The annual Northwestern Girls' Trip marks 25 years of marvellous adventures & priceless friendship

In October of 1999, three American expats living in England answered Northwestern University’s call to represent the institution at London’s Fulbright College Fair. They hadn’t known each other on campus, but the girls had all graduated within four years of each other and quickly hit it off. All eager to take advantage of the opportunities for tourism offered by life in England, they thought they might be good travel companions. In March of 2000 they put their suspicion to the test.

The rest is history.

Tomorrow, it’s officially 25 years of gloriously entertaining, adventurous, relaxing, story-spinning history. Our annual Northwestern Girls’ Trip hits the milestone when we board our British Airways flight to Naples.

There have been changes over the years. In the early days we were more likely to do multiple, short trips across the year. As we settled in to life in the UK and our jobs got progressively bigger, we focused on just one significant, annual journey. We’ve never missed a year, though parental illnesses, work travel, breast cancer and Covid all proved challenging. In 2020 we slipped a glorious road trip to Devon and Cornwall in between lockdowns but in 2021, despite two attempts, we only managed one day as a complete group due to positive Covid tests amongst us. Over time, our working lives became so busy we learned to compare diaries and pencil in the date for the next year as we were wrapping up the current trip. Once the dates are resolved, girls' trip is sacred.

In 2017, we expanded our trio to a quartet. It was a big decision, given the perfect balance we’d established, but we’d all known Suzy almost as long as we’d known each other. And though she hadn’t graduated from Northwestern, she’d worked for me twice … the first time straight out of uni … and I’d taught her much of what Medill taught me … so we granted her our special girls’ trip honorary degree. 

Finding ideal travel companions is no easy task. People like to move at different paces, do different things, and have different price points. Learning to go on holiday together was, by far, the biggest challenge of my marriage and one that took years to sort comfortably. From that first trip with the girls, however, it was clear that we were naturally in tune with each other’s preferences. 

The ideal girls’ trip should have a near-perfect balance of history, culture, fabulous food, vineyards, shopping, and indolent self-indulgence. We are all naturally curious and love to learn. We sightsee in high-energy bursts, then collapse happily into spas, wine bars or quiet spaces with a good book. We love an off-the-beaten-path experience. We’re also a gregarious bunch, and we’ve talked our way into a notable number of upgrades and remarkable extra treats. Perhaps the most extraordinary example took place in a forgettable town in central Spain. We were the only foreigners in the restaurant during a local festival. Our enthusiasm so charmed the waiters that they gave us a tour of their extraordinary wine cellars, dating back to Roman times, while we were waiting for a table. They lovingly described every course of the festival menu as we ate, then cracked out their home-made post-prandial firewater and invited us to drink with them after the restaurant closed. (Hillary will never let us forget she was the designated driver that day.) The older we get, the more we’ve noticed that young waiters rather enjoy a bit of mild flirtation from a group of women who could be their mothers. Though none have yet equalled those grizzled old Spaniards. 

Though we didn’t set out to define our journeys this way, they’ve become characterised by affordable luxury and often being just ahead of the curve of travel trends. Many places … most notably Speyside, Spain’s Duero wine road, Porto, and Split in Croatia … enjoyed time in the spotlight of the travel press just after we visited. We are the best travel documentary the BBC hasn't made. 

The affordable tag, of course, depends on your point of view, and our price point has crept up over the years with incomes and stress levels. But we’ve always focused on finding special places that are excellent value for money rather than just opting for whatever gets written up in a glossy magazine. These days we tend to look for four-bedroom apartments to rent rather than heading for upscale boutique hotels, and we’ve discovered the value of pooling our resources to hire private guides for outings.  

A set of girls’ trip guidelines took shape over the years. We travel over a long weekend, generally Wednesday or Thursday to the following Monday or Tuesday. It’s the least interruption to busy work schedules. Travel time should be no more than four hours. If you are celebrating a decade birthday (40, 50, etc.) then the destination is your choice alone. In other years, it’s a group decision based on a shortlist, with the final call made by vote or … in one memorable year … Lisa’s mother pulling the winning name on a slip out of a bowl after a Michelin-starred dinner. 

Combining resources to hire private guides has led to some of our most memorable experiences. These include a day wandering the slopes of Mount Etna with an oenologist who specialised in Sicilian wine and got us behind the scenes at several remarkable vineyards. 

A proud Basque showed us the little-visited seaside glories and Game of Thrones filming locations of the coast between Bilbao and San Sebastián. 

When a travel agent messed up our reservation in Iceland, a strapping Viking who usually only did high-end tours and had recently hosted Tom Hiddleston stepped in to drive us up to the glacier and take us spelunking in an Icelandic lava tube. 

This Friday, we'll be making new memories as a working archeologist leads us around the ruins of Herculaneum.

Vineyards have been high on the agenda over the years for this wine-loving quartet. Our intense interest in wine, thoughtful questions, focused tasting and … we like to think … tremendously genial personalities have often seen us invited by winemakers into their private cellars to taste stuff they usually don’t open and drinking with them well after official tours have ended. 

We haven’t always followed our own Girls’ Trip guidelines. Two of our journeys stretched over a week and one of those smashed through our 4-hour travel time limit. Lisa’s brief flirtation with moving back to the States meant that she was joining the 2007 trip from New York, so we turned it into a full-scale holiday in Tunisia. This was before terrorist incidents endangered tourism there. Even so, crowds were light outside of the main tourist resorts. Wandering virtually alone through the sprawling Roman ruins at Dougga is one of the great memories in the Girls’ Trip archives. 

Eight years later, when Hillary’s father was coping with an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, we travelled to the family home in Florida to revel in the warmth of his larger-than-life personality while he was still with us. 

Sharing parents has indeed become one of the hallmarks of the original trio. As women living thousands of miles from our families we all had a larger-than-average appreciation of time spent with parents. Over the years, a habit grew up of visiting parents including the other girls in a family meal whenever they were in London. All but two of those parents have left us now, but we have the memories forever. (And hope my dad and Hillary’s mum are with us for many years to come.) 

