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We celebrate the 100th anniversary of Thomas Van der Hammen (1924–2010). His career is a model of explorative environmental research in nearly all ecosystems of northern South America. He introduced palynological research into South America. As a PhD student he studied changes of climate, vegetation and landscape during the Lateglacial in Twente, eastern Netherlands. He continued his career in 1952 at the Geological Survey of Colombia with research, and teaching palynology and palaeobotany. He studied sediment archives from the Cretaceous to the Quaternary palynologically. He explored the potential of developing an understanding of the Quaternary history of neotropical ecosystems, the response to ice-ages in particular. In 1959 he returned to Leiden University where he succeeded professor Florschütz. In 1966 he was appointed at the University of Amsterdam and continued training Colombian and Dutch PhD students in studying the history of climate, flora and vegetation of northern South America, Amazonia and the Netherlands. He organised unparalleled transect studies through the Colombian Andes and collected a wealth of evidence in support of an elevational sequence of biodiversity. During decades Thomas skilfully used opportunities for research in academia as well as in industry. He gave structure for research at universities, municipalities, musea, ministries, and nature conservations. After his retirement he lived in Colombia. His country estate became a central meeting place where students, scientists, farmers, mayors, and even Ministers of State discussed the environmental past and future of Colombian ecosystems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The title of the author's film 'HOW PERFECT IS THIS HOW BLESSED ARE WE' (HD video, 22 min and 11 s) is taken from the inscription on a bench on the top of a hill, at the highest point in the landscape of Compton Verney, designed by Lancelot 'Capability' Brown in his ideal vision of the British country house. By appropriating this statement of contentment as a critical tool to inquire how perfect it really is and who is the 'we' that is so blessed, Suleman inserted their body into the landscape as a reminder of historical absences and erasure, and the legacy of colonialism and queer-phobia. The film is narrated, however, in the register of an address to an absent lover. A personal history and a lover's yearning doubles as a critique of violent and exclusive histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores some of the ways in which queer women living in country houses have used their economic privilege and class leverage for their own purposes, disrupting and reshaping country house living to make space for their own independent endeavours. It takes as its case study the life of Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie (1895–1985), an innovative woman potter in the early British studio ceramics movement who rejected aristocratic, familial and societal expectations of duty and lineage to self-fashion an identity as an artist. Pleydell-Bouverie created a separate household on her family estate of Coleshill where she prioritised pleasurable domesticity with her female partners alongside creative expression and productivity. This essay investigates Pleydell-Bouverie's use of the estate – both the conditions it afforded her and its ecological materiality – as a resource in her experimental artistic practice and in her alternative, non-heteronormative mode of living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined public attitudes towards multi-storey wood buildings (MSWBs) in seven European countries. A questionnaire was distributed to online panellists in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Results from 7007 complete questionnaires indicate that respondents knew less about MSWBs in countries where brick, stone and concrete are the most commonly used house frame elements in construction (United Kingdom, Germany and Denmark) compared to countries with a stronger wood building tradition (Austria, Finland, Norway and Sweden). Respondents in Finland and Sweden had the most positive attitudes towards MSWB. The number of respondents, who considered a prospective apartment in an MSWB appealing, was approximately equal to the number that considered it an unappealing alternative. The factors most influencing the respondents' perception of MSWBs as a nice place to live were (i) vulnerability to fire, (ii) material solidity and durability, (iii) healthy indoor environment and (iv) vulnerability to moisture. The results from this study add new knowledge to the understanding of cross-country differences of preferences among the public for living in MSWBs. The results can be used to support the MSWB planning and marketing efforts in the countries involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The methods Western SMEs can use to activate assets of foreignness in compressed developing markets are not well understood. To fill this gap, this study identifies three main mechanisms for such activation: conforming to home-country institutions, creating distancing narratives and accentuating foreignness. It contributes knowledge about SME internationalization into compressed developing markets through two findings. First, SMEs can benefit from contrasting country practices and norms between home and host countries. Second, SMEs can activate institutional resources of their home country, which requires between-market learning because the value of these resources arises from their use in a different context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In September 2022, Hurricane Ian made landfall in southwest Florida, causing