Alexander Chancellor

Is Northamptonshire not scenic enough to visit?

What it does have is some of the country's best houses, as Bailey and Pevsner point out in The Buildings of England

One of the two pavilions at Stoke Park, designed by Inigo Jones. Credit: Getty Images

I don’t know whether Bruce Bailey, a proud Northamptonshire man, agrees with the late Sir Nikolaus Pevsner that no one would visit his county for its landscape. In the introduction to the first edition of this architectural guide, published in 1961, Pevsner wrote that although Northamptonshire bordered on more counties than any other in England (nine in all), it lacked ‘any of the memorable scenic qualities one may connect with some of them’. ‘Its beauty spots are few,’ he said. ‘There is no coast, nor a spectacular range of hills.’

Pevsner was, of course, German-born and therefore perhaps of the German romantic view that landscape without rocks and peaks and waterfalls is not really worth bothering with. But in my opinion, parts of Northamptonshire — around Fawsley or Canons Ashby, for example — are as lovely in a serene, gentle English way as anywhere else in the country. But if Bailey, the author of this revised edition, is of the same opinion, he is not letting on; for he says in his foreword: ‘I am very conscious that this is Pevsner’s Northamptonshire and where possible I have tried to keep his words intact.’

Most of Bailey’s rewriting has been in the descriptions of country houses, with which, he thinks, Pevsner was ‘less at home’ than with parish churches; and also in those of the towns, all of which have been dramatically redeveloped in the last half century, often to devastating effect. Northampton, following the wrecking of the old Market Square and its surrounding streets, is now a shadow of its former self.

However, as Pevsner himself pointed out, the ‘county of squires and spires’, as it is known, has been since the second half of the 16th century ‘the architecturally most important county in England’, and ‘the history of domestic architecture in England from 1560 to 1700 could be written with Northamptonshire examples alone’.

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