English Voices by Ferdinand Mount

Author:Ferdinand Mount [Mount, Ferdinand]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781471155994
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

MARK GIROUARD AND THE ENGLISH TOWN

Waking up in a strange English town is a pleasure I find hard to explain to most Englishmen. Even the smell of burnt coffee from the dining room and the hum of the Hoover in the shuttered bar quicken the anticipation. In fact, the Trust House Forte experience is a necessary prelude to stepping out into the market square and looking for the cathedral tower behind the scaffolding, the sooty mass of the old town hall (closed, except Wednesdays), the Georgian terrace dolled up in Civic Trust pastel shades, the Corn Exchange, now reserved for bingo and the amateur dramatics society. Was much corn ever exchanged there? The merchants usually preferred the pub. Even the havoc wrought by the ring road and the multistorey car park cannot put off a hardcore urbanist, a perversion not often confessed to in this nation of rural romantics. By contrast, I find a faint melancholy stealing over me on joining the queue to pay £4 for a guided tour of Sir Leicester Dedlock’s seat at Chesney Wold (Teas and Gift Shop in the Stables).

It is a delight to recognize in Dr Girouard a fellow deviant. In this neat and beautiful volume, the author of The Victorian Country House and Life in the English Country House takes to the streets and, so to speak, comes out. He speaks with unrestrained nostalgia of driving down, when an officer cadet at Eaton Hall, off the treeless and terrifying moors into Huddersfield:

What a city! For a mile or so we drove along a street of palaces – palaces which were admittedly as bleak and unadorned as the neighbouring Pennines, but still amazing in the height and power of their mighty stone facades, piled up storey after storey, and row after row of windows. I had never been to Florence, but this, it seemed to me, must be what Florence was like.

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