an estimated $67 billion in damage and the loss of almost 150 lives. Before this date, demand and house prices in this area were rising faster than anywhere else in the country. What did homeowners in southwest Florida believe about flood risk to their own homes, and what did real estate agents believe about the role of flood risk in the residential housing market? The survey research summarized in this article shows that not only did residents feel that they were not particularly at risk from flooding, but also that damaging floods would not affect future home values in their neighborhoods or for their own homes. We found that political party affiliation was strongly correlated with the direction and strength of these beliefs. Real estate agents also reported strong demand for low-elevation coastal housing, noting that coastal lifestyle outweighed the prospect of flooding in residential decision-making. They also observed that the detailed maps of flood risk that are now available at realtor.com for anyone browsing for houses for sale had no effect on homebuyers, and that most of their customers were generally unconcerned with flood risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article's thesis expands archival thought and practice to include the built environment, by exploring archival and other theory and practice and illustrating the premise with Dalkeith Palace. Incorporating a multidisciplinary view, we understand the built environment as a form of living archive that expands the notion of records and the meaning of private and semi-private record creation and keeping. The incorporation of traces, symbols and alternative voices as archival sources encourages equity and inclusion in the built environment and in the field of archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ephemera — material culture not generally considered to be of enduring cultural or historical value — has long confounded archivists and recordkeepers. Often considered anomalous within broader institutional repositories, ephemeral records are further side-lined by dominant archival processes, standards, and logics; they lose their contextual nuances and thus become hidden collections within collections. Despite persistent professional anxieties and archival omissions, ephemeral archives often constitute a powerful source for counter-histories of a given institution, community, movement, or era. Such materials are imbued with the specific social, and emotional textures of their creators' lives and accordingly, they require a level of familiarity with their context in order to produce useful, meaningful layers of interpretation. Taking as its site of investigation the English country house archive, this article explores an ephemeral collection which offers a radically different history of an institution often perceived as a bastion of patriarchy and privilege, but which has simultaneously been obscured because of its ephemerality. In offering a close reading of a collection that represents working-class and non-heteronormative archival practices and genealogies, I draw from feminist and decolonial approaches to the archive that centre notions of care, slowness, and intentionality and present ways of better understanding, valuing, and making use of ephemeral collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This theoretical study explores how a home country's policies influence where multinational companies choose to produce. The study models subsidy negotiations between firms and both the home and foreign countries, revealing that offering reshoring subsidies might lead to repatriation of the multinational firm. If the host country values job creation's welfare gain from reshoring, a large reshoring subsidy from the home government can be seen as socially acceptable and encourage reshoring. However, if the home governments prioritize job creation less and the foreign government aims to retain the firm, pushing for reshoring may increase costs for the foreign country and reduce its social welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the evolution of English architecture during the Tudor period rarely mention Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. Even when noticed, the commentary tends to be brief and poorly informed. Much of this Tudor country house survives intact, albeit masked by later alterations making way for changing uses. This essay unravels the history and development of the Tudor house to reveal a surprisingly important structure that deserves a better understanding. Additionally, and for the first time, the career and work of John Chapman, a little-known master-mason, is explored through the buildings believed to have been created by him and his team. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the relationship between research and development (R&D) and firm-level carbon emissions to determine whether firm type matters. Multinational corporations (MNCs) with high-level R&D expenditure have a greater ability than domestic companies to generate technologies that will contribute to controlling environmental pollution and climate change. However, we know less about whether MNCs contribute to reducing carbon emissions worldwide, because they also have the ability to overcome controls on pollution levels by shifting their production facilities from regions with more restrictions to those with fewer restrictions. The sample we use includes roughly 20,000 firm-year observations from 44 countries for the period 2003-2019. We find that MNCs decrease their carbon emissions by increasing their R&D spending more than domestic companies do. We further demonstrate that foreign direct investment (FDI) creates opportunities for MNCs to adjust their