St. Louis high school roots go deep to create a rich community spirit

British friends hovered between bewilderment and incredulity when I said I was planning a whole vacation around my high school reunion. While many British schools have alumni networks, formal reunions by class year are not really a thing … they’re only known through consumption of American media. And most Brits I know would be far more likely to have an allegiance with their university than to the home of their earlier education.

In this, they may be like the rest of the world. St. Louis has always had an odd relationship with its educational landscape; it’s the only place in the world I know where the question “where did you go to school?” definitively means high school, and actually matters no matter how long ago you left the place behind. There’s undoubtably a dark side to this. Your answer generally reveals religion, income level, what your parents did for a living, and the part of town you’re likely live in. It determined who your friends were, and possibly even who you married. In a traditional society where few people move away, your answer labelled you and could restrict your movements for the rest of your life. 

Reality might not have been as extreme as that, but it was something I felt intensely in my twenties and was a significant catalyst for me leaving town. But there’s a bright side to that strange high school-dominated environment, too. One of community, shared experiences and friendships forged so intensely that they remain even as the reunion scales tipped into our 4th decade since we went our separate ways.

I should explain that we’re not talking about those vast American high schools here that cross the Atlantic on film. There were 61 women in my graduating class. I’d been in school with a sizeable chunk of them since we were four years old. Like siblings, I don’t remember meeting them … they have just always been there. Almost the entirety of the class was in place by the time we turned 13, meaning most of us traversed the traumas and triumphs of young adulthood together. (Ironically, our only new joiner in our later years became, and remains, the dearest of all those friends, suggesting that even back then I was hungry to expand my horizons.)

It was a Catholic School, run by a religious order, as so many of the answers to “the Saint Louis question” would be. This will also be alien to British colleagues, as the country has some of the lowest levels of religious affiliation in the world. Religious-led education does exist in the UK, but it’s not the norm it was in my childhood experiences. And while I’d call our nuns, the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, quite light touch on the God front … I’ve always thought of them as the female Jesuits … as the years go by I realise they gave us a shared moral code that’s baked into our bones. Plus a bunch of goofy traditions that horrify properly Protestant friends, like placing notes in the lap of the Virgin Mary with special requests and praying to a vast array of saints based upon your need and their specialty areas. Honestly, who can deny the charm of Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, or slipping some cash under St. Anthony's statue for help finding something you've lost? (Find it, his poor box gets the money. It stays lost, take your cash back.)

We were also given a profound sense of place, something you probably don’t realise influences you until long after you leave. Our school was fortunate enough to be surrounded by rambling acres of wooded parkland. The main building itself had been copied from a medieval French chateau. There were circular staircases and attics, secret access onto roofs with dramatic views, a woodland grotto with a statue of the Madonna we crowned in May, and outdoor hides for secret conclaves. There was even a series of formal “parlours”, furnished like an aristocratic French home, used for special meetings. (Sadly a reunion tour of the building showed that these have been re-purposed and mostly stripped of their grandeur since my days.) Just as Hogwarts functions as a character in the Harry Potter novels, the physical entity that is Villa Duchesne, the house of the oak, played a part in our story. I have no doubt it added fuel to all the loves that brought me to Europe.

Sharing formative years, a distinctive place and a moral code creates an extraordinary sense of community. When my mother was ill and I couldn’t get home, I could trust the women of this circle to help her. When people are in need, the sisterhood steps up. When my parent's divorce threatened my ability to complete my education, an alumnae scholarship filled the gap. There's a connection that brings an ease of relationships, and conversations flow even if you haven't seen each other for decades.

But enough of the soppy stuff, I hear British readers muttering. What actually happens at a high school reunion? 

Well, I’m embarrassed to admit that I missed the official gig: a celebratory mass followed by the annual alumnae luncheon and presentation of the year’s alumnae service medals. That's because while I love catching up with classmates on Facebook I hadn’t bothered to update my postal address in more than a decade, so all the formal materials went in some unappreciative stranger's bin. By Sunday morning we had already moved on to Oktoberfest in Hermann, Missouri. But I got to all the really fun stuff.

On Friday night, one of my classmates opened her house for us to join an already-planned reunion party for the Class of ‘82 from what we had generally considered to be our brother school, the Saint Louis Priory. (This Benedictine outpost in the American Midwest is a daughter house of Ampleforth in Yorkshire, a visit to which I wrote about here.) Our hostess had married one of their number, and the co-educational aspect leant this party more of a sense of what Brits might expect of a high school reunion. There was a lot of peering across the room, thinking someone looked familiar, trying to remember names. “Who are all these paunchy, balding, middle-aged men?” We asked ourselves. The boys were no doubt pondering a similar question about fat women and dyed hair, while we all fancy ourselves to be about 22. Inevitably, for most of the party the girls ended up in one room and the boys in the other … though I think we all look rather fabulous in the group shot below.

The highlight of the night for many was one of the men turning up with his male partner. Everyone was delighted he’d found joy and happy that a relationship that would have been unimaginable in our school days was now normal. Our world had moved on for the better.

The next day held an open house at the school, which has managed to preserve most of its sylvan splendour while adding new buildings and parking. Preserved most, but not all. If I win the lottery I am donating the cash to plant a screen of trees and plants around the “front bowl” where the Madonna of Lourdes currently looks like she’s standing in a parking lot, casting a sly eye towards the hockey fields. The quiet contemplation this place held in my day is long gone.  The sports facilities are a vast improvement, however, with a gorgeous field house overlooking a university-quality field hockey facility. It's something that no doubt goes hand-in-hand with an impressive array of state championships won since my day.

The lawns in front of the main castle building were dotted with tables and chairs, and booths on the front drive offered fun stuff for kids. People had been encouraged to bring their youngsters, always a good idea at a school where some families may be enticed into their fourth or even fifth generation of affiliation. 

I was most interested, however, in what was going on inside the main building.

