YouSaid · the spoken record

Anna Keay

lines on the record: 58
first: 2023-04-19
most recent: 2023-04-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, there's a very good new book that your listeners might be interested in called Scotland of Global History, written by someone called Murray Pissick, that came out earlier this year. And it is a wonderful account of how from the mid-17th century, Scotland, as I say, a tiny little country with a minuscule population came to have such incredible global reach in terms of science, technology, thought, politics, music so much. So, yeah, that's a good place to start.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything, but what? What concretely? Well, there are all sorts of things. I mean, the Scottish Enlightenment is such a completely gripping, extraordinary phenomenon that this tiny little country, my birthplace, but micro little place on any worldview through the course of the early and into the later 18th century, had such incredible influence around the world. And I think the buildings of that period, I think, the political thought, the poetry, all these things we should all know more about, we should teach it more to our children and we should celebrate it.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm trying to save an amazing building outside Edinburgh High School, Mavis Bank, which was built in the 1720s for a man who was one of our great Renaissance figures, man of the great pioneer of the Scottish Enlightenment. And it's the most beautiful, beautiful house. It's derelict, just walls of standing, but the ceilings and the roofs have fallen in and it's clinging onto life by its fingernails. So my great hope for what I'm doing next is being able to raise the money to save it from collapse.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it is the French lieutenant's woman. I think it's just an amazing novel. It really, really bears really reading now. It's less fashionable now than it was maybe 20, 30 years ago, but it is tremendous. He writes some pretty creepy other novels, one called The Collector, which I wouldn't particularly recommend. Amazing though it is. But I think the French lieutenant's woman has a kind of love story and as a kind of a dialogue with Victorian literature is peerless.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it was its prosperity was in the Middle Ages, and then it essentially kind of disappeared from the sort of league table of affluence in the UK as the industrial towns of the north, which is where big scale cotton production and so on really took off. And as a consequence, as a part of the UK, it's a very, very beautiful, it's not very wealthy at all, and it's very unurbanized because it essentially still has its kind of medieval and sort of early modern landscape, both in terms of buildings and topography. Whereas if you go, I mean, equally interesting, but does very different, somewhere like Manchester, which are amazing world's first industrial city, you know, had this extraordinary explosion in the 19th century. The railways were invented there, you know, everything kind of was developing in a very different direction.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Beautiful brick merchants' houses and buildings of the 16th, 17th, 18th century. And it has also some wonderful medieval churches. Norfolk was in a very, very wealthy. It's a sort of bulgy bit on the side of England if you look at the map of England on the right.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Norfolk has no building stone. It has a lot of chalk, which has seams of flint in it. So what you get are buildings in our part of the world, which are overwhelmingly brick, very beautiful red brick that's been fired locally from local brick earth. And then you get dressings of napped flint, which is a very beautiful black kind of knobbly sort of stone. If you go 20 miles east from us to get to Northamptonshire, there's wonderful limestone and everything is built of honeyed, beautiful stone. It's such a lovely thing about your connection with your environment. And I feel in this country we are very lucky in this, that you have this tremendous local distinctiveness. You could open your eyes if you know about this stuff and you could just see by looking doing that which county of England you are in from and given all these places are very close together compared to the states and quite often which part of which county. So Norfolk is very very strongly brick has beautiful”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one of the things that's really interesting about Great Britain is if you ever had one of those maps that you can get which show the geology of the place that you live, the country or the state you live in, so it's the kind of stripes or the bands of different kind of geology, whether it's limestone or granite or chalk or whatever. If you look at one for Britain, it is amazing because there are so many different stripes of geology just to do with the way the world evolves geologically, which means that places in Britain that are very close to each other have completely different geology. And the reason that is interesting and relevant is it places are built overwhelmingly from the materials that you find locally. And when you have an old building stock like we do, that's very vivid. It's expensive to transport materials and so on. So one of the great pleasures, I would say, of traveling around the UK is that places that are maybe only 15 miles apart can look completely different because of that. So in the case of Norfolk, what it means is that”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Instead, and so I think that it's very important for all of us who care about this stuff to remind ourselves and remind each other about the things you can do that enable you to keep your beautiful windows, but also to make sure that you're not wasting energy.