overall carbon emissions if they are located in developed countries. Key policy insights R&D investment in low-carbon technologies and practices decreases carbon emissions intensity and the impact on average is larger for MNCs than for domestic companies, showing that firm-type matters to emission reduction outcomes. MNCs manage their geographically diversified production so as to avoid reducing overall net global carbon emissions. MNCs may seek to operate in places that are weaker in enforcement of emissions reduction, which in turn raises their net global carbon emissions. MNCs located in developed countries are comparatively more important as corporate actors to drive carbon emission reductions due to changing location of operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines elite women's agency and participation in the literary life of the country house, focusing on the circle that centred on Jemima Marchioness Grey and her husband, Philip Yorke, at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. The "Society at Wrest" was an exclusive group of close friends and family that included Grey's childhood friends, Mary Gregory (née Grey) and Catherine Talbot, as well as her sisters-in-law, Elizabeth Anson and Margaret Heathcote (née Yorke). Most members of the Wrest Circle were careful about publishing their works, yet they found a cerebral escape in the shades of "Vacuna" – the name they affectionately gave to Wrest – as they created private literary compositions. Although Grey did not contribute to her friends' literary compositions, she did, as hostess, play an invaluable role in providing a space at Wrest Park that facilitated and nurtured their intellectual and artistic endeavours. Disrupting the scholarly emphasis on public-facing female intellectuals, this article argues that for some elite women, the value of belonging to a coterie was not about attracting literary fame but rather having access to a permissive environment in which they could embark on private literary pursuits and belong to an exclusive and supportive intellectual network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stephen Fry has described the typical American comic hero as a freewheeling "wisecracker" compared to the English type, who is apt to be an aspirational lower-middle-class failure. With Fry as a prompt, we consider humour and class in the evolution—or devolution—of that representative local hero, the larrikin, during Australian television's first three decades. This was a period that saw a realignment of the nation's political, economic and cultural affiliations away from Britain towards the US, and in which the ocker came into sudden prominence as a less benign version of rowdy male identity. If media larrikins such as Graham Kennedy and Paul Hogan excelled at the kind of sketch-based humour that had its origins in vaudeville and were unsuited to sitcoms, ocker characters such as Wally Stiller from My Name's McGooley and Ted Bullpitt from Kingswood Country found a home there. Our analysis of larrikin and ocker humour is triangulated with that of Norman Gunston, as played by Garry McDonald: a desperately aspirational failure with his own mock variety show who emerged from the dialogue between these two comic types. We conclude with some thoughts on post-ockerism and the emergence of the bogan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the staff who support MPs in their work. The literature suggests that these staff serve different important roles in democratic systems. This article compares the size of parliamentary staff in 48 countries and in 66 houses over an eight-year period. It compares three explanations of staff size, which reflect different roles they can have: firstly, that these staff serve MPs as compromise facilitators, planners and scribes. In that case, their number reflects the number of MPs. Secondly, that staff members function as information brokers and advertisers and as such act as intermediaries between the population and MPs. In that case, staff size reflects population size. And thirdly, that these staff primarily serve as a source of independent advice for MPs. In that case, staff size reflects the strength of the house they serve. Population size is found to be the dominant driver of the size of parliamentary staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from an ethnographic study with U.S.-born children who had relocated to their parents' hometowns in Mexico, we engaged transborder and dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit) frameworks to understand the compounding, deterritorialized ways undocumentedness and dis/ability shape educational experiences across borders. In this article, we focus on the experiences of two familias and argue that a transborder DisCrit framing is necessary to reveal how undocumented parents advocate and dream across disjunctures in search of access to educational supports and humanizing futures for their children with dis/abilities across the countries they call home. Findings reveal how intersecting forms of undocumentedness, or exclusion from papers for access and belonging, constrained families' access to movement across geopolitical borders, schooling and health-care institutions, and documented diagnoses needed to access learning supports. In the implications, we explore what approaches to policy, education, and research might look like if they centered the experiences, subaltern knowledges, and humanizing dreams of transborder parents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of industrialised construction can help meet the growing housing demand for developing economies in Africa. In order to understand future scenarios for accelerated adoption of industrialised construction, it is necessary to identify the influencing factors. To do so, this paper conducts a formative scenario analysis which is a literature- and expert-based method, focussing on three countries that have high housing demands, i.e. Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa. The resulting analysis consists of three parts. The first is the identification of nineteen internal and external influencing factors. These factors range from product performance to policies and regulations. The second is the illustration of the importance of each factor as a function of its relationship with the other factors. The third is the description of three possible scenarios the adoption of industrialised construction may take in the three investigated countries. The findings show that the most important accelerators for the adoption of industrialised construction come from governments' commitment to invest in future construction and incentivize companies to adopt industrial construction methods and for these companies to produce competitive products. The specific adoption policies to be implemented, however, depend greatly on the specific situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has seen a revival of private renting across a wide range of countries and housing regimes. Economic and housing restructuring has enhanced rental housing's appeal as an investment class. Apart from an increase in investment from firms, institutions, and trusts, this has triggered a revival of private landlordism among individuals and households. Yet, few detailed studies on the social, demographic, and economic profiles of landlords exist. To fill this gap and understand landlords' class position, this article draws on Dutch register data with information on the entire Dutch population and housing stock. Analyses of their socioeconomic characteristics reveal the highly privileged class position of many landlords, with a substantial portion found in top income, wealth, and neighborhood positions. One-third of the top wealth percentile—the Dutch top 1 percent—consists of landlords, underscoring their vast economic power. Although landlords with larger housing portfolios are notably more affluent, small-scale landlords are also highly overrepresented in the upper economic strata. Fundamentally, this article's findings urge us to consider landlordism specifically, and housing more broadly, in terms of class formation and delineation, with a class of landlord elites mobilizing multiple properties for the purpose of wealth accumulation and class reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a further exploration of the phenomenon of historic country houses repurposed as private schools. In a previous paper it was shown that 55 English private schools within the Headmasters and Headmistresses Conference and the Girls' Schools Association are partially housed within former country houses. This paper investigates some of the possible motivations for schools choosing to occupy such redundant country houses. There are a number of obvious reasons, such as their availability at low cost with appropriate facilities that could be readily used by the schools, but in some cases, it was found that the country house's historic associations with arts, culture, and learning were a particular motivation for repurposing into schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities face increasing housing needs, particularly in Southern European countries, as well as tightening constraints on public expenditure. The mismatch between income levels and housing costs has come to concern a larger and more diversified share of the population so that housing needs strike beyond the poorest and most underprivileged profiles. This article discusses the outcomes of fieldwork conducted in San Donato Milanese, a medium-sized, affluent town in the Milan metropolitan area, to explore the changing facets of housing issues and the margins for action that can innovate local public action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

William Rathbone IV was a radical who helped found the Liverpool Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the same year that he first leased Greenbank. His death in 1940, however, ended the direct connection between the Rathbones and Greenbank, which soon passed into the ownership of the University of Liverpool. ADRIAN ALLAN, Greenbank House and the University of Liverpool: A History: (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. [Extracted from the article]

The eighteenth-century country estate was a political space, and this was particularly true for the estate of Brahetrolleborg in 1780s and 1790s absolutist Denmark. This article explores the agency of Brahetrolleborg's social hostess, Sybille Reventlow, and her sister, Charlotte Schimmelmann, focusing on the politically charged years of 1789–90 and the two women's engagement in the political project of their court faction, the 'reform circle'. Taking Elaine Chalus' concept of 'political sociability' as my point of departure, I argue that the estate's female head of household, Sybille Reventlow, managed people and social situations for political ends at Brahetrolleborg; receiving and entertaining school inspectors, members of the court and the royal family as guests at the manor. Sybille Reventlow's correspondence shows that she cooperated with Charlotte Schimmelmann to suppress a petition from the peasants at Brahetrolleborg, calling on the Foreign Minister to stop the complaint. The concluding analysis demonstrates that Charlotte Schimmelmann, during one of her summer visits to Brahetrolleborg, discussed the composition of a new School Commission, and the funding of Brahetrolleborg's schools, with Sybille Reventlow's husband, Ludvig Reventlow, acting as an intermediary between her brother-in-law and her husband, the Finance Minister of the reform reign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

