Sir John Betjeman was an English poet, writer, and broadcaster. He was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death. He was a founding member of The Victorian Society and a passionate defender of Victorian architecture, helping to save St Pancras railway station from demolition. He began his career as a journalist and ended it as one of the most popular British Poets Laureate and a much-loved figure on British television.
Castell Coch is a 19th-century Gothic Revival castle built above the village of Tongwynlais in South Wales. The first castle on the site was built by the Normans after 1081 to protect the newly conquered town of Cardiff and control the route along the Taff Gorge. Abandoned shortly afterwards, the castle's earth motte was reused by Gilbert de Clare as the basis for a new stone fortification, which he built between 1267 and 1277 to control his freshly annexed Welsh lands. This castle may have been destroyed in the native Welsh rebellion of 1314. In 1760, the castle ruins were acquired by John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, as part of a marriage settlement that brought the family vast estates in South Wales.
A settle is a wooden bench, usually with arms and a high back, long enough to accommodate three or four sitters.
Knightshayes Court is a Victorian country house near Tiverton, Devon, England, designed by William Burges for the Heathcoat-Amory family. Nikolaus Pevsner describes it as "an eloquent expression of High Victorian ideals in a country house of moderate size." The house is Grade I listed. The gardens are Grade II* listed in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.
Carlton House was a mansion in Westminster, best known as the town residence of King George IV. It faced the south side of Pall Mall, and its gardens abutted St James's Park in the St James's district of London. The location of the house, now replaced by Carlton House Terrace, was a main reason for the creation of John Nash's ceremonial route from St James's to Regent's Park via Regent Street, Portland Place and Park Square: Lower Regent Street and Waterloo Place were originally laid out to form the approach to its front entrance.
Lotherton Hall is a country house near Aberford, West Yorkshire, England. It lies a short distance from the A1(M) motorway, 200 miles (320 km) equidistant between London and Edinburgh. It is one of nine sites in the Leeds Museums & Galleries group.
Edward William Godwin was a progressive English architect-designer, who began his career working in the strongly polychromatic "Ruskinian Gothic" style of mid-Victorian Britain, inspired by The Stones of Venice, then moved on to provide designs in the "Anglo-Japanese taste" of the Aesthetic movement and Whistler's circle in the 1870s. Godwin's influence can be detected in the later Arts and Crafts movement.
William Burges was an English architect and designer. Among the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, he sought in his work to escape from both nineteenth-century industrialisation and the Neoclassical architectural style and re-establish the architectural and social values of a utopian medieval England. Burges stands within the tradition of the Gothic Revival, his works echoing those of the Pre-Raphaelites and heralding those of the Arts and Crafts movement.
Charles Francis Annesley Voysey was an English architect and furniture and textile designer. Voysey's early work was as a designer of wallpapers, fabrics and furnishings in a Arts and Crafts style and he made important contribution to the Modern Style, and was recognized by the seminal The Studio magazine. He is renowned as the architect of several country houses.
The Tower House, 29 Melbury Road, is a late-Victorian townhouse in the Holland Park district of Kensington and Chelsea, London, built by the architect and designer William Burges as his home. Designed between 1875 and 1881, in the French Gothic Revival style, it was described by the architectural historian J. Mordaunt Crook as "the most complete example of a medieval secular interior produced by the Gothic Revival, and the last". The house is built of red brick, with Bath stone dressings and green roof slates from Cumbria, and has a distinctive cylindrical tower and conical roof. The ground floor contains a drawing room, a dining room and a library, while the first floor has two bedrooms and an armoury. Its exterior and the interior echo elements of Burges's earlier work, particularly Park House in Cardiff and Castell Coch. It was designated a Grade I listed building in 1949.
Combe Florey House in Combe Florey, Somerset, England is a country house dating from the early 18th century. It replaced an Elizabethan manor house which was pulled down after the English Civil War. The gatehouse to the original manor survives. In the mid-20th century, the house was home to the writer Evelyn Waugh who died there in 1966 and is buried next to the churchyard of the adjacent Church of St Peter & St Paul. Combe Florey House is a Grade II listed building.
The Golden Bed is a bed designed by the English architect and designer William Burges in 1879 for the guest bedroom of the home that he designed for himself in Holland Park, The Tower House. It is now in the collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) in South Kensington. The bed was made by John Walden and carved by Thomas Nicholls. The painting in the central panel of the headboard was executed by Henry Holiday, and the motifs and figures on the bed painted by Fred Weekes. The bed is made from polished hardwood, mahogany and pine.
The Higgins Art Gallery & Museum is the principal art gallery and museum in Bedford, Bedfordshire, England, run by Bedford Borough Council and the trustees of the Cecil Higgins Collection.
John Malcolm Andrews is an English author on antiques, journalist and crime writer, engineering businessman and author – as John Malcolm – of the Tim Simpson series of art crime novels, author as John Andrews of the first Price Guide to Antique Furniture (1968) and Managing Editor of Antique Collecting magazine.
The Great Bookcase is a large piece of painted furniture designed by the English architect and designer William Burges. The bookcase is 10 feet (3.0 m) high and 5 feet (1.5 m) wide. It has been described as "the most important example of Victorian painted furniture ever made."
The Narcissus washstand is a piece of painted furniture made by the Victorian architect and designer William Burges in 1867. It was originally made for Burges's set of rooms at Buckingham Street and subsequently moved to his bedroom at The Tower House, the house he designed for himself in Holland Park in London. John Betjeman, later Poet Laureate and a leading champion of the art and architecture of the Victorian Gothic Revival, was left the remaining lease on the Tower House, including some of the furniture, by E. R. B. Graham in 1961. He gave the washstand, which he found in a second-hand shop in Lincoln, to the novelist Evelyn Waugh who featured it in his 1957 novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, mirroring a real-life incident when Waugh, in the grip of bromide poisoning, became convinced that an ornamental tap was missing from the washstand.
The Red Bed is a piece of painted furniture designed by the English architect and designer William Burges made between 1865 and 1867. Built of mahogany, painted blood red and decorated with imagery of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, it was made for Burges's rooms at Buckingham Street, and later moved to his bedroom at The Tower House, the home he designed for himself in Holland Park. Burges wanted to fill his home with furniture decorated with paintings; they served not only their obvious practical purposes, “but spoke and told a story”. After catching a chill while engaged on works for the Marquess of Bute at Cardiff, Burges returned to the Tower House and died in the Red Bed, aged 53, on 20 April 1881.
Modern Gothic exhibition cabinet is a piece of Modern Gothic furniture now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although its design was once attributed to Philadelphia architect Frank Furness and furniture maker Daniel Pabst, MMA now credits its design and manufacture to Pabst alone. At 8 feet (2.4 m) tall, it is an unusually large and polychromatic American example of the rare style.
From 1865 until his death in 1881 the Victorian architect William Burges undertook the reconstruction of Cardiff Castle for his patron, John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute. The rebuilding saw the creation of some of the most significant Victorian interiors in Britain.
