In the 1890s tearooms flourished all over the UK, and nowhere more than in Glasgow. There you would find several city centre premises with a choice of rooms for customers taking tea – including separate rooms for ladies and gentlemen, and smoking rooms. Those managed by the enterprising Miss Cranston, who asked designer-architect Charles Rennie [more...]
In the 1670s a young Scotsman called William Cash sailed to the New World and set up home in Virginia. Nine generations later his direct descendant, country music star Johnny Cash, wanted to explore his ancestry. He crossed the Atlantic in the other direction, to visit the part of Fife once known as the “lands [more...]
Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was a two-year-old princess when German paratroops landed in the Hague on May 10, 1940 with orders to take the entire Dutch royal family to Berlin. Her grandmother, Queen Wilhelmina, wanted the younger generations to flee to safety as soon as possible. Apart from any personal feelings she wished to [more...]
You may have read that walking is the only way to see historic Siena. It’s true that nothing beats exploring it on foot, and also true that the hilly medieval city has banned most cars from the narrow, uneven streets in the city centre. There is an efficient taxi service though, so if you are an [more...]
Many nicely-crafted antique card tables were made in the 1700s and 1800s. The social lives of prosperous families in America, Britain, and other parts of Europe depended on having a card table, or two, for friends to play at in the evening. Before 1700, card-playing was a rich person’s game. It stayed fashionable with the aristocracy [more...]
I used to see the paisley design as a curled leaf or feather, without thinking about its history. Paisley fabric is “patterned with distinctive, ornate, teardrop- or feather-shaped figures, based on an Indian pine cone design”, according to the dictionary. Textile experts have called it a “drooping bud” or a “Kashmir cone”. It’s also been [more...]
In the late 1600s shawl was not yet an English word, though it was beginning to turn up in travellers’ descriptions of clothing they had seen in southern Asia. In the 1700s fine cashmere shawls from Kashmir and India arrived in Western Europe. At first they were not treated as clothing, but used to ornament [more...]
Pashminas took off in the later 1990s, when draping a generous piece of woven cashmere round your shoulders was a fashion trend in Western countries. At the end of 1996 a London journalist reported that “style guru Lucia van der Post” said the pashmina was “the most chic shawl around town”. The New York Times [more...]
Travellers to South America in the 1800s brought flowers made from feathers home to Europe or the USA. Feather flowers were displayed in the London Great Exhibition of 1851, and over the next few years instructions for making your own appeared in various ladies’ magazines. The Victorians had a taste for novelty crafts that ornamented [more...]
Everyone who visits Siena heads for the Piazza del Campo, the great medieval square where the famous Palio horse races are run in summer. Energetic types can climb the Torre del Mangia (14th century bell-tower in the photo); others admire the medieval architecture from an outdoor café table. Next stop is probably the even older [more...]
If you were bereaved in the 1800s, your clothes and jewels had to be black for a period of mourning, the length depending on whether you were widow, daughter, sister etc. Apart from the usual gold and silver settings, mourning jewellery was made of black jet – a “stone” derived from coal - onyx, black [more...]
Club chairs owe a lot to Victorian advances in upholstery techniques. Earlier padded chairs just had a light layer of horsehair stuffing – kept in place by quilting in the 17th century, or by tufted deep stitches for the 18th century’s thicker padding. As the 1800s progressed, chair makers explored ways of adding more stuffing [more...]
Fans of old embroidery will find plenty in Scotland. The suggestions here are a few favourites, all in reach of Edinburgh or Glasgow. Traquair is an ancient house with a unique collection of old needlework. The 16th century petit point fruit and flower “slip” motifs are well-preserved, still waiting to be sewn onto soft furnishings, and [more...]
The history of Delft tiles goes back to the early 1600s when blue and white porcelain from China first arrived in the Netherlands. It was much admired and Dutch potters wanted to imitate the look, even though they couldn’t recreate true Chinese porcelain. Potteries in Delft had more success than others with good quality blue and [more...]
Chinoiserie was a new fashion in the 18th century when China and the Far East seemed incredibly exotic to people in Europe. Imported arts and crafts had an excitingly different beauty from those made at home, and some were clearly superior to anything European – especially Chinese porcelain. Designers and craftsmen wanted to recreate the style [more...]
Bilberries grow wild in Europe. Blueberries look similar but bigger, and are native to North America. That’s the short answer, but the longer truth is that there are quite a few different varieties – all cousins related to one another. It’s usual to call dark blue members of the European branch of the family bilberries, [more...]
Rosslyn Chapel already had 30,000 visitors a year before Dan Brown used it in his mystical adventure novel the Da Vinci Code in 2003. Numbers rose, and then escalated massively after the 2006 movie version showed Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou searching for secrets there. The church near Edinburgh, Scotland was overflowing with tourists in 2006 [more...]
Rosemary is delicious in all kinds of savoury cooking, and it’s simple to grow in climates not too different from its home base around the Mediterranean. If you plant it near a path not only can you enjoy its scent when you brush past on sunny days, but on rainy days you can easily pick [more...]
The first flower salad I ever saw was covered with bright nasturtiums like the visual treat in the photo. It impressed me with the idea that some garden flowers are not only edible, but look wonderful on food. You can grow them as well as the better-known herbs to add interesting colours and flavours to [more...]
Famille rose decoration for porcelain developed in China around 1720. A new wave of Chinese ceramics using rose and ruby shades in multi-colour designs was greatly admired in Europe. Introduced just before the western craze for oriental style interior decoration peaked in the mid-18th century, plenty was manufactured for export, along with many other Asian [more...]