Stately Homes and Country Gardens

The English Country House is a unique symbol known the world over. This course will teach you how to read the floor plan and elevations of the country house and its surrounding landscape and help you understand how the unique relationship between client and architect can produce leaps of artistic greatness.

About the Course

Tutor Profile: Our courses are taught by knowledgeable and enthusiastic academic staff.  Staff are appointed to ORA courses because they are experts in their field, can demonstrate a passion for their subject, and can convey that passion to our students. In the main, the teaching staff come from Oxford University, but we also recruit from other universities both in the UK and abroad. Teachers often host one off informal tea time talks on a specific subject of interest. These are available to all students to attend and to engage in the debates that follow.

Course Details

The course sets the English country house in its social, political and economic contexts. We look at the evolution of the country house from its origins in the fortified manor houses of the middle ages, through Elizabethan Prodigy Houses, to the cultural and artistic apotheosis of the country house in the eighteenth-century. We will also consider the changing relationship between the country house and metropolitan centres, the political importance of the country house, the interplay between the country house and the English landscape garden and how the country house has been represented in film and popular culture. The course will also address both the decline of the country house, considering why in 1974 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London hosted an exhibition entitled ‘The Destruction of the Country House’, and its subsequent Brideshead Revisited inspired revival.

Course Schedule

Please find below a provisional list of destinations to be visited during the course. Note that this itinerary is subject to change, and trip arrangements will be finalised closer to the start of the course.

DAY 1: The Fortified Manor House

In this trip students explore the origins of the English Stately Home in the fortified manor house of the late medieval period. The excursion for this aspect of the course will be to Broughton Castle, the home of Lord and Lady Sale and Sele, one of the most beautiful late medieval houses in the United Kingdom. Broughton will give students the opportunity to explore how a home evolves over the centuries to match the needs of its inhabitants, which gradually shifted from defensive priorities to the need to accommodate family and visits in comfort.

DAY 2: The Restoration Stately Home

With the end of the of the Commonwealth rule of Oliver Cromwell and the return of Charles II the stately home, after centuries of gestation, was finally born. The Restoration country house made use of the new European style of Classicism to express its owners’ intellectual and cultural pretensions. Students will explore this aesthetic and cultural shift in detail by visiting the visually striking Ashdown House. The house takes inspiration from both Classical and Dutch styling and is one of the best examples of Restoration architecture in the United Kingdom.

DAY 3: The Eighteenth-Century

The eighteenth-century witnessed the apotheosis of the English stately home. In this trip students will visit the acclaimed Compton Verney, designed by Robert Adam. This house has been sympathetically turned into an art gallery and provides a fascinating indication of how the country houses of the eighteenth-century have continued to be relevant cultural forces into the twenty-first century.

DAY 4: House or Palace? Statement Architecture and the Stately Home

In this trip students will explore the house and gardens of Blenheim Palace, birthplace of Winston Churchill and home to the Dukes of Marlborough for three-hundred years. Blenheim Palace scales new heights of baroque extravagance and is unmatched in its visual impact throughout the United Kingdom. Students will explore how the architect Sir John Vanbrugh immortalised the 1st Duke of Marlborough and his victories over the French in stone. Students will also consider why the homes of the aristocracy are grander than the palaces of the British royal family.

DAY 5: The English Landscape Garden

In this trip students will explore the unique gardens of Stowe. Students will experience the relationship between the stately home and its garden by walking through the most famous English landscape garden in the world. Stowe was the wonder of the eighteenth-century and continues to awe visitors with its beauty today.

DAY 6: The End of an Era? Moral Decline and the Stately Home

In this trip students will visit the beautiful house of Cliveden, overlooking the River Thames. During the twentieth-century the house belonged to Waldorf and Nancy Astor and became the hub of high society throughout the roaring twenties. In the 1960s the house was the setting for the infamous Profumo Affair which scandalised the United Kingdom.