Five incredible old English homes built by women

by Briony McDonagh (@BrionyMcDonagh)

The initials ‘ES’ on the parapets are those of Elizabeth Talbot, who built Hardwick Hall. adteasdale, CC BY-SA

We tend to think of the landowners, architects and builders of the past as men, just as we do its politicians, rulers and artists. Women rarely get a look in. But research is uncovering more and more historical examples of women who played a leading role in society, politics or the arts – and the public, it seems, are fascinated. Take Amanda Vickery’s recent series on The Story of Women and Art for example, or the idea that Bach’s wife composed some of his finest works.

Likewise, my ongoing AHRC-funded research project on 'Elite women and the agricultural landscape' is revealing that women owned far more land than was once thought – and this despite the fact that before the late 19th century the law made it difficult for married women to own property of any sort. As a result, we’re also recognising that women played a far greater role in designing, commissioning and building country houses, gardens and parklands than was once imagined.

The nature of surviving historical sources means that women’s contributions are often poorly recorded, but there are exceptions – and we’re uncovering ever more of them. So as the National Trust and English Heritage open their properties to the public for the summer, why not pop along and visit a country house where the influence of a woman in its past is plain to see? Here are a few suggestions to get you going.

 

Temple Newsam

This vast Tudor/Jacobean house stands in grounds near Leeds that were landscaped by Capability Brown. Originally built for Thomas, Lord Darcy (who came to a grizzly end after rebelling against Henry VIII), the house was remodelled in the late 18th century by Frances Ingram, Viscountess Irwin, a highly involved female patron.

Her whopping £60,000 dowry – worth more than £7m in today’s money – had been used to fund improvements to the house and grounds in her husband’s lifetime, but it was only after his death that she was really bitten by the building bug. As a widow, she demolished and rebuilt the entire south wing “for the sole pleasure in building [it] up again” – as she put it – and redecorated much of the rest of the house.

Temple Newsam. theracephotographer, CC BY-SA

 

 

Weston Park

Weston Park is a Palladian-style mansion in Staffordshire largely designed and built by Lady Elizabeth Wilbraham in the 1670s. Weston was her childhood home and while her husband was the legal owner, Wilbraham seems to have retained considerable control of the property during her marriage. We know she was heavily involved in both the design of the new hall and the financial management of the building work, and she’s often hailed as the architect of the house.

 

 

A la Ronde

An unusual 16-sided house near Exmouth, A la Ronde was designed by cousins Jane and Mary Parminter in the 1790s. Somewhat unusually for women at the time, the Parminters had spent nearly a decade travelling in Europe and were apparently inspired by a visit to the octagonal chapel of San Vitale at Ravenna (Italy). The Exmouth property was small and there was no tenanted agricultural land, but the cousins also designed and built a chapel, almshouses and school in the grounds just as much wealthier women did on their estates.

A la Ronde. charliedave, CC BY

Hardwick Hall

Built by Elizabeth Talbot, countess of Shrewsbury (better known as Bess of Hardwick) Hardwick Hall is perhaps the most well-known country house in Britain built by a female landowner. Bess was born into a minor gentry family in Derbyshire, but was a woman of great ambition: she married four times, and the property left to her by her four dead husbands eventually made her the richest woman in England.

She oversaw the building of Chatsworth Hall from about 1550 onwards, and later built not one, but two, grand houses at Hardwick. Soon after finishing the Old Hall in 1591, she began to build the adjacent New Hall, a vast house known for its glittering glass façade and unusual floor plan. Visitors should look out for Bess’s initials “ES”, highlighted for posterity in parapets of the towers and elsewhere in the house.

 

 

Belvoir Castle

Elizabeth Manners, fifth duchess of Rutland, was credited by contemporaries both as the driving force behind the rebuilding of Belvoir Castle in the 1820s and the principal manager of the family’s Leicestershire estate. As one friend noted at the duchess’s death in 1825, the duke “did nothing for himself, and his estates, his horses, his family, everything was under her rule”.

While it’s unclear how far this was a fair assessment of the duke’s contribution, the duchess certainly oversaw landscaping works to the castle grounds and took an active interest in the agricultural aspects of the property, including designing a model farm. She also made improvements to Cheveley Park (Suffolk) in the early 1800s, oversaw the building works at York House on the Mall for her lover the Duke of York and drew up designs for a new palace for George IV.

