Gardens, food and architecture vie for perfection at The Newt

The Newt in Somerset is a legend on the English luxury hotel scene, but one I hadn’t experienced yet despite its embodiment of things I love: great locally sourced food, historic houses, impressive gardens, cider, and the Chelsea Flower Show. That changed this week when I joined friends for an indulgent lunch and a wander around the property. 

One of the first warm and cloudless days of the year made the journey there as lovely as the event itself. While driving 90 minutes for a lunch date may seem mad, the southwest’s A303 is one of the loveliest roads in the country, starting with the sweeping vistas of the Wiltshire downs and a drive by Stonehenge before the hills start to close in and you’re winding through the picturesque coombs of the West Country. Hilltops offer spectacular views over undulating countryside luxuriating in the spring palette of newly lush green fields, speckled white with sheep and this year’s newborn lambs, and the shocking yellow of oilseed rape just coming into bloom. Often the 303 is made miserable by slow traffic, but I was blessed with a smooth run. At xxx you peel off onto smaller roads. More bends, more climbs and plunges, but now with the occasional character cottage or venerable old barn at the roadside. It’s not a drive I’d want to do at night, or in bad weather, but in good conditions it’s glorious.

The final approach to the hotel seems calculated more for great views and building anticipation than for speed. You’ll need 10 minutes more from the time your satnav tells you that you’ve arrived before you are finally parked up. You’ll skirt the estate walls, catching enticing glimpses of the hillside gardens, and go by multiple gate houses and entrances before finally reaching the main gate and essentially doubling back on yourself to get to the house. There’s even a view from the drive carefully placed to show off the house in all its glory, across a field inhabited by rare English white cattle. Parking is out of view of the house and its guest accommodation, cleverly hidden behind high hedges and spreading along some modern barns that serve as the administrative hub of the estate. A cheerful lad in a striped jacket, dressed more like he was heading to Henley than working in Somerset, sat in a shepherd’s hut, greeting guests and directing them to the house.

While we’re not in the Cotswolds here, the golden stone, 17th century architecture and cosy sprawl of adjoining farm buildings is much the same as you’d find in any small estate in neighbouring Gloucestershire. There’s something about the architecture and feel of the exteriors that reminds me of Snowshill Manor. But there are no crowds of tourists here. Only hotel and restaurant guests enter this way, and there are few enough of those to make it quite likely you’ll be on the approach on your own.

You work your way up a stone path lined by old outbuildings now restored to a level of perfection their original builders couldn’t have imagined. An old barn has had one wall replaced by a seamless sheet of glass, showing off a gym with equipment overlooking a small formal garden ablaze with spring bulbs. A granary, still perched on its rat-defying pillars, offers detached accommodation. Places once used for brewing, baking, laundry and storage become hotel rooms and a luxury spa wrapping around an outdoor pool. At the end of this tiny agrarian complex, two pillars mark the transition to “the big house”, in truth the kind of modestly-sized place that would have been occupied by the gentry who show up in Jane Austen novels, not the aristocracy.

Interiors are traditional with enough modern twists to make it clear they’re catering to a clientele that has both money and a taste for the latest trends. Like any self-respecting luxury hotel these days there’s no obvious check in desk, just a staff member or two popping up to enquire into your business on property. On this ground floor there are several lovely sitting rooms, each with a different vibe (drawing room, library, garden room), one of the best boot rooms I’ve ever seen kitted out with Barbours and wellies for all, a magnificent floor-to-ceiling diorama of a riverbank teaming with taxidermised wildlife and a restaurant of two halves. Part is all panelling, fireplaces and tradition, while the bit next to it is an old yard now glassed over, kitted out with orange and lime trees and with a view of the open kitchen. It was in the latter that we settled for our lunch.

The Newt is one of those places that’s deadly serious about local sourcing and, like Raymond Blanc’s Le Manoir or California’s French Laundry, makes a big deal of its vegetable gardens. Which means that the whole menu skews towards the vegetarian, with three of the five starters and three of the five mains being virtually meat free. Where proteins looked to the animal, they were pork or beef raised on the estate or fish landed that morning on the nearby coast. It’s probably the first time in my life I went for two vegetable-based courses not because I was watching calories, or trying to save the planet, but because they appealed the most from what was on offer. It’s hard to beat just-cut, early season English asparagus, of course, especially when paired with a fresh egg topped with just a bit of crispy bacon. (There’s the “virtually” on the meat free front.) My main was a buttermilk-fried celeriac, essentially treating the humble root vegetable like southern fried chicken. It was probably the best meat-free main I’ve ever had; you had no feeling that you were sacrificing anything. The celeriac really was just as good as chicken would have been. Then we split some ricotta and olive oil cake, puncturing a big hole in the local sourcing story with its side of plum compote from fruit brought up from the owner’s estate in South Africa.