And so … older, wiser, and in need of a lot more down time than when we started … the girls are off to Naples. This year is a significant decade birthday for me, so the location, lodging and itinerary were mine to call. Culture abounds. I get to try to knock the rust off my very rusty Italian. Food here is lauded as amongst the best in a country already famous for its cuisine. And there’s a four-bedroom apartment with a roof garden waiting for us.  

La vita è bella. 

Here’s hoping for another 25 years. And here’s thanking my friends, God and good luck for the extraordinary adventures behind us. Great times with beloved friends are one of life’s most precious treasures on this endlessly diverting journey through life.

British Museum makes Roman army life fun for all ages

As the daughter of an art historian, it never occurred to me that museums weren't standard territory for childhood fun until my own contemporaries started having kids. Only then did it begin to dawn on me that most people didn’t put culture at the top of their family outing options, and that many children considered the idea of spending time in museums both a chore and … gasp! … boring. Why had I never felt this way?

Quite simply: my mother had a unique talent for bringing art and culture to life for children. Trailing along in her wake, I never realised that she was the one turning places like The Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty Villa and the Victoria and Albert Museum into worlds of fantasy and wonder.

Thankfully, her superpower is no longer unique. Many are reinterpreting their collections and adding hands-on experiences to bring the past to life for children of all ages. The British Museum’s new Legion: Life in the Roman Army exhibition is a gloriously entertaining example. The curators have teamed up with Terry Deary, writer of the Horrible Histories series, to create an alternative path through the show for the young, and young at heart. Legion has received rave reviews across the board for its gorgeous design, exceptional artefacts and meaningful insights, but it’s this outreach to young people that impressed me the most.

You’re greeted by a cartoon rat named Claudius Terratus who’s decided to join the army to see the world, gain his citizenship and reap a juicy pension at the end of his service. He pops up throughout your visit to highlight the difficulties and pleasures of the life he’s selected, often accompanied by things to touch and do. You can see if you’re tall enough to make it into the legion, and see how you compare to the tallest-ever Roman. You can lift weights equivalent to the average pack of a soldier to see how you might fare on a march. You can play with knuckle bone dice. You can even put on a helmet and grab a shield.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that many children in a major exhibition, much less having so much fun. Curators around the world need to take note.

Sceptical academics, meanwhile, needn’t fear. The children’s track sits beside a serious deep-dive into this fascinating topic. My friends and family who’ve seen the show include army veterans, military historians and specialists in the Eastern Roman empire. All were impressed.

There are things of great beauty here, from a bronze head of Augustus to ceremonial helmets to one of my British Museum favourites … the Molossian dog that usually sits in a gallery that is too often closed to the public. It’s good to see him taking pride of place. There is, as you would expect, a lot of evidence of war, from the best-preserved Roman shield in the world to swords to horse armour. There’s a lot of evidence of everyday life, from letters home to an almost perfectly-preserved legionaries’ sock.

Poignant touches throughout make this the story not just of an empire or an army, but of people. The tombstones of the soldiers who never made it to that retirement; especially one shown with his grieving father. The armour of a man who died in the famous massacre of Varus’ legions in the Teutoburg Forest. The skeleton of a soldier who died trying to help the citizens of Herculaneum survive Vesuvius’ eruption.

There is something for everyone in this exhibition. Happily, that includes small people who might think museums are boring. Make some time to introduce them to a Roman rat and his horrible adventures, and you might just open a door to a world of fantasy and wonder they can enjoy for the rest of their life.

Legion: Life in the Roman Army is on at the British Museum until 23 June.

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Joanlee’s Playbook
Want to get your kids to museums but don’t have something as cool as the British Museum’s take on the Romans to help you through? Here are three of my mother’s best tactics for getting young people involved.

Go treasure hunting
Pick one thing … dogs, crowns, swords, etc. … and set children out on a treasure hunt to find as many of that object as possible. This is particularly effective if you have two or more kids on your hands, especially if you offer a small amount of cash to be spent by the winner in the museum gift shop at the end of the visit. The hunt makes them actually pay attention to what’s in each room.

Be a time traveller 

Tell your young people they have access to a time machine for a one-way journey. Because of some kindof impending disaster (make it nasty, kids love that), you need to move to some other time in history. The kids are using the museum to do some research. Where are you going to go and why? What is life going to be like? What are you going to bring with you? What type of people will you set yourself up as when you go? Why not book a meal out after your museum visit and let the kids report back on their decisions over the food?

Go shopping
The kids have just won an enormous lottery and everything in the museum is on sale. They can buy three things. What would they buy for their palatial home and why? Where would they put it, or how would they use it? If they had to put the things in order, from what they’d pay most for to least, what would their order be? A variation on this, particularly useful in traditional art museums full of paintings, is to tell them that they can bring one artist back to life to paint their portrait. Who will they resurrect and why? What surroundings will they be painted in and what things will they have painted with them?

These days, almost all museums have education teams specifically dedicated to bringing their collections to life for young people. They’ll produce guides, games and videos that are often free. For many more ideas, seek them out and use them. Many are downloadable before your visit, so you can do some preparation as a family and turn your day out into a special event.

Fashion, social aspiration and pure loveliness combine in the Tate's "Sargent and Fashion" show

It’s one of history’s great ironies that after going to all that trouble to get rid of monarchy and aristocracy, modern Americans are utterly captivated by them back in the Mother Country. My university friends stateside, for example, are far more engaged in watching and speculating over the Princess of Wales’ sick leave than any of my British colleagues.

There’s nothing new about this, of course. Americans might have declared political independence but they still looked to Britain as an arbiter of style and culture from their earliest days. American money chose to build mansions that reflected English country houses. They vied to marry their daughters into the British aristocracy. The campus architecture at many top American universities apes Oxford and Cambridge; my sorority quadrangle in Evanston, Illinois, was designed to look like a Cotswolds village.

The height of this Anglo worship must surely have been the late 19th century, when vast amounts of American new money was trying to look old and believed that all things English offered the best fast track to becoming establishment.

Artist John Singer Sargent is one of the greatest representatives of this age, and one of the most artistically significant American expats to sink his roots in England. Those old v new, American v. England stories are lusciously represented in Tate Britain’s new show. It gives us both the artist as an example of the expat-gone-native, and lots of Americans keen to let the Sargent fairy dust polish off some of their New World edges. There are plenty of Brits here, too, but they tend to be the edgier, artsy ones. Even at the top of his game, Sargent’s American-ness would have put him slightly on the outside of the establishment. Such is the fate of the American cousin as immigrant, no matter how long he or she lives here.

This is not the focus of the show, however. It's a perspective I bring to it as an American who’s spent half her life in England. The curator’s objective … and a fabulous one it is … is to get you paying attention to Sargent and Fashion.

Portraits are always carefully composed to make a statement, but the late 19th century took this to extremes. Society was changing, people were leaping up ladders and, for some, power and wealth were growing exponentially. People wanted to show off, and Sargent was the man to help them do that. The show introduces us to an artist who worked much as a modern stylist does today, taking total control of someone’s clothes, accessories, and how they moved to convey a particular message.

Frans Hals and Anthony Van Dyck did the exact same thing, of course, which I’ve written about in reviews of previous exhibitions celebrating both men. But Sargent is so much closer to us in history that we have far more descriptions of what it was actually like sitting for him. We also, gloriously, have some of the clothes. 

The first gallery lays down the premise in pink glory. Here is Sargent’s magnificent portrait of Aline Rothschild Sassoon, a socialite, artist and intellectual who draws you in with her kind eyes and warm smile. She’s enveloped in a black cloak with a pink lining that gapes open on the diagonal to create a pink slash across the painting. That slash makes the image. It’s somewhere between salmon and Barbie pink, and it jumps out vividly from the blacks of her cloak. This portrait is in a private collection and I’ve only ever seen photos of it; they simply can’t convey how magnificent that pink lining is. Even more magnificent is the fact that the actual cloak stands in a case next to the portrait, so you can compare the reality to what Sargent created. It’s obvious that he twisted and pinned the garment into shapes it never would have taken on its own to get his vision across.  

This sets the mood for the rest of the show. (And will probably leave you weak with desire for a black, hooded opera cloak with a pink lining.) 

We meet Mrs. Fiske Warren, who wanted to be painted in a favourite green dress but was cajoled (or bullied, one suspects) into a light pink number borrowed from someone else while her daughter leans against her enveloped in a wrap of a darker shade. Sergeant has chosen a background of medieval antiques, deep greens and burgundies, out of which the two women shine like candle flames in the darkness. It’s the same trick as the pink slash in the opera cloak, but bigger. 

Then there’s Mrs. Sears, who adored bright colours. One of her Worth gowns is on display here, a sumptuous design but in an unnatural greenish yellow it would take a supremely confident woman to wear even today. It would certainly grab all the attention in the room. Sargent dissuaded her from colour and painted her in a white gown, bringing all of our attention to her personality.  

It’s a real treat to see the famous portrait of Ellen Terry playing Lady Macbeth next to the actual costume. Its bodice was knitted to mimic chain mail, then had green beetle wings attached all over it to give sparkle with a throbbing, Slytherin-esque menace. 

Any fan of fashion will love the clothes on display here, many from the iconic House of Worth. The design details and tailoring are breathtaking. As the corsetry must have been. Everything designed for the women looks painful to wear.  

Not so the men, of course, who look dashing and more than a bit rakish. One small but interesting

diversion you can listen to on your phone while exploring the show is speculation about the sexuality of both Sargent and some of his sitters. The commentator suggests they felt emboldened to express more of themselves in portraiture than they ever did in their public lives.  

If W. Graham Robertson’s portrait isn’t a gay icon, it should be. Despite the summer heat at the time of painting, Sargent made the young artist, writer, collector and friend of Oscar Wilde wear a long, black overcoat a size too small for comfort. Who knew anyone could be so sexy swathed in that much wool. For the ultimate in male sex appeal, however, look a few pictures to the left where Parisian doctor Samuel-Jean Pozzi was talked out of his standard black suits and into a full length red dressing gown and Turkish slippers. He is beguiling. 

Beyond all those wonderful clothes and personalities there’s much to admire here about Sargent’s painterly mechanics. He was a contemporary of the impressionists, and indeed close friends with Monet. You can see similarities to their style in the way his seemingly rushed, almost abstract dabs of paint melt into the perfect impression of lace, jewellery or other fine detailing when seen from a distance. But when it comes to faces he’s almost photo-realistic, given us dynamism and personality that’s obviously very specific to the sitter.  

This show has divided reviewers, with a horrified Guardian giving it just one star while the Evening Standard gushed with five. How you feel about it tends to correspond with how much of an artistic purist you are, and if you consider fashion worthy enough to be categorised as art. Call me frivolous, but I’m all for the frocks and the fabulousness. And I think Sargent would be, too. 

Sargent and Fashion is on at Tate Britain until 7 July. And if this sounds good you should probably check out Diva at the V&A, which I suspect has a similar vibe. It’s next on my list.

Much-maligned Milton Keynes deserves more credit, both for modern living and heritage

Poor Milton Keynes. It is the butt of endless jokes. Friends from there say the typical reaction when they

tell people where they live is “oh, I’m sorry”. In a country that considers an important indicator of class to be inheriting one's furniture rather than buying it, and where a poky little cottage that’s charming and historic sells for twice its new-build alternative, a characterless “new town” created from nothing in the ‘60s will always have quite the reputational battle on its hands.

News Flash: Milton Keynes isn’t that bad. 

I recently spent a week there and discovered a metropolitan area that’s well-designed, threaded through with abundant parkland, is served by excellent and mostly pothole-free roads, and has more EV charging points than anywhere else I’ve visited in the UK. I’m not the only one to notice: the town has just made The Sunday Times’ “Best Place to Live” list for the first time ever.

OK, I admit, the town centre is a featureless, soulless collection of modern blocks and vast parking lots. There are few people visible because everything is designed to park and come indoors.  It is the most American place I've ever encountered in England and, as such, is very odd. 

That bit, however, is just a few square blocks within a sprawling and salubrious metropolitan area. The housing spreading out from the centre seems to offer something for everyone, from sleek modern apartment blocks to cozy developments that reproduce historic architectural styles. Everything I saw was clearly designed to integrate green space and was threaded through with walking paths.

The best part, from my resolutely old-world, charm-seeking perspective, is that there are gems of historic England threaded into the outskirts if you know where to look. One of my friends, for example, lives less than two miles from the town centre in an early-Victorian worker’s cottage across from fields still bordered by buildings that belonged to an ancient abbey. 

Just a little further out I discovered Great Linford Park (picture above), a collection of historic buildings, gardens, ponds and meadows around a Georgian manor house. The  Grand Union Canal stretches along one side, with festively-painted canal boats now used as holiday homes adding to the scene. Everything in and around the park is beautifully maintained, has plenty of parking and sits beside a historic village high street complete with a proper thatched pub called The Nag’s Head. We're only 50 miles north of London but interaction with people seems different than in the southeast. Strangers make eye contact and chat happily.

A little bit further along the canal, sitting beside Wolverton Road, you’ll find The Black Horse. It’s another historic pub, but much larger and solidly in the gastropub category. We had a fabulous dinner here. The weather was dire but it’s easy to imagine how wonderful it would be to sprawl in their canal-side gardens once the sun returns.

Like any part of heritage-packed England, Milton Keynes can lay claim to historic blockbusters on its doorstep.

My first port of call would have been Woburn Abbey, just 20 minutes away. The Palladian pile is the ancestral home of the Dukes of Bedford. It markets itself, along with places like Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, as one of the Treasure Houses of England and has an art collection that would make many museums weep with envy. A dining room filled with an obscene number of Canalettos is a highlight. And the gardens are smashing, too. At least from what I remember on my last visit, probably 25 years ago. My memories weren’t to be refreshed, however, as the whole place is closed for a multi-year renovation.

England’s greatest landscape garden
My second choice, 25 minutes in the other direction, was Stowe Landscape Gardens. It was not only open, but the ideal place to take one’s canine companion. It’s a pity the weather has been so wet, windy and grey, but the place is spectacular in all circumstances and they provide a handy dog washing area before you return to your car to ensure you won’t be taking their mud home with you.

Stowe took shape across the 18th century and those involved were the design superstars of the age: Charles Bridgeman, Capability Brown, William Kent, etc. Most people are content with one or two garden follies. The Temple family wanted more. Around the house a whole classical world of temples, monuments and grottos appeared. Wandering here is like stumbling through a Poussin landscape, minus the people in togas. There are multiple temples (a play on the family name). A Palladian bridge. Commemorative arches and columns. Stick a few amusement park rides in and you could rebrand the place RomanEmpireWorld. Thankfully, nobody went for that moneymaking scheme so you’re left to wander through an idyllic landscape of peace and quiet.

Well, mostly quiet. The house at the centre of all of this is now a school and the Silverstone racetrack is too close for comfort. Both result in unwelcome noise occasionally cutting through your pastoral idyll.

History and politics nerds will enjoy an extra layer of interest as they wander around Stowe. The Temple family were heavyweights in the Whig party: aristocratic, liberal, enlightenment thinkers who faced off against the Tories for much of the 18th century. American readers, if they dig back into their memories of the Revolution, will remember that the Whigs tended to be pro-American and might have prevented the conflict had they been in charge. Instead it was a Whig prime minister who negotiated the peace treaty to end the war.

In the decades before that cataclysm, the Temples arranged their garden follies to reflect their political beliefs. There’s a path of virtue and a path of vice, with architecture and planting giving you clues as to which you’re on. Unsurprisingly, vice features a lot more confusing twists and turns through deep woodland, where virtue offers up long, gentle views and nicely curated paths. Back then, even the choice of column capital style or decorative scheme said something about your political beliefs. If you’re in any doubt, it’s made clear in the Temple of the British Worthies. 

This arcade of portrait busts features obvious people everyone could agree to endorse, like William Shakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I. They sit, however, which people like John Locke … radical philosopher whose writings are credited with sparking both the American and French Revolutions … and John Barnard, who pushed through a law making stock jobbing illegal in the wake of the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. The bubble was basically a Ponzi Scheme that saw its early investors (mostly Tories, and particularly the prime minister at the time) get very rich while many others were ruined. Given that few people today know the ins and outs of Georgian politics, all this stuff can seem quite arcane, but if you take a guided tour all will be revealed. Stowe certainly makes one hunger for a more gracious age when people used gardening rather than social media vitriol to define their beliefs.

A lesser-known Elizabethan jewel
My greatest discovery of this visit was Canons Ashby. The Elizabethan manor house is in the same direction from Milton Keynes as Stowe, but another 20-30 minutes on, and is also a National Trust property. If you didn’t want to linger, you could easily do both in a day. Canons Ashby is one of those

charming spots that, thanks to a combination of family neglect and lack of cash, didn’t get overly “improved” by successive owners. While there were modernising touches throughout the ages they're small, and the overall feel is of a time capsule back to the 17th century or earlier. 

The “canon” in the name comes from the officials of the Augustinian priory that was once here. The house you see today is typical of so many that sprung from Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Up-and-coming families with lots of cash bought shuttered religious establishments off the government, used the old buildings as a quarry for their new house and built something fresh to proclaim that they’ve arrived. In this case they left part of the old church but turned it into a private chapel a stone's throw from the house. It's now a strangely oversized and beautiful medieval relic on a quiet country lane.

The house feels more medieval than Elizabethan as you enter it through a courtyard and into an old-style great hall. Things get much grander as you move on to a stolid Jacobean staircase and panelled reception rooms. The blockbuster sites are on the next floor, however, when what’s otherwise a relatively modest house yields up a sitting room with a preposterously over-the-top vaulted ceiling dripping with ornate Jacobean plasterwork. This complements a two-story chimney breast festooned with columns, crests and swags, still retaining its Elizabethan paint. The grandeur is so unexpected I gasped out loud when I entered. The guide told me it’s not an unusual reaction.

Beyond that is a bedroom that has original Elizabethan wall paintings. These were discovered by accident, when problems with the roof forced workers to take down the panelling in the room and revealed what had been covered beneath. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. 

Those two rooms alone are worth popping into the house, but there’s plenty more of interest. That includes a sitting room downstairs with faux marble columns painted by Elizabeth Creed, a Regency-era artist and cousin to the owners. Creed’s paintings behind the altar in the church are worth walking up the lane for, and a surprisingly elegant servants dining hall is another highlight as it's leant dignity by painted panelling moved here in some long-ago renovation. 

Outside, the terraced gardens aren’t large but they offer pleasant walks and dogs are allowed throughout. The views are lovely because the house and gardens are on the crest of a hill, so the gardens “borrow” the landscape sweeping away into the distance.  

And more to come 

My list of Milton Keynes-anchored sightseeing would have been longer had we been later in the year and had I done my planning a bit better. Sulgrave Manor, ancestral home to one George Washington, is only open Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays. Something I discovered on the Wednesday. Boughton House, one of the best examples of the English Baroque, wasn’t yet open for the season. Rockingham Castle is one of a constellation of heritage properties orbiting nearby Northampton and was the setting for the BBC’s adaptation of By the Sword Divided in the 1980s. 

That show that kindled my infatuation with the Civil War and Restoration period and, arguably, stoked the passions that eventually led to me moving here. So while others may be dismissive about Milton Keynes, I'm already looking forward to my next visit. I have a lot of territory left to cover, and some excellent pubs to recover from sightseeing within.

Angelica Kauffmann gave us strong heroines and a female take on history 200 years early

The run up to International Women’s Day is a poignant time for the Royal Academy to unveil its Angelika Kauffmann show. While the global day of celebration naturally focuses on the rights and achievements of contemporary women, it also tends to prompt the re-discovery of those whose achievements have been forgotten, or severely downplayed, in a history mostly written by men. 

Kauffmann is a perfect example. 

In her lifetime, she was a superstar of the art world. The great and the good sought her out for their portraits. Her epic history paintings graced the finest buildings. She was a founding member of the Royal Academy in London, and her studio in Rome became an essential stop for aristocrats on the grand tour. In her time, her name would have been regularly grouped with Gainsborough and Reynolds. These days, most people know them … but not her. This show aims to redress that balance.

It is a luscious exhibition full of people and landscapes that are easy on the eye. If you are someone who loves Bridgerton for feel-good entertainment that wraps you in a cosy bubble of rich, attractive people, you will be very happy in these galleries. Everyone sports a flawless complexion, pale as cream except for delicate pink blushes and rosy lips. Gorgeous clothes fold, cascade and drape around fit bodies. Most critically, eyes sparkle. Kauffmann doesn’t quite come up to the mastery of the smile that made last year’s Frans Hals show such a joy, but she is world class at painting eyes that radiate merriment, intelligence and jollity. Look at the scandalous but exquisite Emma Hamilton (above), or the charismatic thespian David Garrick (below). These are rooms full of people you’d follow on Instagram and pay dearly to party with.

Serious pundits of the art world will take my Bridgerton reference as a criticism. It’s not. In fact, it’s why Kauffmann represents her age so well.

In many ways, we are closer to the Georgians than to the buttoned-up, etiquette-obsessed Victorians and Edwardians who are nearer to us in time. Georgian London was an age of celebrity, often criticised for style over substance. Women were a long way from even, but there were famous female names in the arts, politics, and literature. Sexual mores were loser than they were to become. Artists searching for their truth didn’t typically plunge into disturbing depths, but rather looked for a composite of positives to give us a person’s best self, a landscape’s ideal look or a building’s most perfect iteration. Think social media airbrushing apps for an earlier age.

This isn’t just all about beautiful people, however. In her time, Kauffmann was particularly famous … and deeply unusual … for being a woman who embraced epic history painting. These, not portraits or landscapes, were considered the highest form of art by the Georgians. By their nature they were exclusive and male-oriented. They often focused on battles or warriors, generally full of thrusting, semi-naked men who it wouldn’t be considered appropriate for women to paint. More significantly, history paintings tended to explore nuances of ancient civilisations or classical myth that you had to be extremely well-educated to grasp. 

Your average shopkeeper was unlikely to look at a scene and instantly understand “those must be the Horatii boys taking their oath,” much less discuss the relevance of the story to modern politics over their port.  Women ... even rich ones ... tended not to get the educations that opened that world to them either. Nor were they allowed in to life drawing classes to master capturing male form. Emphasising that point is a fascinating group portrait in the show depicting all the founding members of the Royal Academy. It’s set in a life drawing classroom, which Kauffmann and her fellow female founder Mary Moser couldn’t enter, so they’re included as portraits on the wall. 

Kauffmann worked around that reality. The Swiss-born daughter of an established painter drank in both history and art at his knee and was quickly acclaimed a child prodigy. So it’s not surprising she took on history painting. But she did it with a difference. She gives us the great stories from a woman’s point of view. It’s still history, but an inversion of the familiar. My favourite in the show gives us the young Edward III on crusade before he became king. You can imagine the battlefield fun the men would have had with this. All that blood! All those exotic arms and armour! Kauffmann chooses instead a tale of the soon-to-be-queen Eleanor saving her husband’s life by sucking poison out of the cut of an assassin’s blade. 

Eleanor and Edward were one of the monarchy’s greatest love stories. London’s Charing Cross is the last of a series of memorials a heartbroken Edward built to commemorate every place her coffin rested en route from her death to her funeral and internment in Westminster Abbey. Here, they are young lovers. Kauffman’s feminine perspective still gives us bravery and nobility, those staples of history painting, but we get a quiet moment of tender intimacy, Eleanor’s lips pressed gently to her husband’s arm. Eleanor looks calm and determined, the maids behind her impressed, the future king awestruck by this demonstration of love. 

Think of the trend in Hollywood over the past 20 years to give us stories with stronger heroines, or to rework familiar tales from the woman’s perspective, and you’ll grasp what Kauffmann was doing 250 years ago. There are only a handful of her history paintings here. I would have liked more.  

In fact, I would have liked to have seen more of everything. Three galleries in the attic doesn’t seem enough to me for a woman of such significance, who left behind an enormous body of work. That includes contributions to architecture they could have shown off with models or projections. We do get the panels she painted for the ceilings of the new Royal Academy, but there’s nothing else of the contributions she made to Palladian country houses. She was a favourite of Robert Adam, and spent some time working in houses in Ireland that were following his style. I first encountered her work as a series of decorative pendants in the crumbling but still-magnificent Castletown House. 

I would also have liked more on her life, relationships and opinions. She was both phenomenally talented and exceptionally shrewd at business. An early self-portrait shows her torn between the muses of art and music. As a young woman she was as talented a singer as she was an artist, but the family priest warned her of the moral dangers of going down the operatic route.

Her travels with her father, the way she built her brand before she arrived in England so she stepped into a market ready to embrace her, an intriguing first marriage to a fraudster who pretended aristocracy and was presumably after her money, her role in the RA, her eventual establishment in Rome. It’s all here, but in brief. This show gives us a pencil sketch, and I wanted a fully realised history painting. 

Don’t let that put you off from going, however. In a world of art history dominated by men and masculine stories, Kauffmann provides a refreshing counterpoint and reminds us that there were a lot more women doing interesting things in 18th century Europe than we tend to remember.

Angelica Kauffmann is in the Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, until 30 June 2024.

Gaming sparkle brings the 9th century to life in Winchester

I’m not much of a gamer. I love the concept of immersing myself as a character in a fantasy world, but my extreme impatience with the performance of repetitive tasks means I never manage to get past the first challenge. No matter how intrigued I am by the story, I can never manage to sail my pirate ship out of the bay, get my knight over the first bandit-infested bridge, or get my Hobbits beyond The Shire. That hasn’t stopped me, however, from having a huge admiration for the Assassin’s Creed franchise. 

The makers’ attention to historical detail and storytelling intrigues me. I’ve stumbled across them a couple of times in recent sightseeing: first as a display room within the Ashmolean’s excellent exhibition on ancient Knossos, and again as I was preparing to visit Monteriggione in Tuscany. The picturesque Italian fortress is the setting for the second game in the series. Ancient Crete turns up in the 11th. Those connections with my life were almost accidental. Now gaming company Ubisoft has made a full foray into the world of tourism, creating 878 AD, an immersive Anglo-Saxon experience in my local cathedral town of Winchester. They worked in partnership with the Hampshire Cultural Trust and Sugar Creative. 

While I was slightly disappointed with my visit … more on the drawbacks later … overall I think this is a magnificent way to get people excited about history. Particularly one of England’s lesser-known time periods. I’d love to see similar attractions spreading across the country. It’s a particularly good introduction for children; I’d start here with any visitor to Winchester under 18.

It’s also a brilliant use of the excess retail space that’s plaguing most town centres in the UK. Functionally, it’s simply a bit of set design and video projection, some computer screens and display cases, information boards and a few costumed hosts injected into vacant space in a modern shopping mall. With the actual history sprawling just outside, 878 AD doesn’t need to be in a fancy building. It gives people an introduction and then sends them off with an interactive app to explore the reality.

The “experience” invitees you to insert yourself into the world of King Alfred and his battles against the Vikings. You join him after he’s hidden in the marshes and burned those pesky cakes (something many people seem to remember even if they don’t have a clue about the rest of his story) but before the climactic Battle of Edington in May of 878 (something few beyond fans of The Last Kingdom will know about). The citizens of Winchester are waiting anxiously for news, having waved most of their able-bodied men away.

That set-up creates an excellent excuse to then wander around Anglo-Saxon Winchester, learning about the people, their lives and the specifics of the city at the time. At one end of the long gallery two large walls form a corner onto which panning shots of the city from Assassin’s Creed Valhalla run. The graphics are both impressive and built with respectable amounts of historic research. (A small side gallery offers screens where you can explore details of how they built the game itself.) Other digital displays use the graphics as a starting point to explore different aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. There are display cases with some real historical artefacts but it’s mostly re-creations.

Strip away the fiction of time travel and it’s a fairly straightforward introduction to the Anglo-Saxons. If you want to see proper “stuff” from the time period, you’d be better served getting to the British Museum to stare down the helmet from the Sutton Hoo burial ship and the other goodies in Room 41. But it’s fun, and the fiction of the pre-battle tension gives the displays a relevance you’d miss if you just walked into a museum.

You also have the role-playing support staff to help interpret while keeping up the fiction. They’re very good at staying in character. Ask them about the Romans, for example, and they’ll explain that while there are ruins scattered about town that they often plunder for building material, few outside the nobility know much about the people who left them. There are regular story telling sessions where staff members … aka 9th century residents of Winchester … dive deeper into the action and get the audience involved. Inviting all the children to form a shield wall, complete with pint-sized shields, is an inspired way to get them having fun while teaching a real lesson about how battles of the time were fought. 

You end up in a small theatre where the film catches you up on the results at Edington. A resounding success for Alfred, his Viking opponent agreeing to convert to Christianity and respect borders, and the cornerstone of a united England laid. It’s well done. Patriotic and inspiring without being corny, informative enough so even the most historically ignorant can’t leave without grasping why there’s a bloody huge statue of Alfred at the top of the High Street.

But that’s only half of your experience. From here you download an app and hit the streets. There are games to play and puzzles to solve, along with excellent information about what you’re looking at. I was particularly fond of the bits where your phone super-imposes a graphic (from the game, naturally) of what was there in the 9th century over what you’re looking at today. The app takes you on a circular walk that will be familiar to locals, but offers new perspectives. It has the potential to elevate what you experienced in the mall into something really great. If your tech works.

One suspects that the game designers, used to the snazzy hardware and network set-ups of the average Assassin’s Creed player, didn’t think hard enough about the mobile experience. The WiFi inside 878 AD and the shopping mall that houses it isn’t good enough for easy downloads; only one of our group of three managed to get the app onto her phone. But her coverage then wasn’t good enough to follow us around the suggested route. After multiple frustrations we finally ended up at the cathedral when the app stubbornly insisted we were at the Bishop’s Palace. The mobile experience only works if you’re standing where the app wants you to be. So we gave up. This is one of those tickets that’s good for a year, however, so I downloaded the app onto my own phone once I got home and plan to try it again sometime in the near future.

So … five stars for fun, for kid appeal and for design. What were the drawbacks, other than tech?

If you have a basic grounding in the Anglo-Saxons already, you’re not going to learn much. And, honestly, I’m not talking about people who’d make 9th century England their specialist subject on Mastermind. If you watched The Last Kingdom and had a brief nose around the Anglo-Saxon galleries at either the British Museum or the Ashmolean, everything here is going to be familiar territory.

One of my companions, who is unusually well-versed on the topic, was particularly irked that almost all of the illustrated figures depicted in the displays were swarthy brunettes, looking more like stereotypical Southern Europeans than the famously broad, blonde and Germanic Angles and Saxons. I hadn’t noticed it but once he pointed it out it was quite irritating. All we could think of was that ethnically Vikings and Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have looked that different, but this is entertainment, so did they alter the look of the latter to create dramatic contrast? All those long dead Aelfstans, Æðelfriðs and Eadwulfs must be rolling in their graves. 

My biggest frustration, however, is that the marketing probably promised more than 878 AD delivered. Words like “experience” and “digital”, combined with the creativity of Ubisoft and some great graphics in their ad campaign left me expecting something a lot more high tech. There were a lot more text-heavy information panels than I was expecting from the positioning. I thought I might be donning a virtual reality headset, walking through projections or at least getting to play some gamified learning experiences. That may be the intention of the app, but it’s certainly not what you get inside part one. 

It is, however, early days. My post-visit research suggests this was a trial, and success could lead to bigger and better things. The experience has won creative and tourism awards. There was a steady stream of people coming through on the wet Sunday we decided to check it out. As someone who’s worked in Tech for my whole career, I know the high-end experience I imagined would have cost many times more than what they stood up here. Maybe something more sophisticated is to come. I’d love to see Winchester end up with an Anglo-Saxon version of the Jorvik Viking Experience in York.

Meanwhile, if I win the lottery I will be the benefactor behind a Jane Austen experience to fill up some retail space in the Basingstoke’s struggling Festival Place. Though I’m not sure there’s a logical computer gaming partner for that one. Assassin’s Creed: The Bennet Sisters seems unlikely. But if Pride and Prejudice with Zombies can work, who knows?

Worcester proves it’s England’s cathedral cities increasingly winning my heart over London

I may not be tired of London, but these days London certainly tires me out. 

So, with apologies to Dr Johnson, my preferences these are often turning towards our cathedral cities. Like London, they have rich cultural heritage, great architecture, theatres and museums. Yet they are a lot less crowded. Eminently walkable, they are full of charm with a fair few independent shops and restaurants. Many can boast flourishing farmer’s markets packed with local providers and craftspeople. Most avoided both the bomb damage of WWII and the hyper-growth of the late 20th century. So while few are entirely free of ugly 20th century buildings, they tend to have avoided the characterless modernity that blights large swathes of the capital. (Portsmouth is a sad exception.) Overall, the pace is slower and the people friendlier. While I love the staggering diversity of the megalopolis that is London, I am also an immigrant who moved here because I loved all that was traditionally English. You’re more likely to find that today in the cathedral cities than in London, which probably has more in common with New York or Hong Kong than York or Wells.

The fact that all roads lead to London, however, means that many of these charming outposts are on rail lines that can get you to the capital efficiently enough for the occasional commute. Is it any wonder that people whose work gives them the flexibility are moving to these cities, or that real estate in Winchester … our local cathedral city … now features prices on par with London?

Worcester offers an excellent example of the charms of one of these cathedral cities. It lies on the River Severn, about an hour southwest of Birmingham. Some cities turn their backs on their rivers. Others build right up to them until they seem no more than a canal cutting through skyscrapers. In Worcester, green spaces along the riverfront have been zealously protected. The racecourse. The cricket club. A verdant riverwalk. Look westward over the river with Worcester at your back and the Malvern Hills rear up from gentle agricultural plains, offering spectacular views and some gorgeous sunsets. It is, in short, a tremendously attractive place to settle; something people had already figured out centuries before the Romans established their river crossing and street plans here.

If “things you know about Worcester” turns up on Pointless, there are three things you’ll immediately want to avoid.

First, national favourite composer Edward Elgar was born here and gets a nod in statues, monuments, street and building names across the city. So proud are they of the local boy that I’m surprised, frankly, they don’t have Land of Hope and Glory wafting out from speakers in the town centre. Next, Messers Lea and Perrins created their famous Worcestershire sauce here and, though now part of the global behemoth Kraft Heinz, it’s still manufactured in the local factory. Bloody Mary drinkers everywhere owe Worcester a debt of gratitude. 

And then there’s the Civil War. The Battle of Worcester in 1651 was the Royalists’ last stand before nine years of a relatively unchallenged, grim, Godly republic. It’s the one after which the young King Charles II hid in an apple tree and escaped disguised as a lady’s servant. Depictions of those events have been glorified on stage and screen, page and canvas, ever since. There’s even a holiday, Oak Apple Day, celebrated on 29 May.

Delightful as these things are, you’re probably not going to move to Worcester for any of them. You’ll be lured, as our friends were, by a ring of gracious suburbs within walking distance of the town centre, its train stations with easy access to London and Birmingham, and charming properties for a fraction of the cost per square foot of the equivalent in London.

ARCHITECTURALLY BLESSED

The Industrial Revolution was very kind to Worcester, flooding cash into town but on a more manageable, less brutal scale than nearby Birmingham. There’s a wealth of very pretty Regency and early Victorian architecture here, some of it on beautiful green squares. I’m surprised the film industry hasn’t discovered it as a shoot location for historical dramas. As you come into the town centre you’ll find a delightful mix of architecture, from small 19th century industrial buildings now put to modern uses (microbrewery, yoga studio…) to lavish Edwardian public buildings to some art deco gems. The Guildhall is a spectacular early Georgian building that proclaims the city’s Royalist creds with statues of Charles I and II on either side of the door. The sculptor was either very bad, or had never seen a portrait of either man, but that almost adds to the charm. 

Most exciting, and most radically different from London, is a generous sprinkling of surviving Medieval architecture. It’s mostly half-timbered, and concentrated around Friar Street. 

The historic centre offers a tempting range of traditional pubs. We spent some time in The Cardinal’s Hat, occupying an early Georgian building and still operating on that early model of a warren of small rooms. (Much like London’s Cheddar Cheese in Fleet Street.) Local brews, an impressive range of gins, friendly staff, gleaming woodwork, stacks of board games, no canned music, no fruit machines, dogs welcome. I want to go back. 

Worcester didn’t escape the blight of ugly modern architecture completely. Like any English city there are sad concrete blocks that make you shake your head in grim disbelief at the modernist vandals who thought brutalist lines, concrete and lack of ornament could bring joy. But even here Worcester works hard to turn things to its advantage, fostering a civic murals scheme that gives some interest and beauty to the unlovely. 

The 21st century has ushered in more architectural hope, with a combination of sensitive renovations and a development across from the cathedral that gives us a modern take on a town square with a range of restaurants and social spots. According to our hosts it’s heaving most weekends and is a big draw for the students at university here.

The cathedral is the star sight in town for lovers of history and architecture, though it would be easy to miss. It sits just below the crest of the hill the city centre occupies, on the southwest side. If you’re approaching from the west and crossing over the Severn it would dominate your initial views of Worcester. These days, however, almost everyone is coming from the east. Walking through town from this direction you won’t spot the cathedral until you’re practically on top of it. The lack of a spire adds to its low profile.

CLASSIC CATHEDRAL

Unusually for a British cathedral of this size and quality they don’t force the admissions fee on you. Donation points are all over the building and I found my visit well worth a contribution. Typically, it’s an amalgamation of styles: started in the late 7th century, bits of Romanesque architecture still on show, but mostly layers of various gothic periods with some sensitive renovation by the Victorians. (Notably directed by George Gilbert Scott, most famous for the Albert Memorial.) Thus, despite some horrific destruction by hammer-wielding reformers in the Reformation and the Civil War, there’s a lot of beauty here to appreciate.

Most notable is the tomb of King John, perennial winner of “worst king” competitions and one of the few English monarchs not to be buried amongst other rulers. Brother Richard the Lionheart and their formidable parents Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine sleep almost 600 miles away in Fontevraud, France. Given their toxic relationships, it’s probably not far enough.

The monument is far more beautiful than the man’s reputation: he lies full-length, regal and crowned, saints at each shoulder, the once-painted stone now a gleaming black, atop a grand but restrained plinth decorated with Plantagenet crests. He is, naturally, right in front of the high altar. It’s good to be king. All is not normal in the afterlife, however. The lion at his feet is biting the tip of his sword. I have never seen this before on a medieval tomb, and there’s no documented evidence to say why. But scholars’ best guess is that it’s the artists’ subtle commentary showing England (the lion) biting back over John’s brutal reign.

Though the most prestigious, John is just one of a beautiful collection of tombs in the cathedral. Prince Arthur, whose early death ushered in Henry VIII, lies in a mortuary chapel just to the right of the altar, still beautiful despite the way iconoclasts of old chiselled away saints’ faces. Other chapels bristle with the spires and flourishes of the high gothic. Several Medieval tombs still have their lifelike painting scheme, most notably the Beauchamps where the lady lying beside her knight in shining armour uses a black swan as a pillow. 

There’s also a lovely enclosed cloister and an atmospheric Romanesque crypt. Walk around to the west side, where the main (now unused) entrance is, and you’ll be treated to a gorgeous view of the river with pleasant walks beside it. 

The other sightseeing blockbuster in town is The Commandery, a collection of listed buildings now used as a museum covering the history of the city but concentrating primarily on the Civil War. Sadly it’s closed on Monday, which was my free day in town, so it will need to wait until a future visit. Of which I’m confident there will be plenty.

It’s always a wrench when close friends move away. The upside is that you get to go visit them. This blog would be without its many entries on Luxembourg and the area around Lake Annecy if it weren’t for the migration of some dear friends. And now others, just as close, will bring that awareness to the charming cathedral city of Worcester. I’m going to miss having them close at hand, but the compensations of their new home town are compelling.