The list of such houses is growing. So, while undoubtedly disadvantaged both by the law and by societal expectations of their gender, the wives, widows and single women of the past could – and did – build grand country houses. Not all female landowners had access to the money and resources necessary to re-build or significantly extend their country residence of course, but others re-planned gardens and parklands or improved the large agricultural estates which lay beyond the park boundaries. In doing so, these women and others like them had a far greater impact on the landscapes of early modern and Georgian England than history has so far acknowledged.

Briony McDonagh is Lecturer in Human Geography at University of Hull.

An earlier version of this article was published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How I Became a Music Geographer

by Dr Kevin Milburn (@kevmilburn)

Oxbow lakes. That’s the first thing people tend to say to me when I mention that I’m a geographer. Occasionally this is followed by ‘glacial moraine’, or, much rarer still, by ‘Christaller’ and ‘central business districts’. I then helpfully correct them by saying that I’m a music geographer, but invariably that just confuses matters further.

Me. Next to a river. 2013

So, I will try here to explain what it is that I tend to spend my days doing – an exercise likely to prove at least as beneficial to me as to anybody else. But before I do so, a quick detour, a circumlocutory ramble concerning how I reached this point. I was born in the town of… no, too far back, no one cares… Secondary school (onto education at least, vaguely relevant) was divided between Essex and Detroit, two places not well known for being linked, unless that is you had a family member working for the Ford Motor Company. Perhaps being schooled in a different culture gave me a lasting interest in notions of similarity and diversity, in what connects and divides us, core ideas that continue to generate considerable levels of discussion within human geography. More likely is that that is just psychoanalytical babble but it did perhaps stimulate an interest in American subject matter which continues to inform my teaching, as on the World Cities (New York) module, as well as my research (as detailed below).

New York, New York. 2006

Next up, came the ‘geography years’; three years studying the subject as an undergraduate at the University of Manchester. The courses offered back then were interesting up to a point, although truth be told, there was a slight sense that rather too many lecturers were counting down the days till their retirement, and I encountered a more dynamic research environment in the geography department at University College Dublin, where I spent an enjoyable term as a student on the EC’s Erasmus scheme. However, one member of staff at Manchester who certainly was not coasting along at that time was Gill Valentine.  Valentine, now a pro-vice chancellor at the University of Sheffield, was the academic who encouraged me, along with other students, such as John Wylie, now a highly regarded professor of geography at the University of Exeter, to engage with a relatively fresh approach / set of ideas / way of thinking — fresh at least in the 1990s — called ‘new cultural geography’.  Interest in this branch of the subject inspired me to do a dissertation with the badly punning title, ‘On the Road with Jack Kerouac and the New Cultural Geography’.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957. Penquin Books

A decent mark for the Kerouac dissertation prompted me to decide to stay in academia for a bit longer and I successfully applied to do a Masters in Media Culture, taught jointly by the Universities of Strathclyde and Glasgow. The start date of that wouldn’t be for another year however, so in the interim I spent a year working in, and travelling across, Canada (a summer dressed as a monk in a monastic themed restaurant called ‘Brothers’) and Australia (telemarketing to Outback truck drivers, a ‘character building’ experience, and fruit picking in the Bush. The latter was one of the worst jobs imaginable, especially bad were the days spent wrestling with oranges – who knew the trees were so prickly? – and grapes – the juice squirts, the flies descend. Not good).

Once safely ensconced in Glasgow, my longshore drift away from geography and towards popular culture began (years later, I cunningly began to devise various ruses to bring the two together).  On my Media Culture course students had the option of focusing either on TV and film or on popular music. I chose the latter; I'd always been a music nut and had spent a good deal more time than I should have as an undergraduate writing music reviews for Manchester's student paper.  Extended essays on topics of such pressing social concern as the semiotics of New Romantic fashion followed. The culmination of this period of wrapt self-absorption was my dissertation: The production, marketing and consumption of popular music as high art: a case-study of David Sylvian’. Somewhat miraculously, all of this training in becoming a pop pub bore actually led to me landing a job. I know, amazing right?!