We walked off our relatively virtuous lunch with a stroll through The Newt’s famed gardens. I now understand why they’ve put their money behind Chelsea Flower Show sponsorship, even though they’re not a proposition that markets to the masses. These are people who are serious about gardening, and want a place in Britain’s highly competitive horticultural firmament. 

A series of terraces leads down from the house, the direct eyeline taken up with sloping lawns and fountains while over to one side a series of garden rooms are stuffed with perennials and, at this time of the year, a broad range of tulips. Whatever path you follow, you end up in the vegetable garden that just supplied most of your lunch, as much of a work of art … though not quite as large … as the famous vegetable parterres at Villandry. This ruthlessly traditional garden is left by a radically modern, undulating metal pergola that my friend, a local, told me drips with squash in the late summer. Above it is the real treasure of The Newt: the national apple collection.

There are a lot of magnificent apple orchards in England, and I never thought I’d see one to beat the wonderful walled garden at Houghton Lodge, Hampshire, with its centuries-old apples. But The Newt may just beat it. Apples from every county in the country are laid out in ascending terraces, all of them artistically shaped. There are diamond, diagonal and low-fence espaliers, goblets, spirals and pyramids. It’s a tour de force of artistic mastery over nature; the closest the English get to the Japanese obsession with bonsai. It’s easy to imagine how glorious this place is when all of those artistically-placed branches are laden with fruit, but late April as the blossom started to come out was magnificent. I suspect two more weeks will see this unique orchard at its peak.

The South African owners made their money in their Babylonstoren vineyard, and they’re taking the same fruit-to-bottle approach with the apple collection here. The Newt is becoming increasingly known for its high-end ciders, and cider-making time here is quite the event. Even now, in the off season, the equipment for the harvest and making is impressive.

A spring afternoon at The Newt was a beautiful connection with all that’s best in the English countryside. But I suspect it’s even better in the autumn, when the fruits of the harvest are rolling in and making what fills the table and the glass even more glorious. Looks like I have yet another item for the bucket list.

One of the greatest stories ever told beckons all ages at the Ashmolean

I was obsessed by Greek and Roman mythology as a child. While my peers delighted in Barbie dolls, dinosaurs or Matchbox cars I could recite the 12 labours of Hercules and pretended to be a priestess of Vesta with my imaginary sisters. As you can imagine, this was not a recipe for childhood popularity, though I’m pretty sure it did lay the foundations for a career that turned out to be, ultimately, all about story telling. 

One of the greatest of those Ancient Greek stories is that of the Minotaur, the fierce half-man, half-bull creature imprisoned in a maze in Crete and fed on the war booty of young Athenians until the hero Theseus navigates the Labyrinth and kills the man eater. The brilliance of the current exhibition on the topic at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is that it’s all about the story. 

An unprecedented loan from the museum at Heraklion, modern capital of Crete near the ruins of Knossos, means you’ll probably never see this many top-quality Minoan artefacts in one place without getting on a plane to Greece. One hundred of the objects on display have never left the country before. And I doubt anyone has done a better job of untangling the fact and fiction archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans twined together early in the 20th century. There are even arresting video installations that pull parts of the show into the realm of modern art. But the Ashmolean doesn’t major on any of this highbrow stuff. Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality pulls you in with the legend and keeps visitors of all ages interested with solid story telling. The art, history and learning come by osmosis.

You’re plunged into the story from the ticket desk, when designs covering the walls and a dog-legged path to the exhibition’s start make it feel like you’re in the labyrinth itself, stepping through a door and into a dark room to be confronted by the monster himself. This version is a near life-sized statue, a Roman copy of a Greek original. 

Over his shoulder runs a series of films that tell the whole set of stories surrounding the Knossos monster, with typography, graphics and pacing that will satisfy even the shortest attention span. Dig deeper, and this room emphasises the tale’s enduring grip on the imagination, from ancient vase decoration through a Picasso print and a labyrinth-inspired London Underground art installation, with plenty of detours into early Christian maze design, Renaissance painting and Baroque gardens. 

Like Troy, one of the most compelling features of Knossos was a “real or imaginary” debate. Did the cities actually exist, are had they simply been made up as settings for fantastical tales. Both showed up in ancient writings, but there was no trace of them in the modern world. After Heinrich Schliemann found and excavated Troy in the 1870s, the archaeological world fixated on Knossos, and found it soon after. Up until very recently, you would have learned that it was discovered and excavated by an Englishman named Arthur Evans. He’s still the first answer Google gives you to the “who discovered Knossos” question.

But that’s not quite right. The appropriately named Minos Kalokairinos should have the credit. The wealthy businessman and Knossos enthusiast, whose family owned part of the site suspected to hold the lost city, did the first excavation in 1878 and was confident of what he’d found. But politics got in the way. At the time, the Ottoman Turks owned Crete and treated the locals poorly. Any treasures unearthed would probably get transported to museums in Istanbul. 

But the Turks liked the English, and were happy to do a deal with Evans, who was the curator of this same Ashmolean Museum. As concerned as the locals by the possible removal of treasures, he didn’t start digging until after the Ottomans left in 1898. That, and the fact that Evans made sure a museum in nearby Heraklion was built to house the greatest of the treasures he unearthed, is probably why the Greeks don’t hate him in the way they loathe Lord Elgin for his legal (at the time) purchase and transport of the Parthenon marbles. 

But whether he meant to or not, Evans did steal something from Greece: Kalokairinos’ credit for discovering Knossos. Which is why it’s particularly appropriate that the museum he once directed is the one putting on this show, and working so hard to set history straight.

Once we clear up those details, it’s into the main gallery where a treasure trove of artefacts from the palace site unfurls. There are architectural fragments, wall paintings, pottery, furniture, jewellery and ceremonial axes. While Evans might have left most of the artefacts on Crete, he brought home what’s probably the best archive of documentation on the excavations in the world. So this exhibition is possibly even better than a trip to Heraklion when it comes to putting the artefacts in context, complete with beautifully drawn maps and cut-always from the exhibition.

Just as when I saw these treasures for the first time in Heraklion, I was stunned by a mastery of colour and design which makes these 3000+ objects almost modern. Colours and patterns might comfortably grace a set of linens today. The octopus and other sea life swirling across pottery wouldn’t look out of place in a chic kitchen store. The wall painting of olive trees is so close to William Morris’ willow pattern you have to wonder if the late Victorian designer saw and copied. 

And then there are other things that are profoundly alien. While the naked bull jumpers might just turn up in a death-defying YouTube stunt, and beg a connection to Spanish bull fighters, the bare-breasted priestesses holding wriggling, live snakes aloft in their gripped hands are undoubtably from a very different world.

There’s enough of the odd and the exceptional here to keep viewers of all ages interested. Unusually for me, I was in the company of three young people, all of whom found items to interest them here. The curators’ most obvious play for that audience, beyond the focus on storytelling itself, is to include one of the Assassin’s Creed games. Designers Ubisoft included a quest through the ruins of Knossos to slay the Minotaur in their Odyssey installment. In the exhibition, an enormous screen follows an ancient Greek heroine through the ruins to her confrontation with the monster while a display panel explains just how seriously the designers took the history and architecture, actually working with the Ashmolean to get things right.

Not only is this gallery a compelling and vivid bit of world building after seeing all the bits and pieces that would have furnished it, but it’s a real talking point for families. This was the part of the exhibition where my 13-year-old godson was most engaged, showing off his knowledge of the Minotaur and explaining details he’d taken in while playing the game. His mother had the revelation, for the first time, that gaming might be educational and not a complete waste of time. A win for everyone.

While the curators don’t pound the point home, the Ubisoft inclusion is also appropriate because this mix of history and imagination, with some artistic liberties taken to engage audiences, is exactly what Evans did 120 years ago. He rebuilt and restored the site in ways modern archeology would no longer tolerate, and made conclusions about the people and functions of the palace that were based as much on guesswork and personal preference as fact. Even the name we give to this culture … the Minoans … was made up by Evans rather than drawn from history. In my experience, one of the reasons that Knossos is so spectacular to visit is precisely because Evans’ world building gave us a colourful, tangible portal to a vividly imagined past. Whether it’s any more accurate than wandering through in Assassin’s Creed is still a matter of hot debate.

The final parts of the exhibition contain a gallery on newer discoveries in areas around the original excavation, and a video installation inspired by Evans’ fanciful restorations. The 18-minute ramble by Elizabeth Price is narrarated by imaginary, robotic curators who have been asked to clear up the hard drives of the Ashmolean and the neighbouring Pitt-Rivers museum. They draw unexpected, beautiful but often completely wrong conclusions from their mash up. Though meant, at its 2016  creation, to be a comment on what the restoration may have gotten wrong in Knossos, the automated voice prompted me to think about how AI might interpret and curate our artefacts of a world suddenly stripped of humans. It was very weird, but it’s now the thing from the exhibition I’d be most keen to see again.