While the traditional architecture remains, technology is now obviously present in classrooms, as you’d expect. Teachers' and administrators' offices are now throughout the building rather than all clustered on the top floor, hinting at a more open style of learning. In a digital age, the library is smaller, with one wing of it now converted to a high-end lecture hall and conference centre. The stripping back of the parlours across the hall from that, I suspect, is a related development. An exhibition of old uniforms contributed much delight, and even a bit of horror as an old grey tweed smock brought back vivid memories of itchy discomfort. Display boards in the main hallway offered photo montages from the senior yearbooks of the various reunion classes, and bulletin boards showed off what was going on these days with different clubs and extracurriculars.

My greatest joy came from seeing that the school newspaper I founded in 1980 still exists, now as a full-colour magazine. (Back then I had already set my heart on the best journalism university in the country. Villa didn’t have a journalism programme or a regular school newspaper, so the 15-year-old me figured I’d better start one so I could have a competitive application. The nuns, bless them, went along with it.) Just as exciting was the fully-equipped broadcast studio that will be rounding out the current girls’ communications skills.  I was delighted to see much more emphasis on our international network than in the old days, and more proof that current students were learning about … and getting to … the world well beyond St. Louis. And though I didn’t get to see it, classmates told me that the new theatre in what was our old auditorium also impresses. 

That night was an impromptu, BYO affair for about 20 classmates who hadn't yet had their fill of each other. We sat around campfires in one of the cohort's back gardens, sharing war stories and laughing at the past. We are mature women now, with quite a collection of baggage. It's mellowed us, and made our shared history sweeter.

In our younger years this wasn't always the case. Jealousy crept into the early mix as we suspected the grass was greener over other fences. I know that I, who came late to love and marriage, felt an awkward outsider for years next to many of my ... as I saw them to be ... more beautiful, more affluent and more happily paired classmates. The years have knocked away illusions, and revealed that all of us were insecure about something. And special in our own ways. None of us have perfect lives. Instead, as a community we've seen it all: significant illness, relationship issues, addiction, financial trouble, death. What hasn’t killed us has made us, and the ties in this group, ever stronger. And I have no doubt the moral core that our nuns, mostly long dead now, shaped within us made that happen. In the warm glow of Saturday night’s campfire, I realised just how blessed and privileged I was to grow up with these women.

The one painful absence in the weekend was a lack of diversity. We had four African-American classmates, a slightly larger Filipino community and one Jewish girl (whose mother ran our art department and who was an invaluable addition to both Old Testament and comparative religion studies). That wasn’t a bad mix for a class of 61.

But none of those women attended. Our evening activities were unofficial and loosely organised; it’s possible the school itself did better with the formal event on Sunday. But I missed those women, and their absence made me regret not volunteering to help organise, even if I am at a significant distance. Maybe I need to step up for the 45th, to encourage people like me who don’t return often to come back and feel the magic. 

In the mean time, the St. Louis Cardinals play the Chicago Cubs in London on the 24th and 25th of June. I pledge here, publicly, that I'll organise a party for any of the sisterhood who make the trip. A communal London experience could add drama to our shared character-building experiences. Trust me, the Central Line on a hot day requires prayer and fortitude.

A trio of St. Louis classics captures our limited sightseeing time

It’s been eight years since I’ve set foot in my home town. For some people, that would be unremarkable. But before this stint I'd never gone much more than a year without visiting, even though I’ve lived in Europe since the late ‘90s. This was a long gap. As with people you don’t see for a long time, changes were more apparent than they used to be when I returned more frequently. 

On the whole, the differences I saw were positive and suggest the place is prospering. The Chesterfield river bottoms, agricultural in my childhood and under water when I moved away, is almost built out now, with a new outlet mall and a massive double-decker driving range to join the sprawl of retail, restaurants and offices that had already mushroomed there on my last visit. While the outlets are killing off the mall that was a highlight of my youth, built on higher land above the valley, developments around the old building are creating the Chesterfield business district promised when my parents moved there in the early ‘70s. 

Clayton Road, always an East-West artery lined with gracious houses, has transformed with new construction. Gone are many of the classic, rambling St. Louis-style ranch houses sprawling beneath the trees of wooded lots of an acre or more. In have come massive, multi-story mansions. Some have architectural merit, reaching back to my home town’s love of historic European vernacular styles, but many others are horrific, looking more like commercial buildings than residences. And far too many trees have been sacrificed for the explosion in square footage. It will be many years before the road re-gains its sylvan glories.

Downtown looked tidy and well maintained, though locals warned of the continuing disintegration of the City of St. Louis, the rising crime rates within, and warned grimly about going there after dark unless for a baseball game. (In this, at least, the divide between county and city hasn’t changed, though optimistic developers keep trying.)

Our four nights in the St. Louis area were devoted to family and friends rather than sightseeing, but we did manage to work in a bit of tourism. I was keen to see developments at the Gateway Arch and the Missouri Botanical Garden, and I wanted to introduce my husband to our spectacular Cathedral.

THE GREATEST BYZANTINE CATHEDRAL IN AMERICA

Officially the Cathedral Basilica of Saint Louis, this is one of the grandest churches in the United States and could go head to head on the architectural front with many European giants. Few beyond locals appreciate this however, so outside of services the place is often empty, despite the free entry and well-informed tour guides who will illuminate secrets of the building with their laser pointers.

The church is Romanesque on the outside, Byzantine on the inside and was heavily inspired by the Hagia Sophia. No, the city has no link whatsoever to that style; the cardinal who led construction simply liked it better than gothic. With more than 83,000 square feet of mosaics, it boasts the largest collection of this art form under one roof anywhere outside of Russia. It’s for the rich ornamentation of its walls, ceilings, domes and columns that the Cathedral is best known. 

In fact, it dates from the early 20th century, when St. Louis was a much bigger deal than it is now and its population was almost entirely Roman Catholic thanks to the city’s French Colonial roots.  Breaking ground soon after the St. Louis hosted both the Olympics and the World’s Fair, the Cathedral was a statement to the world of both the city’s position and the power of the church underpinning it. Its floor plan actually owes a heavy debt to the Roman Catholic cathedral in London, which had just opened for worship when St. Louis' church leaders did a grand tour looking for inspiration. Unlike the Londoners, however, St. Louisans didn't run out of money and were able to finish our decorations; Westminster cathedral is a much darker, gloomier place.

