Irreplaceable at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London

History and places

On Tuesday evening I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum for a dual celebration: to celebrate Historic England’s campaign Irreplaceable and to mark the publication of my new accompanying book, Irreplaceable: A History of England in 100 Places.* The idea of the campaign was to highlight and celebrate one hundred remarkable places that have in some way shaped the history of England. The public were asked to nominate their favourite historic places and a panel of ten expert judges¶ then took the thousands of nominations and reduced them to a list of one hundred, equally allocated over ten different thematic categories, from “Music and Literature” to “Power, Protest and Progress”. The result is a fascinating and diverse list of places, from obvious and internationally famous buildings such as Canterbury Cathedral and Windsor Castle to less well known sites, such as a rainy Jewish cemetery in Falmouth and some allotments in Wiltshire.

My job was to write something about each place and so create a book, illustrated with Historic England’s excellent photographs. It has been fascinating. Half the time I have been writing about places I know well, half the time about places and buildings that were new to me. The book we have produced is not a continuous history of England but a patchwork, reflecting not just the variety of the choices but also the many different ways of looking at history and at England in particular – cultural, social, military, industrial, technological, political, and so on and on.

The gathering at the V&A was well attended and convivial. We were honoured to have several distinguished speakers – Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A; Duncan Wilson, Chief Executive of Historic England; Mark Hews, Chief Executive of Ecclesiastical;† and Rosie Ryder, Media Manager, Historic England. Among the many filling the main domed hall of the V&A were a good number of representatives of the one hundred places, including people who’d come to London from Durham, Rochdale, and Birkenhead. It was a great pleasure to meet many of these people and hear about their enthusiasm for ‘their’ places and the hard work that goes into maintaining and running all kinds of places, from museums to open-air swimming pools, from Bletchley Park to the Dreamland Theme Park in Margate. Everyone seemed pleased with the book, and I hope it plays its part in celebrating these wonderful sites, in telling their stories, and in highlighting in general the extraordinary diversity and richness of England’s historic places. 

- - - - -

* Irreplaceable: A History of England in 100 Places is published by Historic England. It is available from bookshops, the usual online sources, and from Historic England themselves. For more information, click on the book cover in the right-hand column.

¶ The expert judges (and their categories) were: Monica Ali (Music & Literature), Mary Beard (Loss & Destruction), George Clarke (Homes & Gardens), Will Gompertz (Art, Architecture & Sculpture), Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson (Sport & Leisure), Bettany Hughes (Travel & Tourism), Tristram Hunt (Industry, Trade & Commerce), David Ison (Faith & Belief), David Olusoga (Power, Protest & Progress), and Lord Robert Winston (Science & Discovery).

† This whole project – campaign, book, and the celebration at the V&A itself – could not have happened without the support of in the insurance company Ecclesiastical. This company insures the majority of the Grade I listed buildings in England and donates its profits to charitable causes, including many heritage-related projects.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill

Readers within striking distance of London still have about three weeks to see the exhibition Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Horace Walpole, writer, collector, letter-writer, and man of taste, bought his house, Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, in 1749 and rebuilt and extended it over the next 17 years. In doing so, he created one of the most influential of all English buildings, the house that kick-started the Gothic revival.

Strawberry Hill is a very special house with a very special atmosphere, built in a Gothic style that draws on a range of different sources – a chimneypiece based on a tomb in Westminster Abbey, bookcases inspired by a screen in Old St Paul’s Cathedral, and so on. Its variously shaped rooms, decorated with medieval stained glass and 18th-century imitation-Gothic vaulted ceilings, are impossible to recreate in an exhibition, but the V & A designers and curators have done a good job with a sequence of irregularly sized and shaped spaces decorated in a way that evokes Walpole’s ideal combination of glom and warmth which he christened ‘gloomth’.

But what makes the exhibition memorable are the objects from Walpole’s collection. Strawberry Hill was furnished like the most precious cabinet of curiosities, but the collection was disposed of in a great sale in 1842 and its constituent items have been dispersed around the world. Many of them have been brought together again for the exhibition, and these rooms in the V & A once more give an idea of what this outsize cabinet of curiosities must have been like.

There are paintings of course (including a stunning Eworth) and books about architecture, portraiture, antique sculpture, heraldry, and even the symbols with which ‘swan-uppers’ marked the beaks of their captives. There are objects with interesting historical or artistic associations – John Dee’s mirror, Cardinal Wolsey’s hat, a vase bearing the arms of the Medici. There are designs for different parts of the house – a tentative drawing of an elevation by Chute, a finely worked design for a Gothic ceiling by Robert Adam. Personal memorabilia abound, from Walpole’s wooden cravat carved by Grinling Gibbons to the goldfish pot in which his cat (celebrated by the poet Gray as ‘Demurest of the tabby race’) was drowned.

Drawings and examples of furniture give an idea of the house as it grew, thanks to designs by Walpole’s friends Chute and Bentley, as well as Adam and Walpole himself. And there are hints of Walpole’s other achievements, such as his modestly titled Some Anecdotes of Painting in England, in fact a compendious work still used by art historians.

As for the house itself, it is currently being restored and will reopen to the public later this year. Walpole characterized the fragility of its filigree Gothic when he called it a ‘paper house’. The restoration (marked by a tantalizingly brief video in the exhibition) shows that it has actually proved rather robust. But in another way Walpole was right. It is one of the most written about of all houses, celebrated for its pioneering Gothic asymmetry, its remarkable guidebook (probably the first for a private house), its expression of its owner’s character, and its lasting influence. We’ll carry on writing about it for generations to come.

There is more about the exhibition, which continues until 4 July, here.

Strawberry Hill, interior, from Chambers Book of Days