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what I would say is that you must never underestimate just how much our ancestors cared about keeping warm. You think we care about it and the cost of warming our houses. But if you had to chop every log that warmed your sitting room, you'd pretty much be focused on it too. But we often forget about the things that they did, which we ought to do too, to keep warm, which is, for example, really thick curtains with lining, which means that when you draw them really exclude all the heat, not something very sort of flimsy. A lot of old buildings have shutters, which are also very, very good. So you use those in conjunction with the windows. So these things are really, really worth doing in your house. And I think as far as making sure that old windows are doing their job and keeping you warm, because I think there's a real, real risk at the moment with the completely correct focus on insulation in buildings that all are beautiful old sash windows with their wonderful handmade glass get put in skips and UPVC windows get put in.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pretty practical. If you see if that's really the thickness of the thatch is absolutely enormous. So it has very good thermal properties. It's very good for biodiversity. Lots of beetles live in them. But they're not cheap. And you need a wonderful thatcher to replace the thatch on a cycle every sort of generation or so. So they keep you very warm and they're very sustainable, they're very low carbon, but they're not cheap.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do have a dishwasher. We didn't for a long time because my husband, who's bits of puritanicals, said that he thought we shouldn't. But I said, let's put the bloom. And he's pretty grateful now.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So we love an electric blanket because you don't need to heat your bedroom because you don't need your bedroom to be warm. But it doesn't mean when you get into bed, you're not freezing. So keeping warm in the winter is a bit of a challenge. But mostly it's the most wonderful, delightful thing you could possibly imagine and a massive, massive privilege to live in a very old and beautiful building.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We wear a lot of socks and jumpers. And we also have a thing in this country. I don't know if people go in for them in the States, which is called an electric blanket. Have you come across an electric blanket? Sure”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Well, probably part of the reason is that houses in this country are on the whole very old houses. I mean, the vast majority of our building stock in this country was built before the Second World War in a time when the amount of garages and skis and snowboards and things that everybody needed to keep was considerably less and were built for people who were used to living less expansive lives, less wealth seen. So it's probably a facet of that really as much as anything else. But yeah. It would make me look when I next go to the States, look in some cupboards, see what the storage levels are.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, you could do that. I mean, you could do that, but I'm not sure where it gets you, really. I mean, but then you start saying, well, what about all the other things? Do you go for a kind of massive repatriation? You'd empty a lot of museums. And I'm not sure you'd solve a lot of problems, really. I think, you know, it's been there for a long time. And I don't think there's an easy solution. I don't think there's a kind of act that you could take in relation to that stone which would just involve kind of Britain saying, well, it's fine, we don't need to have it anymore, that would do anything other than cause infinitely more conflict and agro because it would open up the whole question of all these other moments of conflict when the stone was taken. And I just don't see that gets you very far. I think it's bad as just, you know, it's not being used in the coronation, which I think is very wise. And it's an object which can be seen and viewed and discussed by all of us, but I wouldn't start passing it around the world myself.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a very interesting point. The trouble is that the Koinor diamond has been a stone that was taken in conquest through a whole series of conquests. So as you say, it came to Britain following the Anglo-Sikh Wars in the middle of the 19th century was given a kind of legal status, but it clearly was a spoil of war. But of course, it had only been in Lahore, which is where it was taken from for, I can't remember how long now, but decades and had been taken before then by Ranjit Singh, who's the Maharaja from somebody that he had conquered who had previously taken it. So it had been through Persia, been to the Mughals, been through Pakistan. So, I mean, where do you choose your moment? I mean, it could be given to Lahore, to back to Pakistan, but then the Indians would say, well, hang on a second, you should have given it back to us because Babur, the Indian Mughal Emperor, had it to the coin.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they produce new ones because the old ones have been melted down. So it was a bit more of a necessity than a desire for novelty. There wasn't any desire for novelty. They could have had the old ones. They would have had them. And when the new ones were made in the 1660s, which is the collection that we now have, the instruction worthy should be exact replicas of the things that were destroyed. That said, there has always, alongside this idea that you should be using something very ancient that speaks of the ancientness of your lineage and so on, new pieces have in the past often been made to accompany the older sort of ancestral pieces, quite often for queens, for queens consort. I don't think that's where that's not the appetite of the age. I think it would be very hard to imagine anyone feeling that it was a good use of money to spend a lot of money buying diamonds and making a new crown at the moment, not least because there's quite a lot in the collection.