I haven’t been to Boughton since I was an undergraduate.   The only thing I remember from my previous visit was a long corridor of linen cupboards and being told that every year the family laid in a new set of linen which they used sequentially.   They were still using eighteenth-century linen.   It’s a sleeping beauty of a house, lost in the deepest Northamptonshire countryside and not much occupied since the death of John Montagu, second duke of Montagu in 1749, used by the family only for summer holidays.

This is the main north front, so French in style because it was almost certainly designed by an (unknown) French architect or designer after Ralph Montagu, first Duke of Montagu returned from serving as Ambassador in Paris:

This is the west front looking out onto the remains of the original formal garden:

Indoors, I was only able to photograph a small number of details which caught my eye.   The portrait of John Montagu, Marquis of Monthermer by Pompeo Batoni:

A floral painting, I assume by Jean Baptiste Monnoyer:

A detail of a seventeenth-century mirror:

The state bed:

And the view from the window:

I was told last night about the history of early gaslight in London.   First used for domestic lighting by William Murdoch in Cornwall in 1792, it was used to celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Wales in 1807.   The Prince then became the patron of gaslight.   In 1812, the Gas-Light and Coke Company was established to provide gas lighting throughout the city and a year later Westminster Bridge was lit by gas.   The availability of gas lighting then accelerated the industrial revolution because it made it possible to work longer hours.   I hadn’t realised that it’s gas which lights the path through St. James’s Park at night.

This is a picture of one of the gaslights in St. James’s Park:

And alongside Green Park:

I have always loved Oare House just below the Marlborough Downs ever since I visited it as a schoolboy on my bicycle.   The house was built for a wine merchant, Henry Deacon, in 1740.   He took on as an apprentice a poor boy called John Hiller from Ireland who married Deacon’s widow, inherited his house, and left it to his sister’s son, a classic eighteenth-century story.   In the early 1920s it was extended in a playful Georgian style by Clough Williams Ellis for Sir Geoffrey Fry of the chocolate family, who became private secretary to Stanley Baldwin: