Wentworth Woodhouse: South Yorkshire's treasure house of stories

All English country houses are treasure troves of fabulous stories, but few are as rich as Wentworth Woodhouse.

This jewel of South Yorkshire boasts superlatives in abundance: the longest façade of any private home in Europe, more than 300 rooms, one of the most expensive homes ever built, and the birthplace of the first prime minister from Yorkshire. Its walls once housed George Stubbs’ famous equine portrait of  Whistlejacket (now in the National Gallery, but a copy hangs here). It provides a cautionary tale on the dangers of chasing fashion in architecture. It was both the headquarters of the Intelligence Corps in World War II and the victim of an ugly campaign of class warfare in the 1940s. It seemed destined to collapse under the weight of its own history before an extraordinary community initiative brought it back to life.

Unusually for me, it was Wentworth’s 20th-century story that proved most compelling. The post-war Labour government was determined to build a new egalitarian society, and the aristocracy—with all the history and culture they embodied—were enemies to be swept away. Punitive death duties meant that around 1,000 country houses were lost to the wrecking ball in the decades after the war. Wentworth faced even more challenges, thanks to a seam of coal running through the estate.

Enter our villain: Manny Shinwell. A firebrand minister who dismissed the middle class as “not worth a tinker’s cuss” and actively sought to bring down the upper classes. He used his position as Minister of Fuel and Power to take aim at the Fitzwilliam family and their vast estate. After nationalising the coal industry, he ordered mining of a seam that ran through Wentworth Woodhouse's grounds. Historic gardens and ancient woodland were ripped out as the grounds became the largest open-cast coal mine in the country. Works extended to just 100 yards from the house, and massive slag heaps were piled … one presumes intentionally … in front of the family bedrooms. Debate continues about how much damage the blasting did to the structure, but the insult to the landscape was undeniable.

Ironically, local miners opposed the scheme. The Fitzwilliams had been fair employers, and few wanted their neighbourhood’s jewel destroyed. Their warnings proved accurate: the coal was poor quality, the mining futile, and Shinwell’s policies did nothing to avoid the energy crisis of the brutal winter of 1947. Shinwell was demoted but managed to stay in politics. In the biggest irony of all, this enemy of the upper classes had no issue accepting an honorary peerage as Baron Shinwell of Easington and sat in the House of Lords for around 15 years. Hypocrisy as choking as coal dust.

After the mine

By the late 1940s, Wentworth was a decaying white elephant with an exhausted mine for a front lawn. Too costly for the family to maintain, too vast for the National Trust to adopt, successive owners failed to restore it. Only in 2016 did the newly formed Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust finally turn the tide.

Their achievement is remarkable. The lawn is back, the scars of mining erased. Restoration continues room by room, often with holes discreetly netted or braced, but the spirit of the place is alive. The house now belongs as much to its community as to the nation. Dogs are welcome in the entrance hall and café, children have spaces to play, and locals use its grand rooms for everything from meetings to weddings. The combination of grandeur and community adoption is unlike anything I’ve seen in another stately home.

If you’re here to see the house, your £15.50 admission (free to Historic Houses Association members, discounts to National Trust and National Art Pass members) gets you into the enfilade of state rooms that fill the centre pavilion, the ceremonial stairs leading up to them and a couple of less grand rooms just below them. It’s a tiny fraction of the overall house but, again, in square footage equals what you would see in many of the grandest stately homes. 

The blockbuster here is that staircase, rising to a landing, dividing, and curving back together under the gaze of Roman statues, and the ludicrously large great hall it brings you into. 

It’s an enormous square of white marble and sand-coloured columns, with more noble Romans standing in alcoves between them. The room is double-height with a balcony around its mid-point. There’s a spectacular inlaid-marble floor swirling out from its centre, and an ornate plaster ceiling to echo the shapes in the floor; though that’s still under renovation. Windows on both levels in front and across the top level at the back flood the room with light. 

It is a magnificent space, on par with the great entrance hall at Holkham for creating a space that feels built for Roman emperors rather than English lords. 

A service passage the size of many other houses’ great halls takes you to the end of the enfilade of rooms; two on each side of the main hall. You start in the Whistlejacket Room, where the copy of the famous painting seems more impressive here than in his usually home at the National Gallery, because he is alone and in the space he was made for. The Trust has brought in modern artist Hugo Wilson to paint a matching canvas directly across from the familiar one. It’s in exactly the same style as Stubbs, so close you’d assume they came from the artist, but this time Whistlejacket is showing us his backside, bucking. In the artist’s description, he’s turning his back on his national significance. I prefer to think that he’s just driven his hooves into Manny Shinwell. 

This room, and the rest of the enfilade, are mostly towering white walls with accents of gilt plasterwork cascading down them, around fireplaces and massive family portraits. One is a deep blue showing off neoclassical plaster reliefs. The hard work of restoration is obvious here: the walls shine and the gilt glistens. At the other end of the enfilade Whistlejacket makes his return, but this time as a neon sculpture. I loved the playful extension of the house’s masterpiece into new interpretations. 

