Bea
I curate art, I read buildings the way other people read novels, and I live forty minutes past where the city gives up.
Fifteen years in print rooms and reserve collections taught me that the interesting object is almost never the one in the case. It is the one behind it, catalogued badly in 1954 and left alone ever since.
Ashcroft Manor is the house I bought with more confidence than survey. It is now my desk, my archive, and — on the good weeks — my excuse for the train fare.
House rules
I write about what I have actually stood in front of. Where I have not been, I say so. The Directory carries a date of last visit for the same reason a wine list carries a vintage: the information ages, and pretending otherwise is a small dishonesty that compounds.
I am not interested in the best of anything. I am interested in the specific — the parish church with a hammerbeam roof and four changes on the way, the provincial gallery with one extraordinary Dutch interior and a tearoom that has never once let me down.
Things I recommend are things I own. Where a link earns the Manor a commission it is marked, always, and the recommendation would stand without it. That is the whole of the arrangement.
Corrections are the best post I receive. A reader once sent me a 1911 survey proving the east wing had been lying about its age for a century. I have never been so pleased to be wrong.
The Journal
Everything written here, newest first
Every old house keeps two sets of records: the drawings it was built from, and the decisions made when nobody was drawing. Learning to read the second set has ruined me for ordinary looking.
The archive begins in March 2026, when I finally admitted the notebooks were an editorial project.
One letter, most Sundays. What I've seen, what I'd hang, and where to go before the crowds work it out.