Pleased that the forecast heavy rain held off yesterday for the open-air annual Radio 1 Roadshow this year broadcast from the grounds of Burton Constable Hall, in Holderness, 12 miles north-east of Hull. All those with tickets were bussed-in to the site from distant parking sites, this necessary as local roads are narrow and winding. There was, apparently, heightened security following the Manchester bombing last Monday.
Although not usually a Radio 1 listener I did take some interest, given the circumstances. Rather irritatingly the commentators (out-dated term probably) kept repeating that the event was ‘coming from Hull’, and although the helicopter pictures showed the Hall in the middle distance no mention was made of it, its history or of the parkland and its history. The image above is a drawing of the ‘elevation of the east front based on a painting of c. 1690′, Neave, D. Yorkshire: York and the East Riding (Buildings of England series), (Yale University Press, 2005, 372). David Neave describes the U-shaped ground plan of this mostly late Elizabethan period house in detail as well as unravelling its building history. The parkland is a product of work done in the 1770s and’80s as overseen by ‘Capability’ Brown (see p. 377). I am driven to the conclusion that the ‘commentators’ consider landscape history to be of little interest to their listeners and that their petty conversation and oft-repeated comments about ‘coming-up’ acts is. Actually I enjoyed some of the ‘songs’.
As every year already some of the colour, only recently flowering in the hedgerows and road-side verges, is fading as plants and grasses set to seed. Thankfully the clovers and buttercup are longer lasting.
Recently saw two tv programmes from the annual Chelsea Garden Festival in London. Much of interest, however, the ‘best-in-show’ award went to a garden with lots of wild plants but these growing around the bottom of rectangular freestone blocks set on end. This apparently to show the alliance between rock and plants – but I just didn’t get it until the designer was interviewed. Why didn’t he just re-create a weathered chalk face with ‘natural’ ledges on which plants develop as in Nature? Answers please.