There are miles of gardens here to explore, dotted with significant garden follies. I, however, had aggravated my arthritic knees so badly at the Women’s Rugby World Cup launch two days before that I wasn’t up for the hike. I did, however, enjoy the exterior of the house enormously. And given the size of the place, there’s plenty of walking to be done in the admiration. 

The two-faced house

The west front of the house looks nothing like the east. They are, in fact, two entirely different houses; built back-to-back. Around 1724 Thomas Watson-Wentworth started building the first one in the trendy English Baroque style. Red brick, white stone facings, abundant decorative gewgaws, lots of curves. But that style went out of fashion quickly, especially with the Whig party … of which Thomas was a member. They stood firmly against the Jacobites, and Baroque had quickly become a style associated with that Catholic challenge to the Hanoverians. 

So Thomas shifted style. But he was too frugal to tear down a brand new house. Instead, he started an entirely new house to the east in the more sober Palladian taste. This became the new front; the smaller baroque house became the back, screened by trees and gardens and kept for family. The new Palladian front was so big its construction fell into the next generation, being completed by Thomas’ son, Charles. The end result was so enormous it became … and still is … the longest facade of any private home in Europe.

From that superlative I was expecting it to be ungainly, or even a bit ugly. But here’s where Palladianism proves its brilliance. The balance of the elements, and the rhythm of the various columns, windows and pediments is so pleasing that it just melds into a brilliant whole. It’s easy to forget just how big it is until you look carefully. Or try to get the whole thing in one photo without engaging panorama mode. (top photo)

Wentworth Woodhouse is a place where beauty, history, politics, and resilience collide. Once scarred almost beyond redemption, it now stands as proof that even the grandest white elephants can be reborn when communities rally to their cause. Come for the staircase, Whistlejacket, and the sweep of Palladian columns—but stay for the community triumph that lingers in every restored gilded wall. Wentworth is no longer just a symbol of aristocratic ambition; it’s a testament to survival, reinvention, and the power of people determined not to let their heritage slip away.

Royal Armouries: A northern treasure house free of London crowds and foreign tourists

Not long after I started working in England, the British government made the radical decision to move the Royal Armouries from London to Leeds. The intent was to spread national heritage beyond the capital and to get treasures out of storage and onto display. I vowed I’d head north and check it out.

It only took me 29 years.

Finally, in the company of my husband — now a fellow arms and armour enthusiast, though I didn’t know him when the place opened in 1996 — and with far more experience of continental collections than I had back then, I made it to see the our national collection of arms and armour.

If you’re only interested in glamorous examples from the great age of knights in shining armour, the museum can’t compare, artistically, to many collections on the continent. (Leeds didn’t come close to knocking Dresden’s Rüstkammer off the pedestal we’ve placed it on.) That’s no surprise: Italian and German workshops made the most beautiful pieces. English-made armour was more functional, with decorative imports bringing the bling. While there are a handful of noteworthy items, it’s probably not worth the trip from London if art history is your only interest.

The museum’s strengths lie elsewhere. 

Its scope is far broader than I expected, closer to a military history museum than a pure arms and armour collection. (The best comparison is the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden.) Being purpose-built and modern, the Royal Armouries lean heavily on technology: interactive games, video deep-dives, and historic reenactments. The building is big enough for dramatic displays and spacious enough to include performance areas, with at least three live shows daily. We caught Renaissance sword fighting and the guns of the Old West.

The swordsmen were particularly impressive, not just for their choreography but for their ability to explain fighting details that were new to us. Here, staff are both curators and performers.

Museum management strikes an admirable balance between commercial savvy and government-mandated free admission, without being too obvious. The crossbow-firing experience (£8) was clearly popular, the cafés are plentiful, and the gift shop is impressive, with something for everyone. A large exhibition space currently features a copiously promoted pay-for-entry show on gladiators, though the permanent collections are so vast that we couldn't consider add-ons.

Practicalities are unusually convenient. Because the building sits in a newly redeveloped urban area, there’s a huge, spotless multi-storey car park just a short walk from the entrance. The motorway network glides you straight there. Getting to a major UK museum is rarely this easy.

All this combines to create one of the most child-friendly museums I’ve ever visited, while still offering plenty of depth for grown-ups who want a serious exploration.

We particularly liked the gallery on arms and armour in popular culture, showing how real-world history inspired weapons and style in the Star Wars and Bond franchises, and in countless medieval epics. (I reacted with childlike glee to Lancelot's armour from Excalibur.) There are thought-provoking displays on modern crime and policing, including some excellent myth-busting about the reality of weapons use in today’s UK. Elsewhere, an outstanding Agincourt gallery combines hundreds of tiny model soldiers with informative panels exploring the event and its main players in depth. 

While the collection may be light on artistic masterpieces — the French 16th-century “Lion Armour” is probably the highlight — what it lacks in decorative firepower it makes up for in drama. Suits of armour stand in cases so beautifully made that the barriers almost disappear, many dramatically positioned against vast windows overlooking the docklands. Life-sized models bring the armour to life in battle scenes; the clash of foot soldiers and mounted knights at Pavia is particularly effective. Most striking of all, a vast tower reimagines the old tradition of decorating walls with weapons, supersized into a breathtaking piece of installation art.

One of the museum’s most spectacular objects is the full suit of elephant armour. Those of my generation will remember it as a highlight of the Tower of London. It’s one of the treasures that moved north, and it was a joy to see it again. It now crowns a gallery of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian arms and armour, with an especially fine samurai collection.

Like all our national collections, the Royal Armouries offer too vast a larder to consume in one go. Ideally, you’d pop in repeatedly, perhaps devoting an hour to the Indian Rebellions or the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Unless you live nearby, though, you’ll probably visit as we did: taking in as much as possible in one go. Three hours gave us time to cover most galleries, catch a couple of presentations, and get a sense of the place before our brains hit “full.”

Unlike the London museums, you’ll find fewer crowds and a less international audience. I worried when the website sternly warned me to pre-book the day before our visit. I’d missed the booking window. Had they booked out all the spaces, as the British Museum sometimes does? Hardly. Even in the peak of school holidays, there was space aplenty. No queues. We waltzed in and were immediately welcomed by helpful volunteers explaining how everything worked. In contrast to London, where foreign tourists dominate, the only non-British accents I heard were my own and that of the curator introducing the guns of the American West.

It did make me wonder how this experiment — moving a major cultural institution out of London — has fared, thirty years on. I loved the museum. It’s clearly anchored the regeneration of its neighbourhood. But I doubt it attracts anything like the numbers or revenues it would in the capital. I found articles about budget cuts and redundancies in recent years, but little to answer my broader question.

One thing is certain: the people of Leeds are blessed to have such a magnificent resource on their doorstep.

Why Stow-on-the-Wold is our perfect cotswolds base

Planning your first Cotswolds getaway? With almost 800 square miles of rolling hills, honey-stone villages, and historic inns, it can be hard to pick the perfect base. After 30 years exploring the region — and more than a decade of summer weekends here for opera — I have a firm, well-researched favourite: Stow-on-the-Wold. It's a centrally-located market town with superb restaurants, excellent accommodation, and easy access to all the Cotswolds’ highlights.

Here’s why I regularly recommend it — and why some other hotspots didn’t make my cut.

It’s central
Stow sits almost in the geographical centre of the Cotswolds, right beside the main north–south artery, the A429, with good roads heading east and west. Nowhere in the region is out of range for a day trip that starts from here, and most of the area’s “greatest hits” are within a 30-minute drive.

It’s also one of the highest points in the Cotswolds. Stroll over to the Queen Elizabeth II Playing Fields, just west of the A429, for a magnificent view — one of the best sunset-viewing spots in England.

The main road bypasses the town centre
The A429 skirts the west side of town, leaving the expansive market square for people who are here by choice, not just passing through.

This is not the case in popular towns like Chipping Norton and Moreton-in-Marsh, where the traffic barrels through the middle. On busy days, their high streets resemble slowly creeping car parks rather than postcard scenes. Stow’s bypass makes its centre far more pedestrian-, and dog-, friendly.

Excellent range of food, drink, and accommodation

It’s a given that most Cotswold towns offer a range of places to stay — from rooms above pubs to hotels to Airbnb-style lets. Increasingly, there are “rooms only” setups: beautifully decorated en-suite rooms without shared lounges or on-site staff.

What really sets Stow apart is its dining scene. Alongside sandwich shops, pubs, and a chippy, there’s a wealth of upscale options. You’ll find posh bakeries, breakfast cafés, and restaurants for foodies, plus a superb deli perfect for assembling opera picnics. Craving something international? Stow offers Greek, Chinese, and excellent Indian options. There’s even a boutique wine bar to delight any serious oenophile.

You could easily spend two weeks here, dine somewhere different every night, and never need your car.

Quiet mornings and evenings
Like most Cotswold towns, Stow regains its tranquillity once the day-trippers leave ... but even more than most. Purely anecdotal, but I’ve noticed Stow attracts fewer coach tours than places like Broadway, where buses unload outside the Lygon Arms daily. Stow feels more geared to independent travellers, families, and locals — with a higher proportion of domestic visitors than many other popular towns.

Why I’ve passed other favourites by
Bourton-on-the-Water: Charming canals, yes — but the atmosphere feels geared towards families with young children. If that’s you, you’ll probably love it. As more mature travellers who value peace, we tend to recoil from the noise and chaos. (Why do so many parents abandon discipline on holiday? One starts to wish for the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.)

Moreton-in-Marsh: The A429 slices through the centre, and the mainline train station makes it one of the most crowded towns in the Cotswolds. While I understand the reluctance of visitors unused to driving on the left, the best parts of the region are beyond public transport.

Chipping Norton (pictured left): Shares Moreton’s traffic issue and has, to my eye, less charming architecture. In recent years it’s become a magnet for posh Londoners heading for Soho Farmhouse or the absurdly priced Daylesford Farm Shop. Add in the Clarkson’s Farm effect, and it’s just not my scene. (Though I heartily endorse the way Clarkson has raised awareness of the challenges farmers face.)

Chipping Campden: Were it a little closer to our cultural anchor, Longborough Festival Opera, it would be a serious contender. Its fairy-tale architecture, thatched cottages worthy of Disney, historic market hall, and proximity to Hidcote Gardens are irresistible. Still, Stow wins on restaurants.

Broadway: Nearly as storybook-pretty as Chipping Campden, but its location near the A44 makes it a favourite stop for tour buses. It was my base on my first trip here, with a busload of fellow Americans — lovely, but too crowded to beat Stow.

Where to stay in Stow-on-the-Wold
The Stag – Our go-to hotel. This 17th-century coaching inn and Georgian townhouse blend into 22 stylish rooms. Some are compact, but all are design-magazine gorgeous. Right on the market square, with parking, a pub garden, dog-friendly policies, and a solid kitchen. Splurge on “The Potting Shed” if you can — a rustic, free-standing gem in the garden, ideal for dog owners. (Pictured below.)

The Porch House – Dating back to 947 (yes, really), it’s one of England’s oldest inns, blending historic beams with modern comforts. Not all rooms are dog-friendly, and those that are tend to be the smallest.

The Unicorn – Our favourite Airbnb-style option for longer stays. Eight spacious apartments in an old coaching inn, wrapped around a courtyard and walled garden. Many have two bedrooms, making it perfect for weekends with friends. Secure parking across the street; dogs welcome.

Cotswold Cottage Guest House – A small, room-only B&B with three tastefully designed en-suites. More affordable than the Unicorn, but with less space and no parking.

Where to eat & drink in Stow-on-the-Wold
The Old Butchers & The Old Stocks – Creative, modern fine dining in a relaxed yet polished atmosphere. The Butchers leans French and specialises in seafood; The Stocks is just as good, with slightly easier reservations. Expect £150–£180 for two with wine.

The Bell & The Queen’s Head – Solid pub classics at friendlier prices. The Bell edges ahead for food quality, though it’s a bit of a walk from the square. The Queen’s Head wins for central location and quintessential Cotswold charm.

Otis & Belle – An artisan bakery with pastries worthy of Copenhagen or Paris. Our guilty go-to when we don’t have breakfast included — and when one butter-laden treat inevitably turns into two.

The Cellar – A boutique wine bar with a carefully curated list and a genial owner who's usually there to guide you through creative wine picks, and often DJs smooth vibes from his vintage vinyl collection. Lite bites available; dogs welcome.

A surprisingly cheerful farewell to Longborough’s founder

This was the first Longborough Festival Opera season since the death of its founder, Martin Graham. You might expect a bittersweet tone — especially as most operas in the popular repertoire are tragedies — but 2025 turned out to be one of the most cheerful years I can remember.

Not only has the festival carried on Martin’s vision without missing a step, but it managed to deliver unusually merry interpretations of two classics: Dido and Aeneas and The Barber of Seville. As usual, we chose two of the four productions in the Cotswolds-based season. The location demands an overnight stay, and in high summer most local accommodation insists on two nights, which — along with time and budget — limits us.

Dido with a twist — and a wake

Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is a compact tragedy, usually all doomed love and mourning chords. This year, Norwegian Baroque specialist Bjarte Eike and his ensemble Barokksolistene turned it into something unexpectedly uplifting. The original 60-minute score survives only in fragments, inviting re-interpretation. Eike filled the gaps with sea shanties, Celtic laments, and folk-inflected improvisations — perfectly in keeping with the opera’s Carthaginian port setting.

His musicians roamed the stage and aisles, engaging directly with the audience (yes, we sang along), while remaining rooted in 17th-century style. We’re used to seeing the orchestra on stage for Longborough’s annual Baroque offering, but Eike’s free-flowing, improvisational energy took the experience up a notch.

The most striking departure came after Dido’s famous lament — delivered untouched, as it must be — when the stage erupted into a wake. The mournful laments gave way to increasingly joyful dancing, until even Dido herself returned to join the revelry. It was inventive, participatory, and instantly became one of my favourite Longborough performances in 13 years of attending.

Barber with a dash of Fawlty Towers
Three weeks earlier came Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, a comedy guaranteed to bring smiles. Director Louise Bakker’s production leaned into farce, delivering a Spanish-flavoured Fawlty Towers. Voices and orchestra were as excellent as ever, but the staging stole the show: a clever two-storey set serving as both interior and exterior of holiday apartments, one of the most ambitious designs I’ve seen on Longborough’s tiny stage.

The extras, doubling as Seville’s working-class crowds, became part of the comedy’s heartbeat — especially in the second half, when they reappeared as a hopelessly inept ballet chorus in pink jumpsuits, bringing the house down.

A plea for more comedy
In the 18th century, opera balanced comedy and tragedy in equal measure. By the late 19th century, tragedy dominated, and cheerful works became rare. This year’s Longborough season made me wish for a rewrite of that history — or at least more programming in the spirit of Barber and Eike’s Dido.

The 2026 lineup returns to heavier fare: Handel’s Orlando, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Verdi’s Macbeth, and Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel. We’ll be there for the Wagner and the Baroque as always. Whether we go beyond our usual two productions remains to be seen.

Postscript: For those new to Longborough
Perched on a hillside in the northern Cotswolds, Longborough Festival Opera is a tiny rural opera house with an outsized reputation. Built by Martin Graham and his wife Lizzie in a converted barn, it now stages a summer season that attracts audiences from across the UK and beyond. With just 500 seats, an intimate auditorium, and a country-house atmosphere, it’s one of the most distinctive opera experiences in Britain — blending world-class music-making with picnic intervals on the lawn. It's known particularly for its Wagner interpretations; a composer thought impossible for country house opera to carry off until Longborough did it. They've now done two full Ring Cycles and are known as England's Bayreuth.

Here are links to some of my earlier stories about Longborough:

• What it's like to live through the monumental Ring Cycle
• Other experiences with Purcell, Dido & Aeneas' creator
• The first time The Magic Flute was actually fun
• How the pandemic gave us the most emotionally moving Walküre ever
• How Longborough's Tristan und Isolde ... which they're reprising next summer ... convinced me that Wagner could write a love story
• The first time I truly appreciated La Boheme

Tom Kerridge's Hand and Flowers lives up to its lofty reputation

The Hand and Flowers has been on our culinary bucket list for a long time. We’ve long been fans of chef and owner Tom Kerridge. Marlow’s not that far. We’ve had plenty of special occasions to celebrate. But we’d never quite managed to combine the necessary advance planning (three months, at least) with an open slot in the diary. Finally, the stars aligned. We marked Mr. Bencard’s 60th birthday with a long, magnificent lunch that rivalled our best-ever meal at Clare Smyth’s Core.

This is, of course, a very different kind of place. The Hand and Flowers may hold two Michelin stars, but it’s still a pub in a charming small town along a mostly rural stretch of the Thames—not a temple of modern design patronised by the capital’s great, good and glamorous. Different in no way means inferior. If anything, the pub ethos only adds to the magic.

I’ve been lucky to dine at a generous number of Michelin-starred restaurants (see the index of reviews in the left column). They all serve exceptional food, and most start with luxury ingredients and gourmet concepts. It’s fancy from the first idea.

The Hand and Flowers starts from a different place: wholesome, traditional British comfort food. Like classic Italian cooking, it builds on a foundation of simple ingredients—beef, duck, pastry, potato—in deceptively straightforward preparations, executed to an insanely high standard.

Take the amuse bouche, for example. A bite-sized sausage roll with a side of spiced mayo. The stuff of a hundred summer picnics, a familiar taste guaranteed to put a smile of both recollection and anticipation on your face. Here, the familiar is transformed into something almost unrecognisable. The meat is so smooth and perfectly spiced, the pastry so flaky, the mayo such an exquisite complement that it’s hardly still a humble sausage roll. And yet it envelops you in the warm emotional blanket of comfort food.

That’s the one-two punch that makes this place special: the nostalgic hug of the familiar, delivered with the dazzling artistry of fine dining.

We started with dishes we might easily choose at our local: pork and mushroom terrine for me, duck liver parfait for the birthday boy. I was seriously tempted by the parfait, too, but had duck lined up for my main course and wanted to mix things up. As with the sausage roll, both starters took the familiar and elevated them into the gourmet stratosphere. My terrine was an explosion of umami, balanced by the sharp tang of minuscule dill pickles and pickled onions. 

But Piers’ parfait was the clear winner. Neither of us has ever tasted that combination of rich flavour and light texture before—so smooth it had the consistency of top-quality gelato, but at room temperature. A chat with the staff—and a helpful browse through the Hand and Flowers cookbook—revealed that even with a week at the Gascony Cooking School and the ability to make our own foie gras, we’d never come close. The processes, steps and specialist equipment used to put that perfect quenelle on the plate were nothing short of wizardry.

The main course had its own amuse bouche in the form of a spectacular bottle of wine. We let the sommelier guide us, and he delivered something worthy of the occasion: Habla No. 30 from a small vineyard in Trujillo, in the Extremadura region of Spain. If I had to limit myself to just one red wine for the rest of my life, this might be it. It’s full of fruit (the producer says tropical; I tasted dark berry) but balanced with black pepper and herb. That balance is its magic. It has the punch of flavour I love in bold Malbecs or Cab Sauvs, but with a delicacy and lightness that nods to my husband’s preference for elegant French Pinot Noirs. A perfect compromise.

A memorable wine deserves memorable food. And out it came.

I had the Devon duck breast and cherry “pie” with duck liver, marmalade sauce and crispy duck fat potatoes. The “pie” was actually a slice of roulade, styled like a Wellington: crisp pastry, a blanket of duxelles and liver wrapped around perfectly pink duck breast. My only quibble—there wasn’t much cherry on the palate, and the sauce could have used a bit more fruitiness to balance the tang of the liver. But that’s a small note. I loved every bite. The crispy duck fat potatoes showed exactly why Tom Kerridge is famous for his triple-cooked chips. Outstanding.

And yet I only ate one, giving the rest to my husband—not just because it was his birthday, but because his main came with mash, which he didn’t fancy. We’d been served each other’s favourites, so we swapped. Not that he needed anything extra to elevate the perfection of his 30-day dry-aged fillet of beef with potato-buttermilk waffle, crème fraîche and chive butter, and sauce bordelaise. We are highly competent cooks, confident with meat. We go to a top-quality butcher. We have great pans. And yet we’ve never managed a steak like this. A hot, crispy, flavourful bark on the outside. Extremely rare within. Sauce as smooth as silk sliding over a baby’s stomach. We might get close on the steak with more butter and higher heat. The sauce? That’s another realm. As for the potato-buttermilk waffle—in a world of deep-fried delights, it’s near the top.

Despite generous portions and plentiful bread, I heroically found room for dessert: a malted nougat delice, essentially a thin slice of wicked indulgence with cocoa, ale, smoked toffee and hop ice cream. I confess to being unsophisticated on the chocolate front—I usually prefer milk to gourmet dark—but this grown-up version turned my head. The ale, smoke and hops added sharpness and bitterness that lifted the whole thing far above the average chocoholic hit.

Piers, meanwhile, went for the cheese board. I was far too full to help, but he marched bravely up that hill, tackling a generous selection of English classics (including my beloved Baron Bigod) and French sophistication. I was particularly impressed with the accompaniments: not just ordinary biscuits, but hand-made crunchy sheets topped with seeds and nuts, a date bread salad, and yet another perfect little sausage roll. All washed down with a tawny port.

I’ve not always nailed the birthday brief for my husband, but this one brought him to his culinary happyplace and pushed all the right buttons.

There is a set lunch: three courses for £65, or two for £55. With a specialty soda or a pint of beer, you could walk away for under £100 per person. But it was a milestone birthday, and our eyes inevitably drifted to the most tempting items on the menu. We didn’t hold back. This is what we save for, and it was worth every penny.

Where else can you find comfort food turned into pure magic?

There's a video of our experience on TikTok. If you scroll there, find me as BencardsBites.

Russell-Cotes is an Edwardian treasure trove on Bournemouth’s striking seafront

Bournemouth, on England’s Dorset coast, is more likely to conjure visions of buckets, spades and fish and chips than high culture. But there’s a museum amongst the coastal amusements that deserves the attention of any ardent sightseer. The Russell-Cotes Gallery and Museum is, like the Wallace Collection in London and the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan, one of those wonderful treasure houses built and filled by 19th-century collectors who then gave the whole place to the public.

While people have lived on this pleasant bit of the southern English coast for most of human history, Bournemouth didn’t hit the big time until the 19th century, when the new railways made this one of the easiest stretches of sandy beach and attractive coastline to reach from London. The entrepreneur Merton Russell-Cotes took advantage of this trend, building the Royal Bath Hotel to cater to the richest and most famous visitors. As Bournemouth thrived, so did he and his wife Annie.

Eventually, they had the money to become significant collectors of art, furniture and decorative objects, Which they originally used to furnish their elegant hotel. With the hotel’s reputation established and team running at peak efficiency, they were also able to travel widely, including a long trip to Japan. That country, only opened to the west for a few decades, had become wildly fashionable. Gilbert and Sullivan were taking London by storm with The Mikado, the Impressionists were finding inspiration in Japanese prints, and opera fans would soon be weeping over Madame Butterfly. The treasures Merton and Annie acquired in Japan form an impressive collection within the house, which was partially built just to give them proper display space. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.

They named the house East Cliff Hall, and it was finished in 1901 as a birthday gift from Merton to Annie. It was one of the last Victorian villas ever built in England, boasting all the modern conveniences of electricity and plumbing. It stands as a curious hybrid of historicist decoration and cutting-edge domestic technology, befitting a couple with one foot in tradition and another boldly embracing the modern world.

