Author Lydia Greeves talks at this year’s Chichester Speakers Festival

23/03/2018 1:30 pm – 23/03/2018 2:45 pm

Lydia Greeves is a writer and editor who has had a long association with the National Trust and is known for her writing on Britain’s cultural heritage. She is the author of The Good Country House Guide, Country Cottages and The Harrods Guide to London. 

Lydia will be talking at this year’s Chichester Speakers Festival on Friday 23rd March.

Houses of the National Trust describes over 300 places open to visitors.  Some are grand show houses, like Petworth and Hardwick Hall, but the book also includes a wide range of other places, from ruined castles and monasteries to barns and watermills and even whole villages. This talk will introduce a couple of the Trust’s quirkier properties, one of them set on an island in a lake, and unusual recent acquisitions, such as a network of tunnels burrowed into the White Cliffs of Dover. Then, focusing on a few major properties and bringing in some of the more memorable people associated with Trust buildings, among them Sir Francis Drake; a highly eccentric Victorian architect with an opium-fuelled imagination; and a novelist and pianist who moved in the artistic and literary circles of the 1930s, the talk will show how the presentation and understanding of properties is constantly moving on. New rooms and wings are being opened, contents enhanced and re-examined, leading to the discovery of some lost masterpieces, and decorative schemes reconstructed.  And a new approach by the Trust means that places are now open that have not been open before.  The talk will be fully illustrated.

For further information and to book tickets, click here

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