St. Louis' cathedral glistens and glimmers like the inside of a jewellery box. Vast tracks of ceiling are covered with gold; pure gold sheets beneath glass that ripples, broken into tiny tesserae. The result is a background that flickers, gleams and moves behind scenes from the bible and the religious history of St. Louis. As the home of all the missionary orders serving the west, we have a lot of it. The canonised nun who founded my school has a prominent pendentive to herself. 

The side chapels are arts & crafts in style, with a more balanced range of mosaic colours as flowers twine up columns and neo-classical design motifs repeat. Perfect to accompany the Tiffany glass in windows and light fixtures. Perhaps most unique is the deep red mosaic ceiling of the side aisle to the right of the altar, meant to convey the blood of Christ and almost hypnotic in the intensity of its shade. The central dome repeats the red as its background but cuts it with gold, to present the heaven gained through the blood. 

I took these wonders for granted as a child, though was always grateful for the visual distractions when masses got too long. Returning with an appreciative, impressed husband in tow reminded me of just how lucky I was to grow up with this.

GATEWAY TO THE WEST
The Cathedral hadn’t changed since I last saw it, but the grounds and museum beneath the Gateway Arch had undergone a radical transformation. The museum here was always good. In fact, once you’d made the trip to the top of the stainless steel structure in its infamous rocking elevators, it was the museum that was worth coming back for. But the entrance … almost tomb-like ramps leading down from either leg … was unimpressive and there was little room for big groups or security. More problematic, a mid-century museum built to glorify Westward expansion by white European settlers, lacking in interactive displays to appeal to youth, was out of step with the modern zeitgeist. Outside, there was the problem of the noisy concrete canyon of a highway that separated the Arch from the rest of the downtown area.

The recent renovation addresses all these problems. The architects have essentially roofed and turfed over the road for a one-block width, creating a new park that connects the vast lawns beneath the arch to the architectural glory of the Old Courthouse. The view both to and from the monuments is vastly improved. There’s now a grand, oval entrance plaza facing the downtown area, but sunken so it’s hidden to the viewer looking uphill from beneath the arch. It’s much more suited to the dignity of St. Louis’ most famous monument, and disperses crowds that overwhelmed the original lobby area.

Instead of occupying a fan-shaped footprint beside the old entry, the museum is now a long corridor linking the new entry facility to the old lobby with the lifts to the Arch’s top. Friends tell me there was much hand-wringing about the “woke agenda” when the new museum was unveiled. I wasn’t bothered. All the stories from my childhood are still here. Jefferson is still honoured for buying the Louisiana Purchase, Louis & Clark are still heroes who went on a grand adventure, and the settlers who set off from St. Louis are still commended for their bravery and determination that reinforced the American dream.

There are just more stories here, and more perspectives. The most noticeable increase is about the Native Americans who already lived here, both how they helped the new society and how they lost out. We explore the reality that the identity of the aggressor in the Mexican-American war depends on your starting viewpoint. Going further back, we’re reminded that the French and Spanish colonial roots of the area made for a startlingly diverse society.

We also get more exciting and more interactive displays. There’s a fantastic new model of the St. Louis riverfront at the height of the steamboat age, with lights on a circuit that give you a sense of day and night.

Whole building facades have been moved inside. Touch screens offer games and quizzes. Social media snappers will love the photo opportunities on the back of a Westward-bound train or in a colonial trading canoe. There’s even an exact-sized replica of the top of the arch, complete with true-sized windows that show the actual view transmitted by live cameras. So if trips are sold out for the day, or you can’t face the claustrophobic rocking elevators, you can get close to the real thing. Best of all, the the grand tradition of all of St. Louis’ historic cultural attractions, everything but the ride up the arch is free.

SHAW’S GARDEN KEEP’S GROWING
While the Cathedral undoubtably had a role in developing my appreciation for grand European architecture, the Missouri Botanical Garden laid the foundations for my growth into an English gardener. Englishmen are rare amongst the French, Germans, Italians and Irish who dominate my home town’s story, but Sheffield-born Henry Shaw made an outsized contribution for his nationality. Having grown very rich selling English cutlery to settlers heading West from St. Louis, he returned to his motherland for a visit, was impressed with Kew Gardens and thought we should have something similar. The rest is gardening history.


The longer I live in England, the more I appreciate just how British this place is. It’s not just the English woodland garden, the Victorian parterres around Shaw’s house or the formal box hedge garden that, hopefully, will preserve the viability of that British native once the scourge of box blight wipes ours out. Rather, it’s how much the Missouri facility resembles our Royal Horticultural Society gardens: the devotion to teaching, preservation and science; the wide range of styles and nations represented in different gardens within the garden; the facility dedicated to home gardening advice with a series of smaller gardening rooms meant to inspire what you could do at home. And just like RHS Wisley is a multi-million dollar re-development of the entry pavilion. So alike, in fact, I have to wonder if they exchanged planning notes or at least visited our Surrey-based garden for inspiration.

The most noticeable change in St. Louis is that the entry building that once felt like a barrier between you and the garden is now an obvious gateway to it. Instead of entering on one level and going up to another to access the gardens you make the change of levels in front of the building, on ramps through beds that are currently unplanted but promise to be spectacular. A two-story, glasshouse-like entry hall (just like Wisley) takes you straight out to a new forecourt that will be planted with rotating beds of seasonal annuals and grasses (just like Wisley). The new facility has a bigger restaurant, more classrooms and exhibition spaces, a much bigger shop and what looks to be a new glasshouse.

Beloved favourites are still here, too. The Japanese garden looked grand, the climatron showed off its tropical plants beneath its geodesic dome and the tradition of local couples having a photo shoot here to announce their engagement continues. Watching two before the lens on my visit reminded me of our turn 11 and a half years ago.

Unlike the changes at the Arch, the renovations at the Garden are all raw and incomplete, with construction workers still beavering away across the site. It’s going to be magnificent, and my gardening interest demanded I check it out while I’m in town. But, to be honest, it’s still many months away from being in shape for the average tourist. The building needs to be finished, the new glasshouse and forecourt planted and the Victorian camellia house put back in order. (At the moment it’s just a functional storehouse for a lot of plants in pots.) 

I suspect visitors next May will be very lucky. But they won't include me. While I doubt I'll go another eight years before returning home, my time of annual visits is long gone. Who knows what transformations will have taken place before I get back again.

St. Genevieve offers peace, quiet and time travel back to colonial French America

If you want to know what St. Louis looked like in the colonial era, there’s a fantastic video in the newly-renovated museum under the Gateway Arch. Or, you could climb in a car, drive an hour south along the Mississippi, and spend some time in St. Genevieve.

Europeans flock to places like Bruges and Venice, where quirks of history have left cityscapes frozen in time. But few of those travellers would have heard of, much less visited, the first organised European settlement west of the Mississippi, despite its abundant charms and what many claim is the biggest and best-preserved collection of French colonial architecture in the Americas.

Founded in the 1740s, by the closing decades of that century St. Genevieve was a very big deal. Lying close to two major French military instillations along the river, it was the commercial hub of French trade for the whole middle-American river basin. Further north, the Missouri, Illinois and Ohio all joined the Mississippi, making a convenient highway for the continent. (The very reason for St. Louis’ rise a bit later.) French entrepreneurs sent European trade goods out to sell to settlers or swap with native Americans for furs. The houses and shops they left behind show that they managed to carve a gracious lifestyle out of the wilderness.

A row of beautifully preserved houses on S. Main Street, managed as part of the National Park Service, shows this off. High, spacious rooms with broad windows face deep, covered porches. Anyone who’s lived in the Mississippi Valley will instantly recognise the summertime necessity of keeping hot, humid air moving. Everything is built on high stone foundations that would have added to air cooling in the summer, provided ample storage (most of these people were traders) and lifted living areas above floods when those times came. Elsewhere in town are shops and warehouses from those same settlers, all with signs indicated who built what, and when. 

As the years passed and ownership of the territory bounced around … Spanish, English, back to French and finally American … more settlers came to this busy little place. It was particularly popular with Germans. Architecture evolved to something a bit closer to East Coast colonial, though deep porches, high roofs and dormer windows remained. Those late 18th and early 19th century houses are dotted about town, too, also marked by the names and dates of their builders. 

Then came the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811 and 1812, so violent they changed the course of the Mississippi. St. Genevieve was no longer a riverside town; now there was about a mile of river bottom to cross to get to the port. It was enough to exacerbate what had already been a gentle decline in favour of St. Louis upriver. Though a few new buildings arrived in the following years, most of the historic district of about 8 square blocks looks like it was frozen in time around 1860. And that is what gives St. Gen its huge appeal for tourists. 

Beyond the historic homes run by the Park Service and the associated visitor centres, almost everything is either a boutique hotel, a restaurant or a cute shop. While there are “real” residents on the outskirts, the heart of town is essentially a living museum. There’s only one problem with this: Its tourist existence means that outside of school holidays, St. Gen only really exists on weekends. We stayed over a Monday and Tuesday to discover most of the place shuttered, and nursing a bit of a collective hangover from a huge Oktoberfest party the weekend before. 

The result was a ghost town with few places to eat, little to do, empty streets, and a profound silence occasionally broken by the whistle of freight trains passing the edge of town. We were delighted. This was early in the trip, we were after R&R and the silence suited us perfectly. 

I wandered around town with my sketchbook, drawing and painting buildings … badly … and enjoying the autumn colours. 

Mr. B slept in our enormous room at the Audubon Hotel, waking for a lunch excursion before returning for a nap. It was just what the doctor ordered. If you’re looking for excitement, head to St. Gen on the weekend. But if you’re after the peace and quiet of a bygone age, a weekday stay is for you.

WHERE TO STAY

Audubon’s Hotel is shockingly modern for St. Genevieve; the newly-built structure first opened as a bar in 1901 and has had a history of hospitality ever since. It’s currently run by several local families who ran a major restoration effort less than a decade ago. The result is not just gorgeous hotel rooms finished to a high standard, but friendly and personal service that makes you feel like a local from your first belly up to the bar. Each room is named after a different bird, celebrating the legacy of naturalist John James Audubon who, legend has it, first started drawing birds during a winter stuck near here by a frozen Mississippi. Turtle Dove is at the front corner of the building, with three enormous windows screened with plantation shutters looking over the town’s historic district. 

WHERE TO EAT

Local traffic made it clear that the Audubon’s was known for both its food and the fellowship at its bar; we ate dinner here both nights. Enormous home-baked pretzels with beer cheese dip were stand-outs. These are served many places in Missouri but we never had better. A wide ranging menu covers American classics (burgers, pizza, grilled sandwiches) and has some more upscale options. There is an impressive number of local beers on tap and the owners are proud of the stock of their bar, including an impressive range of bourbons and a thoughtful wine list.

Two blocks away, The Old Brick House has a similar menu but a darker, cosier atmosphere in a building dating from 1800. You can envision fur trappers congregating at the bar after a hard trip in the wilderness. It’s one of the only places in town other than the Audubon’s that’s open on Mondays. Rather amazingly, it’s the only place outside of Disneyland that I’ve seen a monte cristo sandwich on a menu. Essentially a ham and cheese toasty between two slightly sweet pieces of toasted French bread, there’s probably a good reason this oddity isn’t better known. But it was a fun dose of nostalgia to encounter one.

Just a few shopfronts down is The Anvil Saloon. If fur trappers haunt the Brick House it’s the ghosts of Riverboat passengers from the age of Mark Twain who you’ll imagine here. The high, airy room, massive windows and pressed-tin ceiling panels lend a wonderful atmosphere, but it’s the stunning, high wooden bar that’s the scene stealer. Legend says it came off a riverboat that needed to be relieved of weight when stuck on a sand bar. Tasty and generous salads here, a timely intervention after days of carb and meat heavy meals.

WHAT TO DO

The main attraction of St. Genevieve is its French Colonial architecture, but if you want to wander further afield here are two suggestions.

Unfortunately for tourists and the whole tourism economy, the ferry at St. Genevieve is currently shut down for repairs. When it’s working, a quick hop over the river to see the 17th century remains of the French Fort de Chartres is worth the trip. At the moment, the best you can do is walk or drive to the embarkation point about a mile out of town, where there’s a lovely view of the Mississippi and some pretty riverside woodland if you fancy a picnic. 

About 40 minutes’ drive inland is Cave Winery, which I’ll cover in a bit more detail in a later article on the Missouri wine experience. It’s a pretty drive, and the winery has a picnic and drinking area in a cave at the bottom of a woodland walk that’s ablaze with colour this time of year. 

The Land of Lincoln rewards sightseers, but steer clear of the horseshoes

What in the world am I doing in Springfield, Illinois? Regular readers will know that the United States doesn’t feature much in this blog. But your author is from the Midwest and I’m making my first journey home in eight years. Springfield, quite simply, is about as far as a jet-lagged Brit would want to drive from O’Hare on arrival day.

We’re headed to St. Louis for my high school reunion, but decided we didn’t just want to spend two weeks in a place we already know. So we’re saving the central weekend for my home town and filling the days on either side with luxury B&Bs in small towns, rural wineries, and spectacular landscapes starting to blaze with autumn colour. All linked by a meandering road trip in a rather flashy red Mustang convertible. The forecast for R&R is excellent.

We’re spending the majority of the holiday in my home state of Missouri, but Springfield was a logical first stop. Closer to St. Louis than Chicago, it always felt like part of my extended home turf and my childhood saw several visits to the Lincoln sites. More than 40 years on, things are looking a lot better than I remember.

The Lincoln home is now part of a two-block long restoration area closed to traffic and run by the National Park Service. Everything built after Lincoln’s time has been cleared away. Everything he’d recognise has been beautifully restored. The result is a peaceful, tree-lined street straight out of mid-19th century America, a short walk from the state capitol building.

Lincoln wouldn’t have recognised that soaring dome, however, since construction started on it three years after his death. It is a grandiose, if architecturally odd, mix of Greek revival, French and Italianate architectural styles, and is the tallest traditional-style capitol building in the United States. It’s higher than the capitol building in Washington D.C., only outstripped by the Art Deco tower blocks of Louisiana and Nebraska. Despite the architectural mash-up it’s a lovely building set in pleasant parkland with a statue of Abe Lincoln out front that’s a popular photo spot for visitors.

Lincoln himself would have known the older capitol building a few blocks to the Northeast. Smaller, squatter and surrounded by a square of early 20th century brick business buildings, it looks like any one of thousands of county courthouse squares across America. On one corner is the modern Lincoln Presidential   Library and Museum; highly recommended by friends but we didn’t have time to get inside on our one day in town.

The one interior we did want to see (besides the Dana Thomas house, described here) was Lincoln’s tomb. It’s the centrepiece of Oak Ridge Cemetery, one of those classic 19th century necropolises full of impressive memorials and architecturally fascinating houses of the dead. (Londoners: Think Highgate with more space between occupants.) The president’s memorial is an obelisk sitting atop a square base with a rotunda protruding from its front. The first impression the lower walls give is of a fortress, one reinforced by the bronze sculptural groups of soldiers on four drums at the base of the obelisk. Lincoln was, after all, a leader defined by war, so the martial feel of his tomb is perfectly logical. Though the sad look on his face in the full length statue standing at the centre of it all speaks eloquently of how he felt about that. 

There’s a surprisingly plain bronze door that leads inside through the centre of the round, projecting base. You find yourself in a beautiful, solemn rotunda lined with marble columns, topped with a shallow dome gilded with palladium, a rare, silvery relative of platinum. At the centre sits the original artist’s maquette of the famous seated statue from the Lincoln memorial in Washington. From here, sepulchral passageways lead around the rectangular base of the building, widening at each corner with apses displaying bronze statues of Lincoln at different significant times in his life. At the far side of the square from the entry rotunda stands a red marble cenotaph in a semi-circular apse, with “Now he belongs to the ages” carved above. Lincoln, his wife and two of his three sons are buried nearby.

A serious Lincoln aficionado could easily spend another day or two in the area, taking in the modern library and New Salem, the village where Lincoln grew up that is now run as a living history museum. But that wasn’t for us. Springfield was mostly a revival stop, giving us a chance to get into the US time zone and spend some time with my father, who’d driven over from another state capital … his home, Jefferson City, Missouri. 

WHERE TO STAY

We stayed at The Inn at 835, a B&B converted from a prosperous turn-of-the-20th-century apartment building just a few blocks from the capitol. Convenient location, marvellously comfortable bed, lovely decor but a bit questionable on value for money. I need to get to the other two B&Bs on this trip to do a fair compare-and-contrast job on this category of US accommodation.

WHERE TO EAT

It’s worth noting that many things close down on Sundays in small town America. Springfield may be a state capital, but its population is less than 120,000 and most of the legislators and other government workers who do business there during the week return home on weekends. Due to current labour shortages, many restaurants are closing on Mondays, too. So the two places my pre-trip research suggested I would want to try weren’t open during our visit.

Maldaner’s is one of Springfield’s oldest continually operating businesses, a staunch bastion of tradition located near the old capitol building. It looked like a slightly dressier option that would have been nice for a “welcome to America” dinner. On the outskirts of town is the Cozy Dog Diner, one of several claimants to the title of inventor of the corn dog however they insist on avoiding the name … they’re cozy dogs. Both of these places sit along the legendary Route 66.