MNEs' HRM practices need to be mindful of the institutional differences between the local context of host countries and that of their home countries. Balancing the localization of HRM practices with the desire for global standardization and integration is a dilemma for MNEs. We examine this tension utilizing a unique perspective, namely by analyzing the HRM challenges that MNEs face with regard to LGBT employees in Africa. We find that MNEs experience difficulty in reconciling their global corporate values and HR policies with local institutions and legislative requirements. Several contributions result. First, by bringing issues of duality to the fore both at the organizational and individual level. Second, we contribute towards the global configuration literature in international HRM as regards global standardization and national differentiation, by focusing on developing countries, where the scale of the cultural or institutional distance between home and host countries are likely to be larger, which allows us to examine the difficulties of the transfer of HR practices to these sites. Third, we embed our analysis of localization within institutional theory, and finally, we integrate these contributions into an analysis of HRM challenges of LGBT employees in hostile contexts and make recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel The Remains of the Day (1989) by Merchant Ivory evokes nostalgia as a trope that glorifies the imperial past of the British through portraying extravagantly both the butler protagonist's professionalism and his attachment to the country house (Darlington Hall), one of the symbolic places used in heritage cinema. In the novel, Stevens' sense of nostalgia is presented as a sensual impetus or a blueprint to revisit the past to construct a more insightful understanding of the self. Analysing both uses of nostalgia in the source text and its adaptation, this article reveals that the Merchant Ivory adaptation (1993) limits its nostalgic perspective to depicting the idealised imperial past, and it does not evoke any dissident conception of nostalgia for the audience as the novel provides through its protagonist's retrospection for the reader. Discussing the politics and contextual background of the adaptation, it concludes that Merchant Ivory's film version of Ishiguro's novel exemplifies characteristics of heritage cinema to convey dominantly conservative ideologies such as elitism and nationalism as common norms upheld in Thatcher's Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of economic policy uncertainty in home and host countries on the choice of foreign establishment mode. Using 777 foreign subsidiary establishments made by Chinese firms from 2004 to 2015, we find that firms prefer M&A compared to greenfield investment as the establishment mode when the host country is experiencing high economic policy uncertainty. Firms that face high economic policy uncertainty in their home country prefer cross-border M&A when entering the host country. Economy policy uncertainty in the home country is the main factor when economic policy uncertainties in both the home and host countries are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars often analyze houses' "Jewishness" vis-à-vis Jewish law and rituals. For Dutch Sephardic Jews during the long eighteenth century, however, identity is better understood using a model of rhizome in which "Jewishness" consists of the deliberate interbraiding of multiple traditions. Jewish identity was inextricable from the cultures in which Jews lived. Jewish homes along the Vecht River near Amsterdam exemplify the rhizome model. They embody the same braided pastoral ideal found in eighteenth-century Dutch Sephardic literature and material culture. As Sephardic Jews relocated to Netherlands Antilles, the rhizome present in country houses shifted, taking into account Jews' new role as slave owners. Thus while buitenplaatsen along the Vecht embraced the Jewish pastoral ideal of a retreat from mercantile life, landhuizen in Curaçao evoked a georgic ideal that channelled the residents' gaze not on rivers, gardens, and grottos, but on guard stations, slave huts, and enslaved workers. Leisure became redefined as an ability to watch rather than retreat from labour. Taken together, Dutch Jewish country houses along the Vecht and in Curaçao challenge the notion that Jewish material culture has a "single root system." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Jewish country houses explored in this issue represent a group of properties spread across Europe that have hitherto escaped systematic research by country house studies. In thinking about what was distinctively Jewish about the country houses of the Jewish elite this issue consolidates three significant trends in country house studies – the house, collections and wider estate as a dynamic entity shaped by a range of historical processes; the global interconnectedness of country houses; the importance of collaborative projects spanning the heritage sector and academic – and poses exciting new questions that may be profitably adapted by country house studies to advance scholarly understanding of non-Jewish houses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the vast majority of modern country houses built or refurbished in the long nineteenth century were owned by non-Jews, Jews owned some of the most magnificent. Thus, these dwellings pose the same question that historians have raised about other aspects of diasporic Jewish