A Home for All Seasons

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With passion and precision, Gavin Plumley pushes the boundaries of memoir and scholarship and shows that the chronicle of a house can contain the grand history of a whole world as well as the sweet, urgent story of a life: all that intimacy within the vastness of historical time. With ancient beams crossing the ceiling, the date they'd been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. Features about Gavin’s home and life in Pembridge have also appeared on Inigo, Sphere and in Herefordshire Living. I don’t know if the filling stations are still disturbing the village, but if they are, there are plenty of compensations: a 14th-century church with, so the story goes, the marks of Cromwellian musket balls still showing in its west door; a spectacular pagoda-like bell house dating back to the 1200s; an early 16th-century market hall; 17th-century almshouses; and streets stacked to the gills with picturesquely wonky black-and-white houses. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly.

I assumed (like other reviewers) that this would concentrate on the house and surrounding areas of Herefordshire where author Gavin Plumley lives. This was particularly shown in the art of the time which was influenced by the more sophisticated European styles and techniques. If your interest is the Herefordshire aspect of this one, I would say steer clear- it doesn't give anywhere near enough sadly. Afew years ago, Gavin Plumley and his husband, Alastair, bought a house in the Herefordshire village of Pembridge.But I have a love of art, literature, gardening, architecture and history (all represented throughout the book) and yet I still felt long portions overly tedious and at times pretentious. As a final thought, while I was reading this the author posted a comment by a reviewer that said they weren’t able to continue reading the book due to the prevalence of references to his alternative lifestyle. I almost felt that I had somehow been tricked into reading it by a “false description” given by the publisher and even those who had reviewed and blurbed it. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he uncovers a past steeped in history and art, memory and nature that resonates powerfully with our present.

The book is supposed to be about the history of a house in Pembridge, Herefordshire, (near where I live), that the author bought with his husband, according to the blurb and insinuated by the title and dust wrapper illustration, but the information assembled is so meagre that, I’m afraid, I felt that I had been conned. What starts out as a straightforward house history morphs into something else, a wide-ranging meditation on place and past, taking in climate change, rural depopulation, the Reformation and folklore . All this gleaned while he tried to establish the age of his Tudor-looking property, for which there was no definitive record. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he saw a past emerge that resonates powerfully with our present.

Keen to fit in, yet sensitive to homophobia, Plumley and his husband soon came up against the harsh realities of life in a rural community. If I’m honest, the art history was less interesting to me than the social history aspect of the book, but it has inspired me to take more interest in historical detail and the bibliography included will be invaluable for this. Beautifully written and structured, Plumley’s writing is vivid and captures bucolic scenes perfectly. In fact, Pevsner, in a rare burst of enthusiasm, declared it to be one of the prettiest villages in the county, on account of its abundance of black-and-white buildings, ‘hardly disturbed by Georgian brick, though disastrously disturbed by some recent filling stations’.

J. Marsh, Judith O'Reilly, Kelly Clayton, Kim Nash, Leah Mercer, Liz Fenwick, Louise Jensen, Louise Mumford, Malcolm Hollingdrake, Marcia Woolf, Mark Stay, Marcie Steele, Natasha Bache, Nick Jackson, Nick Quantrill, Nicky Black, Patricia Gibney, Rachel Sargeant, Rob Parker, Rob Scragg, S. He also delved extensively into the art of the Tudor period and came across the 16th century immigration issues. The perfect Christmas present for anyone who has ever been curious about the house they live in and who might (or might not) have lived there before them. It had some interesting details but I didn't enjoy Gavin reading it as there was no shading in his narration. A hybrid work of domestic history and European art, of memoir and landscape, A Home for All Seasons is both grand in its sweep and intimate in its account of life on the edge of England.A work of non-fiction, it was published by Atlantic Books in hardback and e-book on 2 June 2022 to wide acclaim and then released as an audiobook by W. That simple question set them off on a discovery process, delving into the house's mixed and varied history, and expanding out from that (via a lot of medieval art, especially Breughel; the author is an art historian) into the rhythms and processes of the countryside generally, and how to live within them.