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 
issue 09 November 2013

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’.

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