practices: Was there anything particularly "Jewish," about country houses owned by Jews? In this essay I propose a hypothesis – that Jewish country houses were the ideal-type of the modern country house. On the one hand, super-elite Jews took their capital, both cultural and real, their family networks, and their long experience interpreting and navigating the often-hostile worlds in which they found themselves and created country houses that were the model of the genre. On the other hand, I argue that Judaism itself mattered as much as the social and economic positioning of Jews produced by discrimination. Uniquely Jewish conceptualizations, and practices, of home, of time, and of space rendered Jews particularly comfortable with the complex interweaving of public and private intrinsic to the country house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The country house has long been seen as a space of luxury consumption. Large houses are characterised as enclaves of the London, spending all their money in capital, rather than buying goods locally. They sapped wealth from the local area rather than stimulating economic activity This paper analyses data from highly detailed account books which record the kitchen expenditure at Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall in the years 1658-1660 to understand how the kitchens of the Earls of Devonshire were supplied. In discussing the ways in which the household sourced foodstuffs and how much they spent doing so, this paper challenges the prevailing idea that houses are economic leeches on the local area. The Devonshires spent a vast sum of money on food locally; helping to create communities of commerce in the local area and to fuel a vibrant and various grocery trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles within the issue on topics including the domestic servants of country houses, the country house's social history, and master-servant relationships.

The balance of power in nineteenth-century country estates was firmly weighted in the employer's favour, making it difficult for servants to carve out an identity, find a voice, or establish self-worth. Their characters, morality and conduct were often problematized by the upper classes, and they were frequently derided, as Davidoff (1993) suggests, for 'having very ambivalent attitudes towards their employers'. Applying discourse analysis to data derived from nineteenth-century servant letters uncovered in two archived collections (the Savernake Estate and Mote House) this article reveals the complex tensions and ambiguities that characterised working relations between masters and servants in such households. By focussing explicitly on how servants managed perceptions of themselves in moments of rupture this article considers how their narratives can be re-conceived as active dialogues in which different representations of the self and the complex layers of the domestic service relationship are continually and creatively re-formulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the role of Edward Wrench in doctoring Chatsworth House. He purchased the practice in Baslow in 1862 and from the beginning sought to become the doctor of choice for the Devonshire family when in residence and the numerous staff that they employed. Edward Wrench's diaries which exists in an unbroken run until his death in 1912 create a prism through which to explore the country house and its consumption history from a different angle. It will examine the importance of men like the Duke of Devonshire in establishing a practice both in the medical marketplace and within society. While the local GP might call in a consultant when conditions appeared to be anything other than minor this did not mean that they did not play an important role in the health of an aristocratic family and their staff. Overall it gives a sense of the conditions suffered and treated locally. More importantly for a young GP setting up in practice and gaining the trust of a wealthy patient could mean the difference between success and failure. While historians have explored the evolution of General Practice, the historiography remains short of detailed case studies and this article will start to fill this gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Country houses are as much storytelling houses as storehouses of great collections. Culzean Castle was built on earlier foundations in the late eighteenth century to designs largely by Robert Adam by the 9th earl of Cassillis who bankrupted himself in the process. It was inherited by a wealthy distant American relative and completed by his son the first marquess of Ailsa. This article describes how the author located and interpreted the estate records to help tell a wholly different narrative than that provided at the time by the National Trust for Scotland which now owns the castle. Its focus is on the use of financial records to set properties, such as Culzean, in the wider context of their surrounding estate and the income that was needed to support them. Financial records and associated rentals are very bulky and little used. As a result they are vulnerable if held on deposit at a time of financial stringency and declining visitor numbers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on flight of Henry VI and Thomas Playter, the writer of the letter to John Paston I, and plausibility of a diversion to Knaresborough in Henry's flight, dismisses various alternative published suggestions for the site of the siege. It mentions place is well recorded in the Middle Ages and place referred to was the ancient and substantial Cornbrough manor house itself, a moated site. It also mentions mention of anything comparable at the vanished manor house.