David Sylvian, Brilliant Trees, 1984. Virgin Records

A couple of months after leaving Glasgow I was in the capital, doing marketing (still not a term I fully understand) on an event called London Music Week, an exhibition, conference and live music event co-sponsored by Music Week (the music industry’s trade magazine), Radio 1 and MTV. After this I joined the Mercury Music Prize, the annual prize and awards ceremony for the best album of the year from the UK and Ireland, http://www.mercuryprize.com/ Joining the Prize saw me reunited, sort of, with my Masters supervisor from Strathclyde, Simon Frith, who has been chair of the Mercury Prize judging panel since the prize started in 1992 and is widely acknowledged as the world’s foremost academic when it comes to popular music. I worked full-time at the prize for many years, most of them as a director; I stopped working full-time for it in 2008 but have continued my long association with it, to varying degrees, ever since. This year's shortlisted albums are announced a week today (10th September) in Covent Garden, whilst the decision on who will follow the likes of PJ Harvey, The xx, Alt-J and James Blake in becoming the overall winner of the Prize, will be made at the show at the Roundhouse, north London on 29th October.

Working for the Prize, and by extension, with the music and media industries was enjoyable and very rarely dull; my role included: getting the entries in; choosing and liaising with the judges; running retail campaigns in HMV, Fopp, Virgin and so on; writing press releases, website copy and also event scripts for hosts Jools Holland and Lauren Laverne; presenting to sponsors, hosting media announcements and doing lots of press and broadcast interviews. Here’s one that I did with BBC 6Music (with my name mis-spelt most of the way through!) that explains a bit more about how the prize works: http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/news/20080722_mercury.shtml and here's another with The Independent, one that was also syndicated to the Belfast Telegraph: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/music/news/the-night-of-the-unknowns-the-mercury-music-prize-28062460.html  Quite a lot of my time at the Prize was spent talking about, and talking up, the shortlisted albums, such as here, in relation to Thom Yorke’s solo album, Eraser: http://www.bbc.co.uk/oxford/content/articles/2006/07/19/eraser.shtml

Mercury Prize Albums of the Year Launch, 2013 (t); A Mercury Prize / HMV retail display, 2009 (b) 

However, after a few years at the Mercury, and some might say rather inexplicably,
I began to miss academia. So I did what any sane person would do and started another Masters, this time in Japanese Cultural Studies. I undertook the degree on a part-time basis at Birkbeck, University of London whilst still working at the prize. Here I am talking about combining the two in an interview I did for The Guardian at that time:
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2006/oct/09/careers.theguardian8

My considerable interest in Japan was prompted by a few trips I made to the country in quick succession at the turn of the century. The degree was, as its name suggests, essentially Cultural Studies but with a Japanese emphasis. Debate and ideas encountered there, most notably surrounding issues of identity, representation, and Orientalism, have continued to inform my research and my teaching, most notably in Hull on the Imagining Place, Cultural and Historical Geography and World Cities (Tokyo) modules.  The course was wide ranging and I covered topics as diverse as Tokyo’s 1920s café culture and jazz age, Okinawan modes of cultural protest, Japanese food and identity, and representations of Japan in travel writing and western films. Again, when it came to my dissertation I focused on popular music, this one had the snappy title of: ‘Self-reflexive Orientalism and Cultural Hybridity: a Case Study of Ryuichi Sakamoto and the Yellow Magic Orchestra’.   

Yellow Magic Orchestra, Yellow Magic Orchestra, 1979. A&M Records

As with my earlier Kerouac dissertation, the enjoyment I derived from writing this, allied to some positive feedback, encouraged me to think about pursuing such things in more depth. Therefore, in 2008, I began to scale back my involvement with the Mercury and started a PhD in the Department of Geography at the University of Nottingham. I chose this department principally because Andrew Leyshon and David Matless, two out of the three editors of a book that had captured my attention, The Place of Music, were based there. Andrew became one of my PhD supervisors (along with Alex Vasudevan), whilst David would be one of my viva examiners, the other being Simon Rycroft, also a contributor to that still important collection of writings on music and geography.

