TIM TUBBS’ LUNCHTIME LECTURES - FEBRUARY 2022

Covid-secure, distanced seating, please wear masks.

Tickets £5 (no concessions). Book series of three lectures for £15 and get the fourth one free.

YMCA Box Office 01723 560750 or online at www.ymcascarborough.uk

ENGLAND’S GREAT HOUSES

1pm Tuesdays 1st, 8th, 15th & 22nd February 2022

England’s great country houses are not only part of a glorious heritage and stirring history, but contain fascinating stories of the families who built and occupied them.

Knole & The Sackvilles (1st February)

Built by an Archbishop of Canterbury, then a Tudor royal palace and grandiose seat of the Sackville family, Knole Park in Kent has had a colourful history, with many literary associations, including Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando, written about Vita Sackville-West, one of Knole’s family historians. 

Blenheim & The Churchills (8th February)

The definitive statement of English Baroque, Vanbrugh’s great Oxfordshire mansion is the only non-Royal, non-Episcopal palace in Britain, built for John Churchill, 1^st Duke of Marlborough, and home to the Spencer-Churchill family. If ever there was a triumphalist great house, Blenheim is it.

Madresfield – The ‘Real’ Brideshead (15th February)

The beautiful, distinctive Worcestershire seat of the Earls of Beauchamp was the inspiration, along with the Lygon family’s tragedy, of Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece Brideshead Revisited. It also features unmistakeably as Hetton in his earlier novel A Handful Of Dust.

Wentworth Woodhouse & The Fitzwilliams (22nd February)

Deserted and empty in South Yorkshire stands Wentworth Woodhouse, the largest private house in Britain, stately home of the Earls Fitzwilliam, their fabulous wealth mostly derived from coal-mining, now fallen into decay, from which the great house is slowly emerging.