in for a week was not unusual.

Yet this is partly why I love it here. That is the real Tudor Life. There's nothing I like more at dawn than looking out of the leaded lights in my stone bathroom windows here and seeing the snow falling and knowing that nobody - from the post man to the SKY engineer - can reach us; and there is no way, even with a 4 X 4 (not that I have one) that I can get out. Or anybody can sweep through the gates and disturb the fresh snow. We struggle as it is with getting a mobile signal; I love that my mobile hardly ever rings.

When I saw the old tree that had fallen down from the steep bank that used to be part of the old  Deer Park, as extended in 1518 by Thomas Cressett I just smiled. Yes, we had house opening today and there were a few punters who were stranded here. They didnt seem to mind. I just gave them an extra pot of tea and they settled into chatting away the afternoon in the dining room.

Yes, I would be missing out on a few 'trippers' who would have to turn around thwarted by a fallen oak. But I was glad to see that one enterprising sixtysomething couple refused to be put off by the tree, so they reversed their car, found a place to park and then proceeded to clamber over the tree and the branches in order to get to the Hall. 'It was only a short walk up the hill' said the 'Senior' (he was from Solihull) on arrival. 'I checked the map and I knew we weren't far. I wasn't going to drive all this way and not see the place'.

There is no better feeling in the world than knowing the keys to the drawbridge have been temporarily lost, that the keep is up, and the rest of the world can wait. As Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast: 'The only thing that can spoil a day is people and if you can keep from making engagements, every day has no limits'.