I suspect I may indeed get back for a second viewing. While Labyrinth was great for a family outing, there’s a second layer of discovery I’d like to make with a longer, quieter visit. Like all great stories, multiple tellings reveal new things.

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality is on at the Ashmolean until 30 July. 

Elton John is a legend at the top of his game as he says farewell

If you are really lucky, at least once in your life you’ll be in the presence of a true legend. Given how long it takes to become a legend, however, the stars will probably be past their prime by the time this happens. Not so with the 76-year-old Elton John, whose voice and piano-playing virtuosity are as dazzling on his retirement tour as they were when I first saw him live in 1982.

That epic concert beneath the St. Louis Arch doesn’t feel like it was 41 years ago. But Elton’s made a lot of music and lived a lot of life since, which combined to make this concert a very different experience. Thanks to the remarkable ephemera you can find on the internet, I can tell you than Elton played only 10 songs at that early concert. If memory serves, the short set was because much more was unendurable outdoors on a shade- and air-conditioning free stage beneath a reflective hunk of stainless steel in the brutal heat and humidity of a St. Louis summer. Four of the 10 songs were, and remain, unfamiliar.  Half a lifetime later at the 02 the setlist was up to 20 with a two-song encore, and every tune was familiar. Much of the night was a communal sign-along. 

Elton’s hits have had a way of embedding themselves in your life, so that a heavily middle-aged crowd wasn’t just saying Farewell to the Yellow Brick Road … they were travelling down their own Memory Lane. By this point the Elton John songbook is so rich, in fact, that even with more than two hours of almost constant performance there were still plenty of classics he couldn’t fit in. You could feel the love tonight, but Lion King fans weren’t going to get to hear that one.

A fabulous video montage of career highlights behind the triumphal and now-autobiographical chorus of I’m Still Standing reminded you of the missing melodies and other highlights across an immense and spectacularly diverse career. It also reinforced the kindness and humour that’s flowed through his life, from his charitable foundations and support of younger artists to his willingness to reveal difficult times in Rocket Man and his hilarious comic turn in Kingsman: The Golden Circle.

As you’d expect, video and production values were an integral part of the show, bringing depth to the songs and providing a remarkable sense of intimacy despite the reality of 20,000 people squinting to see one guy at a piano. Elton also spends plenty of time talking to the audience, and there’s a real sense of coming home. The Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour will include more than 300 gigs by the time it wraps in Stockholm this July, but here he’s playing within the M25 that also embraces his birthplace in Pinner, and a car will whisk him home to David and the kids near Windsor after the show. Elton has always been a proud Englishman and good neighbour … I never ran into him when I lived in the next village, but local stories of his generosity and good nature were abundant … and in London those qualities somehow seemed to shrink the arena to something more intimate. This was a friend, saying goodbye to the friends who’d helped him survive and ultimately thrive. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house by the end.

But there was a lot of fun to be had on the way to that teary farewell. Like the perfect wedding DJ, Elton’s set majored on numbers that had the audience on its feet dancing and singing along. That included some of the classics re-worked at a different tempo, including Rocket Man, and most notably the Cold Heart remix from 2021. (Who’d have thought I’d have a pop No. 1 at the age of 75, he mused.) Slower numbers like Levon and Candle in the Wind cut in to give everyone a chance to rest and sway, still singing along, before the next rise of pace got you back on your feet. 

The encore and farewell was the most perfectly pitched piece of the evening. After several minutes of requisite darkness in which the crowd roared for more, Elton returned in his third costume change of the night. An elegant dressing gown replaced the sequinned jackets, amusingly paired with the “curfew 22:15” notice on the tickets. This would not be a late night, and the now famously tea-total Elton is well beyond his years of wild excess. Instead, he sat down and gave us Your Song, changed from a standard of romantic love to a sincere thank you to his fans for their love and support. And then, as expected given title of the tour, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. At the end, he left the piano and stepped onto a platform that slowly lifted him up the stage and swallowed him into a star field that turned into the Yellow Brick Road album cover, with the older Elton who’d just left us disappearing over the horizon. It was the 21st century equivalent of one of those remarkable Baroque assumptions of the saints into heaven, and it left an emotional and exhausted audience in a similar state of reverent awe.

And that is the kind of experience legends can deliver. Thank you, Elton. May your retirement be long, healthy, and full of love.