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Clive has taken the riverboat to Greenwich, one of the most spectacular sites of London. ‘Good Duke’ Humphrey, brother of Henry V, built a retreat here in the 15th century, which Henry VII developed into a palace. This was where Henry VIII jousted in his early years, and where his armour was made. To the early Stuarts Greenwich’s was important from its position at the mouth of the Thames: this was where foreign ambassadors landed on their way to the court: Inigo began a revolutionary building for James I’s Queen, Anne of Denmark, and finished it for Henrietta Maria who was married to Charles I. The Queen’s House, as this structure became known, was where Charles kept some of the best of his art collection – alas, dispersed by the Civil War.
After the palace was roughly treated after the Civil War, it was earmarked to become once more a palace for Charles II. He succeeded in building only one block before the money ran out. Instead of a palace, the Royal Observatory arose at the top of a hill, as a place to study the heavens away from the smoke that was already obscuring the skies of London. The terrible carnage of the Dutch wars of the 1660s and 1670s, fought at sea, touched the heart of the future Queen Mary, who would ascend the throne with her husband William III, Prince of Orange. As a result, Greenwich became home to the Royal Naval Hospital, in a magnificent parade of buildings designed by Sir Christopher Wren. They include the Painted Hall, a masterpiece of the artist Sir James Thornhill, and a chapel that was redecorated in the 1780s by James ‘Athenian’ Stuart after a fire. The complex that Vanbrugh built for his family on Maze Hill, next to Greenwich Park, also survives.
.A generation ago, Greenwich – no longer a hospital but a naval college – was difficult for the public to see. Now it houses a university and a music school, and a dazzling restoration of the Painted Hall has proved, literally, a revelation – previously invisible details have been brought to light, such as the figure of Louis XIV who appears beneath William III’s foot in the ceiling. John is as much enraptured as Clive.

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Doddington Hall in Lincolnshire is one of those country houses you find only in Britain. The attics are full of old toys, military headgear, unwanted commodes and a giant figure of the White Rabbit, left over from an Alice in Wonderland-themed event. A collection of Roman antiquities, some found on the estate, is displayed in the downstairs lavatory, along with a child’s pedal-operated aeroplane with patriotic RAF roundels. From the roof, you can see Lincoln cathedral on a good day. Built around 1600, Doddington has hardly been changed outside, and in half a millennium, it has never been sold.
Best of all are the tapestries. Due to the antiquarian tastes of its 18th-century owner John Hussey Delaval, the Georgian revamp was old-fashioned for the 1760s, and included bedrooms close-hung with tapestries in the manner of the William and Mary era. The Doddington tapestries are now a rare survival, although not perhaps for the reason that might be imagined. They are not of the first quality, but relatively workaday– and which is exactly the sort that have most commonly perished.
Clive and John are both enthralled by this house, which – thanks to the conversation of the stables to a shopping experience – is going through something of a golden age. It was where Clive first rode an electric bike.

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Clive and John have both been to Stansted Park, outside Chichester, though at different times. Clive remembers it from the time he helped the owner Eric Bessborough revise a book in the 1980s, whereas John’s connection is more recent. They both find it an astonishing example of an economic revival, apparently inspired by the Covid years when the public was desperate for open space. As a result, the house and park are beautifully maintained, while estate buildings have been well developed as a retail experience.
Stansted has a long and colourful history, which ushers a glittering array of characters onto the stage. Owners have ranged from kings to wine merchants, Dukes to the remarkable Lewis Way, who made it a seminary for converted Jews who were supposed to go out to the Holy Land and spread Christianity. This enterprise was not successful but the poet John Keats attended the dedication of the chapel, made from a fragment of a Tudor building. The main house was destroyed by fire in 1900 and rebuilt by a member of the Blomfield dynasty. In the 1920s it was bought by the 9th Earl of Bessborough, a Governor General of Canada, who furnished it with the contents of the family’s Irish country house, Bessborough House, in County Kilkenny, which had been removed before Bessborough was burnt during the Troubles. Today, Stansted still looks out over a well-treed landscape with avenues created during the Baroque period.
Few country houses have such a varied history or have been so happily revived. Clive and John are enchanted.