This paper analyses the archaeological and documentary evidence from three West Yorkshire houses—Calverley Old Hall, Shibden Hall and Oakwell Hall—to re-evaluate narratives of gentry emulation in 16th- and 17th-century English housebuilding. Gentry houses have long been absorbed into the literature of elite country houses, with homes of the lesser gentry serving primarily as emulative examples of national architectural and social trends. This paper suggests a more nuanced interpretation of these homes as sites of multi-faceted household relationships, where the inhabitants consciously incorporated and resisted elite trends and used space to establish and maintain control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the kinship networks of the landed gentry of Devon, Lincolnshire and Hertfordshire in the modern period. Using national census household returns, the visitors’ books of a Devon gentry family and correspondence the article reveals dense and meaningful kinship networks centred on the main country house but also woven into the wider familial world of the gentry. Whenever possible, the inheritance of landed estates passed through the male line. But kin networks were bilateral, founded on both birth and marriage, on relations both through the male and the female line. Kin relations provided a range of services within a culture of visiting, epistolary practice and affection, which generated close and cherished family ties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All too often, servants are accorded limited space in country house studies: rarely allowed to venture beyond the kitchen and service rooms, either in academic studies or interpretations for visitors. They are defined by their work not their lives and are seen as serving the physical rather than social or emotional needs of the owner. This paper challenges this viewpoint by exploring the relationship between George Lucy, owner of Charlecote Park in Warwickshire and his housekeeper, Mrs Phillipa Hayes. Drawing on their mutual correspondence, on other letters to and from Mrs Hayes, and on her Household Book, I construct a richer and more nuanced picture of the multiple roles that could be played by a senior servant. She was a housekeeper, but also a correspondent, confidante and hostess, who offered comfort and pleasure to her employer as well as sound economic and social management of his household. Although in some ways unusual, this case study illustrates the importance of placing senior servants more centrally when exploring the country house. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ‘destruction of the English country house’ in the period since the late nineteenth century looms large in popular consciousness, and has received increasing attention from historians in recent years. There is no doubt that demolitions did occur on a large scale, especially in the middle years of the twentieth century, but it is arguable that most research has placed too much emphasis on the economic problems faced by estates arising from the great Agricultural Depression: the narrative so far, that is, has had too rural a focus. This article examines the phenomenon in Lancashire, a county characterized by industrialization, demographic expansion, and rapid urbanization. This regional perspective suggests reasons for country house losses that are subtly but significantly different from those pertaining in the more rural counties of England, which have been the primary focus of previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years historians have highlighted country houses’ colonial connections. Such work is animated by a new approach to British imperial history, which emphasizes colonialism’s impact on domestic architecture, material culture and national wealth. Since the late 1970s, literary critics have contributed substantially to such discussions. Raymond Williams broached the topic inThe Country and the City([1973] 2016), Gayatri Spivak produced her postcolonial critique of Jane Eyre in 1984 and Edward Said wrote the seminal essay ‘Jane Austen and Empire’ in 1993. This late twentieth-century criticism has been addressed and modified by both Austen and postcolonial scholars. This multifaceted critical response serves as a reminder that canonical English literature has long been preoccupied by country houses’ imperial dimensions. My essay revisits a number of canonical works in order to explore how contemporary writing by black Britons responds to earlier writing about country houses and empire. Works such asThe West Indian(1771),Jane Eyre(1847),The Moonstone(1868) andThe Way We Live Now(1875) provide an important literary context for a rural turn in writing by black and Asian Britons, a turn which was inaugurated by V. S. Naipaul’sThe Enigma of Arrival([1987] 2002). My essay situates post-millennial writing by John Agard, David Dabydeen, Sene Seneviratne, Tanika Gupta and Tyrone Huggins in the context of the current renaissance in country house research, which substantially resources post-millennial writing, increasingly allowing historically nuanced critical engagements with the politics of rural entitlement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Akseki Bucakalan villages are a unique type of indigenous rural settlement consisting of dwellings constructed of timber-reinforced rubble