'The Englishman's Room'

      A return to the literary work of the late Alvilde Lees Milne (1909-1994).  She was the wife of the James Lees Milne, the writer and diarist, and in her own right a writer and talented garden designer. 

     'The Englishman's Room', 1986, was her second book on interiors, following on from 'The English Woman's House' of 1984. In both books she worked with the photographer Derry Moore. Earlier she had collaborated with fellow gardener and writer Rosemary Verey on 'The English Woman's Garden' and The English Gentleman's Garden'. I think you may be able to spot a pattern here. 

     The format remains the same here as in the earlier books with la Lees Milne supplying a short preface and the gentlemen an essay each on their favourite room, some 33 in all. All the usual suspects are there: David Hicks, Christopher Gibbs, John Milnaric, Richard Buckle and Tom Parr: the sort who will also have appeared in World of Interiors around that time. And there are some new faces too; Gervase Jackson Stops, Gavin Stamp, Simon Blow. Most choose a room in their house or flat, but not all.  Sir John Gielgud, for instance, chose his old dressing room at the Haymarket Theatre. (And very nice it is too.) James Lees Milne chose his place of work: the sumptuous Neo-classical library in Landsdown Crescent, Bath, designed in the 1830s by H E Goodridge for William Beckford.  (The Lees Milnes lived in Badminton, and JLM used to commute daily.)

     'As for my books I simply worship them. I am not a bibliophile and have no rare books, apart from a handful which belonged to Mr Beckford and which I like to think may in his day have reposed upon my shelves. One of the things I most regret is having been obliged at certain times of my life to part with volumes.... I simply have to be surrounded by books of reference. After all, they consist of the profoundest thoughts and most beautiful words of the greatest men and women of the world encapsulated within one's reach. They are the most necessary things in life. They are life itself.' 

     I suppose this book could be seen as a snapshot of 1980s tastes, but I would caution against that idea. Some of these rooms were designed decades, if not centuries before; others are not the work of a single-minded designer or amateur creating a self-conscious piece of design but the gentle, culminative effort of decades; places of practical comfort. It's all pretty timeless really. The only real disappointment is David Hick's bedroom - just a little lifeless. Finally a word about Derry Moore's photography; it is superb. 

The English Woman's House

   It's been a long while since I posted my article on the two books 'The Englishman's Garden' & 'The Englishwoman's Garden', edited by Alvilde Lees Milne, (the complex, if not at times downright difficult, wife of James Lees Milne), and Rosemary Verrey the famous gardener. 2014 in fact.  Since then I've kept a look out for other books by Alvilde and - having parted ways with Rosemary Verrey - her new collaborator, the photographer Derry Moore.  I was delighted therefore, sometime before Christmas to come across 'The Englishwoman's House' which was published in 1984, Collins, London.  The format, a good one, remained the same as the previous books:  short pieces by each home owner accompanied by Derry Moore's photographs, introduction by Alvilde and foreword by well known commentator in this case HRH Princess Michael of Kent.

   A mixed bag of interiors they are - most conventional upper-class trad, but none the worse for that I feel.  A lot of them were still 'Sixties' in feel - lots, still, of seagrass squares for instance - though you won't find any Op-art. The sitting room of Laura Ashley is a fine example of that; with its spare use of Victoriana it fits almost neatly into the sort of interior examined by Mary Gilliatt in her magisterial, and 'SomethingoftheChameleon' favourite, 'English Style' of 1967.  Another interior that stood out for me was the Salisbury home of Janet Stone, the widow of the remarkable Reynolds Stone.  Remarkable too in her own right was Janet Stone, as a new book of her photographs shows.  Imagine the sheer joy of a sitting room lined with paintings of Welsh mountains by John Piper. I call that bliss.

 Laura Ashley's Welsh home

Barbara Cartland's home in, I think, Hertfordshire.  'Sixties' taste.

