Country Life is a magazine like no other. It comes out every week, beautifully printed, with a truly catholic range of contents that supposedly interest upper-class country dwellers. It would take a page to list the richly varied contents of the copy I have in front of me. They range from cars to pugs to moonlight, the restoration of a London mansion to the fate of a Victorian cavalryman, from the art market to artichokes. Its contributors always seem well-qualified, most write well and a number are leading authorities in their fields. Having edited a magazine that tried to do the same sort of thing, but in the context of fashion, I know that juggling so many experts is a tough job. And Queen was only a fortnightly – and eventually monthly.
Country Life earns its primary living as the estate agents’ window; indeed the first pages of each issue have been described as ‘property porn’ with some reason. Choosing or gloating over houses is a harmless pastime. I habitually look at their gardens, or what I can see of them, and often, I confess, wonder how the owners of such desirable houses can have so little idea of what to do with their surroundings.
The number of fine houses with rooms in keeping that merit articles of their own these days always surprises me. Many years ago, in the 1960s, I set out to write a book on English manor houses, a category below stately homes that seemed neglected. I worked with a photographer, John Hedgecoe, whom I admired for his startlingly romantic pictures. ‘How did you manage to catch the mist on the moat like that?’ I once asked him. “A smoke bomb’ was his answer.
I never wrote the book. For one reason, it was pointed out to me that it would be a handy burglars’ guide. For another, when I was invited into many of the houses their interiors were an anticlimax. Their seemed to be a beige three-piece suite in every lovely room, oak-panelled or plastered by a fine Italian hand. Such houses still exist, as do dreary or ugly or inappropriate gardens. But my impression is that furnishing has come on faster than landscaping.
