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Packwood House
Apr. 13th, 2014 09:22 amAs part of our Go And Do Something Interesting At Weekends plan, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
attimes_bracing and I went to Packwood House yesterday, a National Trust property about five miles south-east of Solihull.
Packwood House is to some extent a reconstruction of a 16th-century house rather than a true preserved example of one, in that although the structure and grounds date from that time most of the fixtures and contents were added in the 1920s and 30s by the then-owner, Graham Baron Ash, who also extensively remodelled it; the impressive Great Hall, for instance, was until then an adjoining barn. Many of the rooms contain little notes with reminiscences about the house and its owner, who appears to have viewed the project as a full-scale toy house to show off, to the extent of being rather OCD about everything being in its place.
(One anecdote by a friend observed that if a book was taken out and read, Ash would return it to its rightful place within a minute of it being put down. And this source reports that he had the habit of adding a comma between his first and middle names, which perhaps speaks volumes about him. But he gave Packwood House to the NT, for which we can forgive him a lot in the way of snobbery and foibles.)
( photos )
More photos here.
Verdict: well worth a visit if you like (quasi) Elizabethan houses and formal gardens.
attimes_bracing and I went to Packwood House yesterday, a National Trust property about five miles south-east of Solihull. Packwood House is to some extent a reconstruction of a 16th-century house rather than a true preserved example of one, in that although the structure and grounds date from that time most of the fixtures and contents were added in the 1920s and 30s by the then-owner, Graham Baron Ash, who also extensively remodelled it; the impressive Great Hall, for instance, was until then an adjoining barn. Many of the rooms contain little notes with reminiscences about the house and its owner, who appears to have viewed the project as a full-scale toy house to show off, to the extent of being rather OCD about everything being in its place.
(One anecdote by a friend observed that if a book was taken out and read, Ash would return it to its rightful place within a minute of it being put down. And this source reports that he had the habit of adding a comma between his first and middle names, which perhaps speaks volumes about him. But he gave Packwood House to the NT, for which we can forgive him a lot in the way of snobbery and foibles.)
( photos )
More photos here.
Verdict: well worth a visit if you like (quasi) Elizabethan houses and formal gardens.