Andrew Leyshon, David Matless and George Revill (eds), The Place of Music, 1998. Guilford Press

The content and focus of my PhD thesis evolved during the course of its gestation, as it seems do most, but at its core was an investigation into why and how the city, particularly the nocturnal city, has been aestheticized in certain forms of (generally male authored) romantic balladry and electronica.  Initially, the plan was to produce a kind of 50 year sweep of this topic but it soon became apparent that even a work of 100,000 words would struggle to accommodate all I wanted to say. Sadly, contemporary musicians whose work I reflected on, including Burial, Carl Craig and Richard Hawley, were put to one side (to be ‘re-mobilised’ years later as examples in undergraduate lectures years…) Instead, the focus congealed around two case studies, Frank Sinatra and The Blue Nile, the latter a trio most active in the 1980s, acts with sufficient similarities and differences to warrant being studied together in a comparative fashion in an extended piece of work. Not only were there clear links between the music of both, but there was also no shortage of cultural connections, particularly musical ones, between the cities with which the two artists were most readily identified: New York (Sinatra) and Glasgow (The Blue Nile), something which the thesis explored in some depth when exploring relationships between notions of place and the production and reception of popular music. As is often the way, the title came quite late, and again brevity was not its strong point: ‘Songs of the City: geographies of metropolitanism and mobility in the music of Frank Sinatra and The Blue Nile’.

The Blue Nile, Hats, 1989. Linn Records (l); Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours, 1955. Capitol Records (r)

Writing the PhD was great fun; no misery memoir here concerning my experience of doing it. Besides the actual writing and editing, one of the most enjoyable aspects of doing the doctorate was getting the opportunity to travel and to attend conferences in many different places, including London, Exeter, Aberystwyth, Durham, Edinburgh, and, easily the most exciting of the lot, Kyoto.

Kyoto Railway Station, 2001

Following completion of my PhD there followed a spell in which I divided my time between the Research and Higher Education Department at the RGS-IBG in Kensington and convening a 3rd year module on Auditory Cultures in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. I got to know the East Midlands Trains timetable better than I ever wished to.

Next, and we are nearly at the end destination now, I took up a Research Fellow position for a few months in the Department of Geography at the University of Exeter, working on two AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) funded public engagement projects, both of which were led by Nicola Thomas, who I first encountered at the Kyoto conference. Given that I am writing this a few days after attending the RGS-IBG conference, it reaffirms the importance of being present at such events (especially if they are held somewhere nice…)

The first of the projects that I worked on with Nicola involved developing a historical geography prototype Android app under the aegis of REACT, http://www.react-hub.org.uk/ It covered many themes but foremost among them were issues of gender, biography, race and status in the Indian Raj, using the life, celebrity and experiences of Mary Curzon, the former Vicereine of India, as something of a prism with which to interrogate these themes; here’s a blog I wrote that highlights how fashion became enrolled in such discourses: http://www.react-hub.org.uk/books-and-print-sandbox/projects/2013/digitising-the-dollar-princess/journal/delhi-durbar-dress-in-derbyshire/ The second AHRC project involved me initiating a timeline for the 80^th anniversary of the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen. Like the Curzon one, this was largely archival in nature and involved extensive research into the Guild's history, most of which was undertaken at The British Library, the Gloucestershire County archives and the Crafts Study Centre in Farnham.

And then finally, in 2013, to Hull. To that place with the distinctive and likeable “end of the line sense of freedom”, as Philip Larkin so accurately put it. An end of the lineness that is even more appropriate in this context given that mobility is one of the geographical themes that I’m most interested in and because my arrival in Hull is where this blog kisses the buffers.

Vintage LNER Hull and London poster

It turns out that I never did get round in this blog to saying what it is that I do all day. I suspect I prevaricate for the most part, hence not getting around here to saying what it is that I do... But I do know what it is that excites me about being a cultural/music geographer: it is coming across all those seemingly random but actually not random at all connections, that sense of “oh look, this links to that, and that informs this.” That’s what keeps me interested, that exploration of those endlessly rich links between, for example, Kerouac and Sinatra (artists both at their prime in 1950s America), between London and Tokyo (Olympic cities), New York and Glasgow (creative connections), Liverpool and Hull (Cities of Culture) and many more besides. And the geography department at Hull is an excellent place in which to feed one’s wonder and intrigue about such things. 

Should you want a or a more straightforward account of my teaching and research there’s always my Hull webpage: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/science/gees/staff/milburn.aspx Additionally, on my blog, www.sonicgeographies.com, I write about music and geography; I also tweet (@kevmilburn), sometimes about the former, and occasionally about the latter #butiamstillcluelessaboutoxbowlakes.