Any guide to Springfield will mention two famous diners, however, and Charlie Parker’s is open until 2pm on Sundays. The food is that classic combo of deep fried, griddled and cheese covered that hardens arteries across America. While the atmosphere was great … a repurposed Quonset hut packed with memorabilia and looking as if nothing has changed since 1962 …  I wouldn’t recommend it if other things were open. My Rueben was tasty, though a bit skimpy on the pastrami, while Mr. B tried a local speciality called a “horseshoe” that just seemed to be a random variety of savoury dining items piled high, strewn with tater tots and slathered with tasteless cheese sauce. “Empty calories consumed with regret,” he mourned of his first diner experience this trip. 

We had better luck that evening at Cooper’s Hawk, an outlet of a winery-based chain. It feels a bit like an upscale Cheesecake Factory, with a massive dining room and a wide-ranging menu. All the wine they serve is their own, made in a facility in Northern Illinois from grapes purchased from around the country. Everything on the menu had wine recommendations, detailed descriptions and could be purchased by glass or bottle. Most bottle prices hovered around $30, so reasonable for restaurant wine even with our collapsed currency. I’m never a fan of chain restaurants, but this was better than average and would certainly stand out on a limited list, especially if chains and mega-brands were the only offerings.

 

A Lloyd Wright masterpiece is the jewel in the Illinois capital’s crown

Springfield, Illinois, is best known for its Lincoln sites. The saviour of union lived here before he was elected president, and his body returned here for burial after his assassination. More surprising is that this Midwestern state capital is also a feast of architecture; mostly high Victorian and Greek Revival with lashings of Federal and a few streets in the business district that could easily host a WWII era drama. But towering over all of these, significant enough to merit a special trip of pilgrimage, is the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Dana Thomas House.

America’s most famous architect designed more than 1,000 structures over a career spanning seven decades, but this one is special. It was the first time, and one of the few, that a very rich and very indulgent owner gave him free reign to do whatever he wanted. He was still early in his career and highly experimental. And, most significantly, the house has more original Lloyd Wright art glass and furniture than any other domestic building he designed.

The cutting-edge creativity of this place is jaw-dropping. Quite simply, her neighbours must have thought that commissioning owner Susan Lawrence Dana had lost her mind. This sprawling complex of Japanese inspiration, clean lines, open plan, and sharp, geometric aesthetics dates from 1904, when fashionable people were maximalists who built houses to look like European palaces. From the moment you step into the tiny, barrel-vaulted entry foyer, surrounded by gently-glowing glass, you know you’re in for something different. There’s a glimpse into a multi-story atrium, but to get there you need to turn into a small, darkened staircase which exacerbates the impact when you come into the light-filled central space of the house. 

On your right, an atrium rises the whole height of the house, bathed with natural light and broken up by balconies and galleries on multiple levels. On your left, a low-ceilinged lobby features comfortable chairs in front of a fountain and a wall of art glass behind. These are the famous “sumac windows”, though most people will interpret them as heads of wheat. From here you can also see a barrel-vaulted dining room with some eye-popping geometric light fixtures and a mural of waving grasses and plants. The colour scheme throughout is the same: golden amber, olive greens, burnished oranges, rich reds. Lloyd Wright wanted the whole house to feel as if you were walking through the local prairie in the autumn, and he’s succeeded.

This is one of the earliest and most complete expressions of his famous Prairie Style. It’s also breathtakingly Japanese. The architect hadn’t visited that country yet, but he was already in love with its style. He and Mrs. Dana were said to have bonded over her collection of Japanese prints. Outside, the peaked roofs, wing-tipped eaves and deep green tiles with their mysterious geometric patterns could be straight from a temple in Kyoto. Inside, the homage continues with an abundance of woods, tall carved finials that look like temple decorations and loads of open, flexible space that can be divided for different uses by green curtains rather than the traditional paper screens. There’s even some of that trademark Lloyd Wright glass that looks like a torii gate, hanging in a big arched window so that it frames those exotic gables outside.

The house is also distinguished by its length and levels. Although it could functionally be described as having three stories … a basement, main floor and an upper story with two bedroom suites … there are actually sixteen different levels as rooms dip and rise from one functional space to another. The house stretches the length of a city block, with a library and entertainment hall with another barrel vault extending from the main block. Garages sit on the other side of the rectangle, framing a long, elegant garden in the space between. Porches surround the whole block, offering fabulous possibilities for parties that flowed between inside and out. Mrs. Dana was a famed hostess and it’s obvious from the floor plan. This would be a dream house for entertaining, from intimate dinners to cocktails and canapés for hundreds. 

Which is exactly what Mrs. Dana did for decades. But age sapped her energy and an unwise choice of third husband gutted her cash resources. Her trend-setting house sat empty for years at the end of her life its contents were auctioned to raise money for her health care. The house would have been sold, too, had anyone wanted to take on an expensive oddity in the middle of WWII. Medical publisher Charles Thomas recognised the genius of the place, bought the house and used it as his company offices from 1944-1969. During that time he restored sensitively and talked the state of Illinois into buying.the house for its preservation. It took another 20 years to be fully restored and open to the public, in heavy part thanks to the deep personal interest and fund raising skills of former governor Jim Thompson.

Three decades on, the legacy is one of the finest Frank Lloyd Wright sites in the world, offering free guided tours for anyone who books in advance. If you’re ever in, or passing through, Central Illinois, this is worth a special trip. And just what am I doing passing through central Illinois? Read on…

Internal photography is not allowed in the Dana Thomas house. Thanks to the official web site for these borrowed shots.

No surprise that 3-star Core leaps to the top of my best meals ever list

I understand that the guards on death row do their best to honour inmates’ desires for their last meals. I wonder how they’d react if I were in that unfortunate situation and requested the 7-course tasting menu from Clare Smyth’s 3-Michelin Star restaurant Core? A ridiculous scenario, I know, but there’s a grain of essential truth here. At the end of that spectacular meal I was in a place somewhere between awe over the culinary magic and humility brought on by my good fortune, sitting across the table from the love of my life, content with the world and thinking that life really couldn’t get much better.