Each room is a masterpiece of Edwardian design, strongly influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. There is beautiful woodwork, opulent wallpaper, delicate stained glass and colourful murals, many bringing the natural world inside. The life-sized peacocks painted around the cornice of the dining room, strutting on their gold leaf background, are particularly impressive. The swallows in the stained glass windows are so lifelike it’s as if they’re flying into the room.

In true Edwardian style, there are wonderfully eccentric touches. Stars and moons are scattered across the ceiling of the main hall, giving an otherwise traditional room a sense of magic. There’s a whole room turned into a mini-museum honouring an actor friend of the family’s, and a lavish Oriental room straight out of Arabian Nights. You wouldn’t be surprised to encounter the ghost of Oscar Wilde puffing on a hookah. While Japan gets top billing, the couple collected from across the globe, and you’ll find objects from Egypt, Australasia, and beyond tucked throughout the house.

Best of all are the bedrooms, with broad bay windows and slim, wrap-around balconies overlooking the sea. These days the view is slightly less spectacular because of modern developments on the waterfront, but it’s still magnificent. There’s a chaise longue in Annie’s room where you’re invited to recline and contemplate the view.

Merton and Annie’s collections quickly outgrew the ability of the house to showcase them, so the builders returned to add a series of museum-style gallery rooms onto one side. These are elegant, top-lit spaces, and today display mostly paintings and a bit of sculpture. There are no immediately recognisable masterpieces here, though you’ll probably know Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Venus Verticordia when you come face-to-face with her. The painting was controversial in its day for its sensuality, and seems a fitting centrepiece for a house so steeped in fin-de-siècle flamboyance. The lack of big names doesn’t matter. The exoticism and love of history that runs through the house come to life in canvases of historical and biblical scenes. Landscapes from local artists show the Jurassic Coast at its best. There are some spectacular portraits of that optimistic generation that kicked off the century—before the First World War crushed the joy out of everyone.

There’s a smaller display space at the back for rotating exhibitions, free with entry. At the moment the focus is on May Morris, a woman who worked for and contributed mightily to the output of her father, William. I never knew. For anyone fond of discovering stories of women who deserve to be better known, this alone is worth the trip.

Despite its opulence, if you ignore the gallery rooms the Russell-Cotes house isn’t that big. Many modern homes would exceed the handful of bedrooms upstairs, though the location and views would make it quite an expensive one indeed. Strangely for a house of this era, you’ll see no service wing, no staff rooms and no kitchens. Merton and Annie didn’t bother, since they owned the hotel across the garden and could call on its staff for anything they needed. It must have been a good life.

The couple had three children who survived into adulthood, but they didn’t inherit the house. Merton had been mayor of Bournemouth and was perhaps the promoter most responsible for putting the town on the map for A-listers. In 1909, he was knighted for his services to the arts and to the town. He loved the place so much he wanted his house to become a resource for future generations. 

Locals clearly still adore Merton and Annie’s house today. It’s staffed by enthusiastic volunteers, one of whom was giving an impromptu luncheon concert on the piano in the great hall as we visited. The entrance is through a modern addition tastefully tucked into the western side of the building; locals clearly come to use the café and enjoy the gardens, both of which don’t require an admission fee.

The garden is neither large nor exceptional, but it’s extremely pretty. One feels the terraced borders of traditional English perennials would have delighted Gertrude Jekyll (and were probably inspired by her). A line of trees between the house and hotel—still there, but no longer under family ownership—blocks the view of modern seaside development. Instead, your eyes are forced southeast, where the only things beyond the garden gates are steep embankments of wildflowers and grasses, plunging down to the beach. Just across the water you can see the western tip of the Isle of Wight, with its iconic Needles rising from the churning waves. On a return visit I’ll make more time to sit here and watercolour.

The gilded age at the turn of the 20th century saw many injustices, forced inhumane working conditions and fostered shocking gaps between rich and poor. And yet it was also an age of enormous generosity, when philanthropists like the Russell-Coteses felt a need to give back for their good fortune. This treasure house has beautified Bournemouth for more than a century, and looks set to do so for many years to come. Thank you, Merton and Annie, for paying some of your good fortune forward.

Pirates at the National Maritime Museum offer a half-full treasure chest

I was obsessed with pirates as a kid. Most likely thanks to my grandfather, who loved the old classics like Captain Bloodand Against All Flags, and would make a ceremony of watching them with me whenever one came on TV. That early spark was fanned into flame by annual visits to the fort in St. Augustine, Florida—basically a ready-made stage set for an Errol Flynn film. Pirates of the Caribbean was my firm favourite on Disney property decades before it became a film franchise. Buccaneer has been my go-to Halloween costume for as long as I can remember.

That fascination endured into adulthood. I seriously considered doing my master’s degree in history with a concentration on the Golden Age of Piracy, before the need for a steady income convinced me to chart a different course. But my interest—and my library on the topic—have remained and grown steady over the years. So you can imagine my delight when the UK’s National Maritime Museum in Greenwich announced a major exhibition on the subject.

