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Alnwick Castle in Northumberland is one of the most spectacular castles in England, an immense fortification that guarded the border with Scotland for centuries. The Percy family who built it had almost king-like power over their territory – and were not above rebelling against the king himself: the impetuous Harry Hotspur was killed fighting against Henry IV at the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403, while his wily father feigned illness. John describes the history and setting of this formidable building, its battlements still lined with statuary figures of warriors (probably 18th-century) to repel enemies.

In London, the Percys owned Northumberland House, demolished in the 19th century, and employed Robert Adam to turn the old nunnery of Syon House into a spectacular neo-Classical villa, using decoration in the style of the recently discovered ruins of Pompeii. Adam was also employed to decorate Alnwick but his scheme was swept away in the mid 19th century by Algernon Percy, 4th Duke of Northumberland, a man so solemn he was known as the Doge. The principal interiors were sumptuously painted and gilded in the Renaissance style that the Duke had seen on his travels in Italy. For this he employed the Italian architect Luigi Canina who used Giovanni Montiroli as his assistant. John and Clive are very nearly lost for words at the magnificence of the result – but (just as well for the podcast) not quite!

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Trafalgar Square has long been regarded as the centre of London. It wasn’t always. John describes its medieval configuration when it was still countryside – hence the name of James Gibbs’s church St Martin in the Fields. This was where Richard II kept his hawks in the royal mews. A square was proposed by the Prince Regent’s architect John Nash but not in the form we have it today. The proximity of a barracks kept public order.

What about the monument that dominates Trafalgar Square today, Nelson’s column? Clive has the story of its slow journey towards completion, and the disappointments suffered by its architect William Railton. Since then, the square has acquired fountains designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, with Art Deco sculpture – replacing ones by Sir Charles Barry that were fed from an artesian well. Within living memory, Trafalgar Square used to be a traffic island, cut off from the National Gallery by a busy road. Now it can justifiably be called the beating heart of the metropolis.

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Detmar Blow was one of the brightest stars of the Arts and Crafts Movement – but his story is also dark and mysterious. A pupil of the Kensington School of Art, where he met Lutyens – a lifelong friend – he won a travelling scholarship to draw cathedrals in France. At Abbeville, he had a chance encounter with the great Victorian sage aesthete John Ruskin, then in the decline of his old age. Blow escorted Ruskin to the Alps and imbibed his radical philosophy. On his return to England, he did not complete his architectural apprenticeship but became a clerk of works to learn the fundamentals of building, as dictated by the principles of the Arts and Crafts Movement. So he directed the building of Ernest Gimson’s Stoneywell Cottage in Leicestershire, a building that seems to have grown out of the ground it stands on. And in 1896 he was with William Morris when he died and drove his coffin to the churchyard in a yellow harvest wagon decorated with willow boughs and vineleaves.

Immensely good looking, Blow became an intimate of the intellectual aristocrats of The Souls, for whom he designed or remodelled several country houses, according to the philosophy of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. He had an affair with at least one of them, Pamela. Tenant. In 1910 he married Gertrude, a daughter of the Hon. Hamilton Tollemache, whom he had met while touring Suffolk in a gypsy caravan. The horny-handed craftsmen with whom he worked were given prime seats at his wedding in St Paul’s Cathedral. Yet by then, despite his impeccably Arts and Crafts credentials, he had taken a French partner, Fernand Billerey, to undertake fashionable work in the West End. He also, fatally, came into the orbit of Bendor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster. After the First World War he became his factotum. He was on the latter’s yacht, the Flying Cloud – whose interiors he had designed in Cotswold style – that Blow’s star came crashing down to earth. He was accused of peculation and never recovered. How did this extraordinary story unfold? What were the motivations of the key players? What role was played by the ideal country house that Blow created for himself and his family at Hilles, on a Cotswold escarpment with views to the Severn Estuary? Do Clive and John have the answers? Some of them, perhaps….