This book has been loitering on my bookshelves for a while now expectant of a post on here. I say a while when it's been about three years to be almost exact. Which post-Lockdown seems a very long time ago indeed. Anyway it was one of those lucky charity shop finds one comes across occasionally. One that has spurred me to return to the shop in question every time we head over to Carmarthen - just in case.
Now to the book - and it is a sumptuous effort, with some ravishing photography by James Pipkin - a photographer I know little, if anything, about. The blurb on the dust jacket says, in so many words, he's American. The text is by the architectural historian Gervase Jackson-Stops (1947-1995), 'the most excellent of fellows, worth a guinea a minute', who must have been an inspiration for the 'Bachelor Folly' character in Alexandra Artley and John Martin Robinson's 'Official New Georgian Handbook' of 1985. He was educated at Christ Church Oxford and the V&A, in 1972 he joined the staff of the National Trust and in 1975 was appointed one of its architectural advisors. In addition to 'The English Country House' Jackson-Stops and Pipkin collaborated on at least two other books: 'The Country House Garden - A Grand Tour' (Pavillion Books in association with Michael Joseph, 1987) and the catalogue to the 'Treasure Houses of Britain' exhibition which Jackson-Stops curated for The National Gallery of Art in Washington (1985-6). It was the highlight of his curatorial career. He wrote quite a number of other books, many for the National Trust, and was a regular contributor to 'Country Life' magazine.
He is perhaps best remembered in British aesthetic circles not only for 'The English Country House' but the restoration of 'The Menagerie' a folly in Northamptonshire designed in the 1750s by architect/astronomer Thomas Wright of Durham for the then Lord Halifax. Jackson-Stops bought the then near ruin in 1972 for £500, and restoration was apparently completed in 1976. Restoration of the elaborate rococo plasterwork was undertaken with the help of the sculptor Christopher Hobbs and the furnishing by the interior designer Melissa Wyndham. Judging by the photographs the interior very much in the grand style, like a country house only in miniature. Jackson-stops and the Menagerie are included in my recent blog-post on Alvilde Lees-Milne's 'The Englishman's Room'. It also featured in Lucinda Lambton's wonderfully eccentric '40 Minutes' documentary 'Animal Crackers'
In all a gilded life one might expect, but it was not to be. He died at the age of 48 from HIV Aids.
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