Did it live up to my lofty expectations?

Not quite. For a piracy nerd deeply steeped in the topic, it was a bit disappointing. I didn’t really learn anything new, and I found the quantity of items on display a little underwhelming. But I’m very far from your average punter here. I suspect most visitors will find it an entertaining overview. The material on pirates in fiction is great fun, and the sections on piracy in the Far East and modern piracy may be new to many. I just wanted more—and had been hoping for a far larger exploration than what’s essentially a three-gallery show.

I definitely enjoyed the first part the most, which focuses on pirates in fiction. The key points here are that pirates have long fascinated us—especially since the Victorian era—and that we tend to create the pirates we need for our time. The Boys’ Own stories of the 19th century and the gentleman adventurers of Hollywood’s golden age bear little resemblance to Johnny Depp’s staggering, comic Jack Sparrow, or to the same-sex love stories now imagined for Anne Bonny and Mary Read, or Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet. (There’s no evidence for either pairing, but they fit the current zeitgeist.) I particularly appreciated the detailed look at Captain Pugwash, not part of my American childhood and thus mostly new to me. I also loved a case full of haute couture inspired by tricorn-topped adventurers.

It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more video from The Pirates of Penzance or the swashbuckling films of the ’50s and ’60s. The latter are only represented by a few clips flashing by on a wall.

The middle section tackles what’s come to be known as the Golden Age of Piracy. This is the source material for the fairy tale: mostly poor white European men seizing opportunities otherwise impossible for their social class, operating largely in the Caribbean (though a few have cracking good stories in the Indian Ocean), and mostly confined to the brief window between 1650 and 1730. The mythologising started early. Captain Johnson published his A General History of the Pyrates in 1724, a compendium of dramatic, often salacious biographies. It was an immediate bestseller and remains, along with a similar book by the writer Exquemelin, “the Bible” of pirate lore. There’s an original copy in the exhibition.

There’s a visually lush recreation of a captain’s cabin that helps you understand the details of a pirate’s working life, an impressive row of weapons and flags, and a painful-looking cage that drives home how bad things got when the law caught up. But I was surprised there wasn’t more—particularly on personalities.

We’re missing my favourite pirate of all time: Henry Avery. Supposedly so persuasive, he convinced his crew to get in one boat while he and the treasure got in another, setting off for the coast of Ireland where they would divide the spoils. He disappeared with the loot. Most of his men were picked up, tried and executed. Avery is one of the great mysteries of history—rumoured to have reinvented himself as an English squire. One of the works of historical fiction I’d like to write is about his children discovering the truth, and how that unravels their lives.

We also don’t get nearly enough of Henry Morgan, the man who went from pirate to governor and conducted one of the most thrilling attacks against the Spanish of all time. There were a few panels on famous names, but not nearly enough for my taste. I would also have liked much more on pirate lifestyle. I might have missed it, but I didn’t see anything on the rise of Port Royal as a pirate capital—surely a model of what now lies underwater thanks to an earthquake would have been in order.

There are no model ships in this section, and little overall on pirate sailing technique or why they favoured certain vessels. Given the number of pirate-themed video games in the world, it’s a missed opportunity not to include an interactive game to demonstrate strategies for attacking much larger prey … perhaps sponsored by one of the game makers.

I found the final section on global piracy the most interesting—both because the territory was less familiar and because there was simply more to look at. There’s a particularly impressive ship model, a gorgeous table centrepiece celebrating victory over sea bandits, and lots of dramatic 19th-century paintings. That century seems to offer a much stronger visual record. This section explores the Barbary Corsairs, who were a thorn in European sides for centuries. (The curators resisted linking the historic trend to today’s migration patterns across the Mediterranean. I think that could have been fascinating, but dangerous.)

Forget another tired instalment of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I want to see a film about Zheng Yi Sao, the Chinese pirate queen who built a fleet of 1,800 ships and 80,000 men to terrorise Asian seas. She was so successful, the Chinese government had to buy her off—including a pardon—which allowed her to retire and become one of the early leaders of Macau’s gambling industry.

The exhibition ends with a digital heat map showing where modern piracy occurs today—a sobering reminder that real pirates are still out there, and they’re not lovable rogues.

The curators of this show faced challenges well beyond walking the proverbial plank. This is a topic for which there simply isn’t that much surviving material. Pirates didn’t leave a lot behind, and even the most dedicated fans have a limit to the number of battered cutlasses they can examine with interest. Enhancing the record with models and digital interaction takes cash, and doing too much of it risks intellectual snobs accusing the show of drifting from education to entertainment. Plus, with a topic like this, you know you’ll be flooded with children. Balancing fun for them with real depth for adults—and confronting the unsavoury realities of pirate life—is a tough brief.

While I might have wanted more, the National Maritime Museum does a solid job of working within those parameters to create something both entertaining and informative. X marks the spot—if you can to Greenwich before the show closes on 4 January 2026.