The Tower of London is one of the great sights of the capital, a place that is as steeped in history as it has sometimes been, through the numerous executions it has witnessed, drenched in blood.  In this week’s episode of Your Places or Mine, Dr John Goodall, Britain’s foremost historian of castle architecture, discusses this extraordinary fortification-cum-palace with Professor Clive Aslet, describing both its architectural features and the uses that it has served through the centuries.  

Sir Edwin (Ned) Lutyens’s old friend Edward Hudson founded Country Life in 1897.  A London printer, he was not a countryman, but commissioned three country houses as well as the Country Life office in Covent Garden.  Convinced of Lutyens’s genius, he also ‘boomed’ him through the magazine and lost no opportunity to promote his career.

The first of a series on the early-20th-century architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, this episode examines the relationship between the young Ned — gangly, witty, shy — and the craftswoman turned gardener Gertrude Jekyll, his senior by 25 years. 

Clive and John discuss one of the most spectacular medieval buildings in Britain, Westminster Hall. Originally built by William the Conqueror’s heir, the voracious William Rufus, it was a structure of immense ambition — said to be the biggest hall of its kind north of the Alps. 

One of the greatest of HM the King’s many enthusiasms is architecture.  He made his first pronouncements on the subject in 1984 with the famous ‘Carbuncle’ speech and has been championing the causes of tradition, community, Classicism and Transylvania ever since. 

In this first episode of Your Places or Mine, Clive and John are in London’s Pimlico, exploring the dynamic personality of the great Victorian builder Thomas Cubitt and the area’s struggle to become fashionable.