stone masonry with projecting tie-beams. The dwellings and the villages, which have preserved their authentic construction system and ritual lifestyles to this day, constitute important examples of authentic rural architecture in Anatolia. While this article includes brief descriptions of the settlements themselves and of village life, the focus here is on the construction techniques and materials used for the dwellings. The functional organization of the structures was assessed using plan schemas; then, their spatial characteristics were measured and their source materials explained. The structural elements have been discussed in terms of construction techniques, materials and organizations. The construction, material, and structural details of these authentic dwellings were collected with the goal of building a document library that the villages can preserve and hand down to future generations to aid in restoration and reconstruction work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY: Most of the estates in Pomerania, Germany (now West Poland), were completely destroyed by the end of World War II (WWII). One of these estates belonged to our great-grandfather, and thereafter to the eldest son and a grandson; three generations lived in the house from 1861 to 1945. An inventory compiled in 1941 by the wife of the third owner has survived; the contents of the entire house, some with their ownership attached, enabled us to divide 80 years of occupation into three phases. This unusual but precise record, together with unpublished family histories, personal memories, and a few photos and documents made it possible to reconstruct the house and revive the history of these three generations in Daber-Freiheit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Indoor climate and user satisfaction were analysed by field measurement and a questionnaire in 67 traditional rural houses in Estonia, Finland and Sweden. Our findings showed that the indoor climate in all the investigated historic rural houses needs improvement. The room temperature was mainly too low during winter. Leaky houses had also a larger vertical temperature difference. The relative humidity in the unheated and periodically heated houses was high during winter and caused risk for mould growth in 17% of all houses and 33% of unheated houses. Significant differences of indoor humidity loads in different houses were revealed depending on the living density and usage profile. During the winter period, the design value of moisture excess was 4–5 g/m3and the average moisture load was 2–3.5 g/m3. The indoor humidity load in historic houses was similar to that in modern houses. The results of the questionnaire showed that main problems were related to unstable or too low temperatures. At the same time, inhabitants rated the overall indoor climate as healthy and no statistically important relations were found between average indoor temperature and complaints about too cold or too warm indoor temperatures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article provides accounts of country estates provided in ancient Greek literature, as well as considering representations of country life in the art of ancient Greece. Writings of authors including Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle. Estates owned by Xenophon, the Athenian statesman and general Cimon, Corinthian general Timoleon, and the soldier-king of Sparta, Agesilaus II. Topics considered include the planting of trees, the stabling of horses and hounds, and hunting.

This article deals with the question of why the architecture of new gated communities includes references to built heritage. The emergence of ‘gated communities’ in the Netherlands is especially interesting because its diffusion is not primarily driven by distinct urban segregation and the gap between rich and poor. ‘Gated communities’ in the sense of exclusive communities with rigid boundaries are basically seen as ‘un-Dutch’ by the planning community and the public media. This paper examines, firstly, the local sensibilities to these residential places in the context of a strong institutional spatial planning practice and, secondly, the reasons why ‘gated communities’ were nevertheless embraced by middle-income households. These groups identify with the reference to built heritage-like walled towns and castles and use them for purposes of social distinction. Moreover, they perceive historical as a symbolic marker for like-minded fellow residents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the material culture of the eighteenth-century aristocracy through a detailed analysis of the Leigh family of Stoneleigh Abbey. Drawing on a succession of detailed inventories and a large collection of receipted bills, the article explores changes and continuities in the spatiality of material culture at Stoneleigh and, in particular, the ways in which old and new coexisted through the differential construction and use of domestic space. On the basis of this evidence we argue that conspicuous consumption and positional goods were only one aspect of methodologies of distinction in the complex semiotics of status expressed through country house interiors. Rank, dignity and lineage were also expressed through older goods and goods with 'patina' value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]