I’ve written about Clare Smyth here before. Back in 2013 I had an opulent lunch at Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, where she was head chef, and was invited to meet her back in the kitchen. I wondered why her name wasn’t above the door, and swore I’d seek her out when she got her own place. (Particularly since I felt guilty that my husband hadn’t been with me that first time.) Smyth opened Core in August 2017. Five years was not a quick delivery on that pledge. There was the pandemic, of course, and that busy time Clare was catering Harry and Meghan’s wedding before it, and the fact that getting a table here is a bit like getting concert tickets to a hot gig. Every day at midnight booking opens for the day three months from that point, and immediately sells out. By 12:15 the morning my husband stayed up to call, there were only two lunch slots left on the whole day’s docket. 

He’d booked to celebrate our wedding anniversary and my birthday, both on the 15th of September but celebrated at Core two days later. So exceptional was both the food and the price tag it provided another validation for having both events on the same day. 

Celebration began with the restaurant design itself which, in tones of white. grey, copper and natural woods, bathed in light and enlivened by seasonal flowers, is sophisticated yet relaxing. There were perhaps 20 diners besides us in the main dining room and a party of 10 at a long party table stretched out next to the pass, and that’s a sell out. So it’s an intimate place. Thankfully, despite being in such high demand Smyth hasn’t packed the house. There’s enough margin around each table to create a bubble of privacy.

Celebration begins with the same quartet of amuse bouche for everyone: a tomato gougere, a bite sized pinwheel of smoked chicken flavoured with beer, honey and thyme, foie gras pate on a crisp tart shell and a bit of jellied eel with some sort of mousse redolent of the ocean, served on a seaweed shell. I wasn’t crazy about the idea of the last but in taste it was a lot closer to the Japanese eel of which I’m an enormous fan than my imaginings of East End pie shops. The presentation was as good as the flavours, with the foie gras coming out on mounds of moss and the eel on beach pebbles, as if the natural forces were converging on your table. 

Next came a langoustine and wasabi pea work of art; the steadiness of hand required to place the circles of tiny dots on the plate would be far beyond me.

This was quickly knocked into a supporting place by the Scottish cep tartlet. A mushroom-lover’s dream, the tart case featured mushroom mouse topped by a pile of wafer-thin mushroom slices sitting in a mushroom sauce. It was the very essence of that flavour.

Back to fish for the Cornish turbot before crispy sweetbreads with kohlrabi. Everyone adores turbot, but sweetbreads tend to be for the more adventurous. I had them on a tasting menu once in the Loire valley and they weren’t bad, but these were truly excellent. (Photo up top.) In the “I’d actually order them again” Category. Piers, an avowed hater of kohlrabi, swore that if I could make it like that … completely infused with meaty, umami richness … he’d actually eat it. I don’t think I’ll be mastering that trick any time soon.

The climax of my savoury dishes was called Beef and Oyster. Like the eel and the tart course, Smyth is playing with common menus items and giving them the three-star treatment. Beef and oyster pie was a staple of the Victorian working classes. I doubt they’d recognise this incarnation. The beef, Highland wagyu, was rich and tender. I could have done without the whole oyster up top but it absolutely complemented the fillet with its saline hit. The best part of the dish, however, was off to one side, where an oyster shell was packed with the steak and oyster filling you might find in one of those Victorian pies, topped with something that resembled a prawn cracker in density and bite but I think combined the flavours of the oyster and sea weed. This little shell full of goodness was actually better than the fillet, proving you can work wonders with stews.

We started our transition to sweet with something called “the other carrot” another eye-pleasing combo of a carrot cocktail with a frothy top and two quenelles which, though two slightly different flavour profiles, would both have registered “carrot cake” in your brain if you’d been given them in a blind taste test. Yet bite-sized morsels were as gorgeous as any pastry chef’s proudest creation.

The dessert that followed was pretty much my idea of meal-ending perfection: chocolate, malt and hazelnut. A fine-dining tour de force inspired by the simple Malteaser. And like that addictive treat, this dessert was light as a feather. If you didn’t get that message through your taste buds, your eyes would help you. Tiny chocolate feathers drifted across the ball of malty chocolate before you, while the whole thing was served up on a thick glass plate stuffed with real white feathers. The only thing that could have made it better was rolling immediately onto a daybed with real down pillows for a bit of a nap.

But you’re not quite finished yet. Out come the petit fours. To be honest, even I of the too-big appetite and the too-ardent love of chocolate was flagging in the face of a small but perfect warm chocolate tart. Easier to slide in were a different take on wine gums: sweet treats made from the actual dessert wines Sauternes and Banyuls.  

Then comes the worst part. The bill. It’s exactly what you’d expect for what is probably the finest restaurant in Britain right now, using the finest local ingredients and with such a high staff count there’s probably one of them for every two guests. No wonder the service is both impeccable and informative. And of course you’ve had the matching wine flight, which increases your total by about 60% and brings out additional flavours with each sip. If ever there was a textbook illustration of “you get what you pay for”, this is it. Exraordinary doesn’t come cheap. I could run a long string of superlatives here and still not capture how distinct the whole experience was.

And thus, while I hope that my last meal is many years ahead, if an asteroid had struck London as we emerged, replete and temporarily impoverished, into the Notting Hill sunshine after that gastronomic ecstasy, I would have said “it’s been a fair game, and oh, have I lived.”

 

Tredegar and Castell Coch: Two Welsh jewels cut for entertaining

Pembrokeshire was wonderfully relaxing, but low on the culture that usually makes up part of any annual girls’ trip. Fortunately, Cardiff sits half way between London and those beachy delights, and offers some sightseeing blockbusters just minutes off the motorway. Outbound, we wandered happily through one of the UK’s rare remaining Carolean houses, unaware that we were mere hours from a new Carolean age. On our return, it was a trip back to the imagined Middle Ages through the eyes of some very fanciful, and rich, Victorians.