How I became a historical geographer

By Briony McDonagh (@BrionyMcDonagh) 

Hi all! This is the latest blog in our series about how we came to do what we do. My name's Briony and I'm a lecturer in human geography here at GEES in Hull. My research interests lie in historical and cultural geography, and I’m particularly interested in how issues of power, space, identity and gender have been played out in the British landscape over the last 1000 years.

Like many of my colleagues I certainly didn't know I wanted to be an academic as a child, but I did like old and ruined buildings, Time Team and trying to figure out why the landscape looked like it did. My friends and I spent considerable amounts of time exploring an abandoned group of farm buildings not far from school (below), which it later turned out were 16th century in date and built from the ruins of a medieval monastery. For some reason I've long ago forgotten, I chose not to take History at GCSE, but ended up taking  a combination of A-level subjects which included both Geography and Classics. I applied for degree courses in a range of subjects but finally settled on a BA hons in Geography at University of Nottingham with the intention of applying for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office when I left.

Haltemprice Priory Farm © Mr Gareth Parry LRPS

From: http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/Details/Default.aspx?id=164688&mode=adv

That didn't happen, of course, principally because I got bitten by the research bug. I took second year courses which included classes on ancient woodlands, urban histories and the mappa mundi and third year modules which involved fieldwork on Italian environmental histories and the urban plan of Revolutionary Paris, along with archival work in the University of Nottingham's Manuscripts and Special Collections. I was hooked. I chose to stay at Nottingham to complete a Masters in Landscape and Culture – which included training in standing buildings and landscape archaeology – followed by 3 years writing a PhD on the historical geographies of the Yorkshire Wolds before c. 1600. It was during this time I developed my current interdisciplinary approach to the landscape combining documentary research, maps, landscape archaeology and theoretical perspectives drawn from cultural geography and elsewhere.

The day I submitted by PhD I was offered a job with the Victoria County History contributing to a volume on the history of Howden and the surrounding region. I did this for 7 months before securing a longer-term post-doctoral position working on an AHRC-funded project researching the long-term impacts of parliamentary enclosure on the landscapes and communities of Northamptonshire (you can find out more about the project here). As part of my post, I also taught in the History department at the University of Hertfordshire, teaching a second year social history course and a third year module on the history of the English landscape, something I absolutely loved doing. Whilst working through endless boxes of archival materials at the Northamptonshire Record Office I came across Elizabeth Prowse, a committed agricultural improver who radically remodelled her estate during her 43-year widowhood (for more on Prowse, see my chapter on her here). It was as a result of researching and writing about Prowse that I began to wonder about the contribution made by other elite women to managing and improving landed estates in Georgian England. We know many male landowners pushed forward enclosure and introduced agricultural improvements on their estates, but we know almost nothing about the part female landowners played in the changes which transformed the English landscape in the century after about 1730. Women certainly owned property as widows and heiresses and sometimes even wives, but how involved were they in its management and improvement?

Wicken House (Northamptonshire), the home of Elizabeth Prowse

These are the questions that my current research project sets out to answer. Whilst still working as a post-doc in 2009, I secured a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship for the project which I then undertook at the University of Nottingham between 2010 and 2014 (the end date for the project was twice extended as a result of the arrival of two little people in my life). Running my own project was a great experience and I later managed to secure additional funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to write a book from the project. I transferred this grant to the University of Hull when I took up my post here in early 2014, and I’m now about halfway through writing up the book (to be published by Ashgate, hopefully in 2015).

So after almost 7 years of post-doctoral and fixed term posts, I finally have a permanent job. I have to admit that when I was completing my PhD, I never imagined I would spend quite so many years in post-doctoral positions. But those 7 years have given me the real luxury of being able to conduct a huge amount of research on a wide range of topics. In addition to my book on elite women, I'm currently working on projects on late medieval popular geographical imaginations, early modern anti-enclosure protest (see, for example, https://hull.academia.edu/BrionyMcDonagh) and the land rights movement in the 21st century (you can listen to me talk about the latter project here). I'm hoping having got all this research under my belt will stand me in good stead in my new job given all the demands on my time that a larger teaching role and increased departmental administration are likely to bring. All in, I’ve certainly got plenty to keep me busy for the next 7 years!