Diana Cage in Cumbria

Love those pale blue walls in the hall

With Janet Stone in Salisbury

Another beautiful shade of blue

Alvilde Lees-Milne & Rosemary Verey

   As readers of the this blog will know I have an interest in the twentieth century diarist, novelist and art historian James Lees Milne.  Reading the Bloch biography I was struck by the formidable character of his wife Alvilde.  Like her husband she was bisexual, indeed not too long after their marriage Alvilde embarked on a tempestuous relationship with Vita Sackville West.  What interested me, and let's be frank gave me a bit hope, was her late flowering career as both an author and garden designer.  In her seventies she collaborated with another renown gardener, Rosemary Verey (1918-2001), (her husband David Verey wrote a number of the Shell County Guides) on producing two books:  'The Englishwoman's Garden' and 'The Englishman's Garden'.  Not only that but she found herself designing a garden for Mick Jagger of all people.  

   Browsing through a well-known internet auction site I came across both books.  Although the quality of the photographs inside as printed is not up to today's standards both books do offer a snapshot of post-war English garden design.  The structure is the same in both books: there is a forward by a well-known gardener, followed by an introductory essay by Alvilde and Rosemary and then a collection of illustrated essays each on a particular garden written by the owner herself/himself.  The idea for the format belonged to the publisher Sebastian Walker and it works very well, giving, amongst other things, a real insight into the long process of creating a good garden.
   The cover of the English woman's garden, which shows part of Rosemary Verey's Cotswold garden was alone worth the cost of the book.  The laburnum walk looks magnificent, and I love the contrast between the hanging clusters yellow flowers hanging there like bunches of grapes and the purple globes of the alliums beneath, which seem quite happy in the partial shade, which I didn't expect. A bit disappointing, though, that all the gardens illustrated show a propensity to nasty concrete paving, but that was the times!

   The men featured tend to be more famous - Beverley Nichols, Sir Frederick Ashton, Nicholas Ridley, for instance - than the women gardeners, though emphasis is rightly placed upon the important role women played in the creation of the English Garden.  As James Lees Milne's biographer points out of the gardeners included in these books half the women were aristocrats and half the men were gay!

   The collaboration between Alvilde and Rosemary was not to last, but Alvilde working with the photographer Derry Moore went on to produce a number of books on both interior design and garden design, such as 'The Englishman's Room' which I have written about before in connection with the architectural historian and campaigner Gavin Stamp.

Currently reading....'Anti Ugly'

   'Anti Ugly' is a collection of short essays - articles, really - written for 'Apollo' magazine by the architectural historian Gavin Stamp.  I first became aware of Gavin Stamp in the early Eighties via colour-supplement article on the 'Englishman's Room' - a selection of pieces from a book of the same name written by Alvilde Lees Milne, photographs by Derry Moore.  I regret that he (along with Brian Sewell and Vivienne Westwood) didn't lecture at 'The Prince of Wales's Institute of Architecture' at least while I was there.*  He's also a good artist, producing pen and ink drawings with an Edwardian feel, which can't be bad.
   The title, (also the title of one of the essays), refers to a student led campaign in the sixties which ostensibly was concerned with quality of contemporary architecture but in fact only demonstrated outside modern Classical and traditional buildings.  This article and others importantly remind us of the damage to the built environment wrought by that almost manic love of the New, that love of Modernism and Modernity that seems (almost) to have saturated British life in the Post War years - what Christopher Brooker called 'Neophilia'.  The loses were great, the scars still born by our cities, and disproportionally by the communities those interventions were often designed to help.  It's hard to disagree with his opinions; he is rightly critical about the recent surfeit of monuments particularly in London, which are mostly of poor quality - he doesn't mention it but RAF monument in the National Arboretum is a real shocker. (It really is appalling.) He is also right to applaud the recent redevelopments of St Pancras and King's Cross stations in London.

Gavin Stamp's bright, cheerful yellow drawing room features in the latest post on the blog Bible of British Taste.  Here's a link

*We did ask our tutors to invite them, but nothing happened.  Looking back now, I realise I shouldn't have been surprised by the inertia, not only was the place seriously dysfunctional but our head of year disliked 'initiative'.