Tredegar is an elegant red brick mansion on the outskirts of the Newport docks complex that once made the owners of both, the Morgan family, extremely wealthy. At first glance the house is definitively a product of the age of Charles II: simple lines outside, elegant proportions within, but festooned with decorative details. The gilded ironwork on the gates outside, the highly-carved wooden panelling inside, painted ceilings and ornate plasterwork all follow the design path Charles II was taking at Windsor Castle, but in a humbler, provincial way. Look closely at the marble columns in the magnificent gilt room and you’ll discover that they’re only painted to fool you into thinking they’re fancy, imported stone.The carved faces in the main hall are much closer to green men than the divine Greco-Roman faces that would have been typical in palaces.

You won't care about any of that when you stand in the Gilt Room, one of Tredegar's highlights.

Carolean is only half the story, however. The modern Morgans, particularly two of the later owners, were characters worthy of novels. Though one would be by Kipling and the other by Wodehouse. The author of empire would take on Godfrey Morgan, a rare survivor of the charge of the light brigade who came home to life as a fox-hunting country squire. There's a magnificent portrait of him with horse and hounds. He looks like the kind of man who values his pets as much as people, so it's no surprise to learn that he buried his horse from the Crimean War, Sir Briggs, with full military honours when he crossed the rainbow bridge age 28. Having never bothered to add a wife to his stable, Godfrey passed his estate to his nephew Courtenay, who seems quite a responsible sort. It was his outrageous son Evan who sent the Morgans of Tredegar out with a blaze of glory.

Evan's profligate spending is doubtless the reason the Morgans had to give up the place, but you can tell that the volunteers all have a fond spot in their hearts for him. The house was famous for its magnificent parties in the '30s, where no extravagance was spared. Evan sent a family-owned ship to Norway when the house needed for ice; evidently the Norwegian stuff is best in a gin and tonic. Despite being openly gay he married twice, both women finding lovers elsewhere. A display in one of the main drawing rooms tells the tale of these bright young things, including some costumes and personal items that bring the age to life. It's good to know that along with his other eccentricities, Evan is remembered for treating his staff unusually well.

Sadly we weren't able to get upstairs on our visit. Heritage properties are having the same staffing issues as everyone else, and the house manager told us that less than half of the former volunteers returned after Covid. They rarely have enough room stewards to open the house all at one time anymore, so have moved to a schedule of opening one floor in the morning and another in the afternoon. It's worth noting for future sightseeing visits to stately homes: you may need to plan a longer visit than in the past to be able to see everything, making sure you are there through the heart of the day.

Our visit on the return drive had some things in common with 20th c. Tredegar: incredibly wealthy owners who spent wildly, derived revenues from shipping traffic in Welsh ports and used their properties mostly as party palaces. But there, the similarity stops. Castell Coch is a Victorian fantasy of the Middle Ages rebuilt within an actual Medieval structure, and its creators ... the Marquis and Marchioness of Bute ... would likely have been horrified by Evan's sexual hijinx. 

You are here to see just three main rooms. Sure, there are a few more, and a nice climb to the tower, plus a lovely exterior ... but three interiors will burn themselves into your brain. The Butes worked with Britain's foremost proponent of the neo-Gothic, William Burges, who was inspired by the look a French architect named Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc. (For other connections to Viollet-le-Duc on this blog, check out my articles on Vianden Castle and the Chateau de Menthon) The result is a fairy tale setting loosely linked to looks of the Middle Ages but then taking fantastic turns that even Walt Disney might find too extreme.

The first room is the banqueting hall, with stencilled, painted walls, a soaring wooden ceiling and a massive fireplace with a polychromed figure of a saint over it. Medieval tales of other saints are painted on the high arches below the wooden roof on either side. It's magnificent, and could easily stand in for the set of Ivanhoe or the like, but it's actually a bit austere. It's an amuse bouche for what comes next.

The drawing room may be he most beautiful room in Britain. It's octagonal, with a towering dome, but it's actually not that big. While you could jam 50 people in here for a standing cocktail party, it could actually be quite cozy for eight sitting before the fire. But it's hard to imagine anything communal happening in here because everyone is so stunned by the interior decoration they just want to shut up and look at it; it may be the most densely decorated room per square meter I've ever seen. 

You can read the room in layers. First comes panelling from floor to shoulder height in a lovely green, with each rectangle within the panelling painted with botanically accurate representations of Mediterranean flowers. Next, from shoulder height to perhaps 16 or 20 feet above your head, is a sumptuous painted mural of wildlife in the natural world. Look closer, however, and the fox, the crow, the ape, the tortoise, the hare et al are actually engaged in scenes from Aesop's fables. Moving up again, you reach the sky, with birds of the world flying through a space that's twilight at the bottom and full dark, spangled with stars, up top. The ribs of the vaults are decorated with butterflies, reminding us of the fragility of life. And up top, a blazing disc at the centre of the dome, is the sun which gives that life. Continuing along the theme of appreciating the life we're given, the fireplace is topped with near life-sized figures of the three Greek fates, spinning, measuring and cutting the string that represents a man's time on Earth. Every flower, animal, plant, bird and human is painted in such detail you could spend half an hour just looking at a square metre of the place. It is an astonishing space, made all the better if you get one of the knowledgeable human guides going into more depth than what's on your included audio guide. 

Head upstairs, passing through Lord Bute's bedroom ... memorable somewhere else but a sideshow here ... and reach Lady Bute's spectacular chamber. It is not quite as decoratively dense at the drawing room below, so not quite as jaw dropping, but it's close. The walls at human level are papered in a geometric design, saving your attention for the dome over this round space. It appears to be an enormous trellis separating you from a sunny blue sky, entwined with grape vines that are strangely laden with pomegranates. Exotic birds appear once more and, rather surprisingly, a troupe of jolly monkeys making merry. The ceiling is so arresting you hardly notice the suite of furniture created for her ladyship, all designed and painted in the Moorish-Gothic style. It's Aladdin meets Sleeping Beauty.

There are other bits you can clamber around but, honestly, save your time. Come here for the drawing room and Lady Bute's bedroom, and drink your fill.

Tredegar and Castell Coch are brilliant reminders that Cardiff is awash with things to see. Maybe a future girls’ trip should head there? But I suspect that will be no time soon. After three years on home shores, there’s a plane in our future for Girls’ Trip No. 23.