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Clive is writing a book for Yale University Press on the Story of the American Country House. John indulges him by discussing an introductory overview of the subject, with which Clive has been engaged since Yale published his The American Country House in 1990. Here is a rich and colourful theme, celebrating a sometimes spectacular architectural tradition shaped by remarkable individuals.
There are numerous reasons people in Colonial American and the developing United States wanted houses outside the city. Rural simplicity expressed a godlier life; country air was good for the health; the drama of the American landscape appealed to the Romantic imagination. By 1900 there was a school of highly sophisticated architects who could serve any need. While some American country houses bore a resemblance to their cousins across the Atlantic, they were, in the early 20th century, built for a different purpose, which was recreation and sport. There was little sense that these were dynastic seats. As soon as fashion changed or money ran out, owners moved on. Hundreds of country houses on Long Island, for example, were demolished after the Great Crash in the 1920s.

Clive and John consider these and other aspects of the subject, in the light of the renaissance of country house building that can be seen in many parts of the US today.

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When the German Prince Puckler Muskau visited England in 1826, he told his divorced wife that it would take her ‘at least 420 years to see all the parks of England, of which there are undoubtedly at least 100,000, for they swarm in every direction.’ One of the most splendid was that at Stowe in Buckinghamshire. The garden was accompanied by an equally important country house, if not palace. John has just been there and describes this extraordinary creation, the product of many generations.

What we see today is largely a product of the 18th-century owner Lord Cobham and his descendants. It was Cobham who employed ‘Capability’ Brown to turn Stowe into (to quote the poet Alexander Pope) ‘as near an approach to Elysium as English soil and climate will permit.’ Sir John Vanbrugh, William Kent and Robert Adam were among the many architects who worked on the house. Through marriage the family became Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos. But their princely extravagance hit the buffers in 1848 when a Great Sale of the contents was held. Not even this could not keep the debts at bay indefinitely and much of the rest of the property was sold after the First World War. The park came into the ownership of the National Trust and the house became a school. Since 1977, the Stowe House Preservation Trust has been restoring the State Dining Room ceiling and returning Classical sculptures to the North Hall, among other projects. John describes the progress made in this magnificent endeavour.

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‘Let’s all go down the Strand!’ ran a popular music hall song. But what sort of street were they singing about? The future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli called it ‘perhaps the finest street in Europe’ in 1847. Which is quite a claim to live up to. Certainly the Strand, one of London’s most famous and important thoroughfares, has had a long and colourful history, with much shape-shifting over the centuries. John and Clive reveal the secrets of a street where splendour lived next door to vice.
Lying between the City of London and the City of Westminster, it formed an important ceremonial route. Until the 19th century, though, it was as much defined by access to the river Thames as by its function as a road. During the Middle Ages, great prelates such as the Archbishop of York built palaces – sometimes known as inns – along the shore, convenient to reach by barge and within a short distance of the Palace of Westminster. In the Tudor period, many of these buildings had become the preserve of great courtiers like the Duke of Buckingham – assuming that they had not fallen into the hands of the King himself. Somerset House was named after the Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector of England until he had his head chopped off. It was then particularly associated with Queens such as Henrietta Maria.
All this changed when Whitehall Palace burnt down at the end of the 17th century and monarch preferred Kensington Palace or Buckingham Palace over Westminster. The inns were redeveloped, famously by the Adam Brothers who nearly ruined themselves building the Adelphi. To Victorian London, the Strand was theatreland – to visit which was as good as a holiday: hence the song. But with theatres, given the proximity of some notorious slums, went other forms of nightlife. Prostitution was rife. So the newly formed London County Council introduced the Strand Improvement Act at the end of the 19th century. The Strand was widened, new buildings arose -- but Clive and John uncover a surprising number of survivals from the ancient of days, such as a Roman bath.
What is the Strand today? Crowded, but once again being improved – look at James Gibbs’s church of St Mary le Strand, now set off by a new piazza that links it with King’s College London and dazzling Somerset House. The reopening of the celebrated restaurant Simpsons in the Strand, in the premises it has occupied since 1904, is (to adopt a culinary metaphor) the cherry on the cake.