Quite a treat to see the midsummer sun low over Capability Brown’s park in such a way that it was relatively easy to imagine how Turner might have experienced the view out of the bedroom window in the late 1820s.
The long, French, main façade without the original central low domed roof which would have accentuated the middle section:-
We spent the afternoon at Woolbeding, an early eighteenth-century manor house which was leased in the early 1970s by Simon Sainsbury and Stewart Grimshaw and comprehensively restored, with help in the layout of the garden from Lanning Roper.
The house:-
I wish I had read Ian Nairn’s paean to Chichester Cathedral in his aborted contributions to Pevsner’s Sussex, 33 pages of vigorous eulogy, including what he describes as an Aesthetic Summary, not something one normally gets in Pevsner. He describes Bishop Luffa’s original design as ‘paying for its balance and reasonableness with a lack of intensity: good committee-man’s Romanesque’. We only had time to drift in just before evensong, admiring the exterior, much of which is a replica following the collapse of the crossing tower and its reconstruction in the 1860s:-
The Romanesque decoration of the porch at the west end of the south aisle:-
We drove through the Weald to a sixtieth birthday lunch. We admired the country settling into late autumn:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 