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's a kind of through time, ages have different kind of stylistic tastes, if you like. So we might think of the 1920s and 30s and kind of Art Deco architecture. And if you look at jewelry and jewelry design, you see that similarly in the kind of favor of the kind of square cut stains and very erectilinear things. Similarly, if you look at the late 17th century with Baroque buildings, then you look at the design, for example, of the Ocran jewels, which were made most of them in the late 17th century. You see common motifs in terms of decoration, in terms of sort of floral devices, in terms of the massing of objects and the kind of relationship between different elements. Yeah, I mean, there's a kind of whether it's an age of ornament or an age of minimalism, you see that across different artistic forms and jury and architecture like clothes and other things are all part of that.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't know. I'm not enough kind of why I'd into the way the system works, but I think there needs to be a clear kind of national policy of exploring that. And then there needs to be the will and the resources for local government to demonstrate that they have exhausted those possibilities before permission is given for new builds in many cases.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are full of life, and how do we use what we've got requires a bit more imagination, but I think that the opportunity there is absolutely enormous. And I long to see somebody really grasp that.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely agree that we need a lot more places for people to live. But my contention would be we have an incredible stock of buildings which are unoccupied. You go into any British market town and you will see half the shops are empty. And if you look above the shops, these are generally speaking 19th and early 20th century buildings. The buildings are completely empty. These could all provide wonderful places for people to live. I live in a town centre and a market town myself with a bit of will to say let's use the things we have, let's adapt them. apart from the interest and the beauty in my view these buildings are all embedded carbon they've all the environmental cost of building them has already been incurred and then they bring people to live in towns near where you know other communities are so it's not that i don't think there's a role for building new houses but i think it's an easy choice that suits a developer very well thank you very much to you know get a field and build some houses on it and sell it off the task of saying how do we make sure our geography and our and our wonderful towns and villages”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, except they're from a pool, all of whom are hereditary. So when the House of Lords reform happened in 1997 or thereabouts, so the kind of compromise instead of all the hereditary peers being able to sit in the House of Lords, they said there'll only be 100 and they can nominate among themselves who they are. But it seems to me absurd that there should be 100. I mean, they're all men apart from anything else. I mean, it's not that they aren't great people. A lot of them are. They're wonderful people, but it just is, to me, it's an utterly absurd basis on which to involve somebody in the process of legislation. And when it comes to your point about heritage, I mean, I think it's good to have a second chamber. I think there's a debate to be had about what the basis of that is in terms of how you would come to have a seat in it. But I believe that a concern for our environment and the buildings and places in which we live and were built by our ancestors is a really universal one and it doesn't require you to have a kind of particular sort of social slice of society in the House of Lords to ensure it's protected.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm all for abolishing the House of Lords myself personally. I mean, I think it's totally past its sell-by date as an institution. And the fact that we still have nearly 100 members of the House of Lords who are hereditary peers, who are by definition all men, I find.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could imagine for people who would be working for him. And there's something about the kind of aspiration of beauty and a sense of responsibility for creating it that it feels like has really diminished in the world of the kind of either the state does it and they're trying to do it as cheaply as possible or developers do it and they have another reason for trying to do it as cheaply as possible. So I agree. I think it's something to really regret and I think it's something we have to decide we care about or we're not going to make it any better.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, such a good question. I was talking about this with somebody only the other day. I mean, I think there are clearly places where you do see it and you do see it work, but they're pretty few and far between. And I think there's a lot of work going on with young architects in the field in really trying to crack this business about neighborhoods and housing, not least because in this country there's a real housing crisis because we're a small country with a lot of people and challenges of building a very great. But it is really stark. I mean, I don't know the answer to it. I think there are observations I would make. One, I would say is that the idea of the philanthropic neighborhood development scheme has really gone, but there was a lot of that that happened in the late 19th, early 20th century to do with landowners and also company directors and so on doing things that were going to be beautiful. I mean, there's a wonderful place up near Liverpool called Port Sunlight, which was all laid out by a great industrialist. Absolutely most beautiful place.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Differently because this pattern of life, this pattern of existence, this way we've operated as a society has been so destructive. So I have, although I think that lots of things were done when it comes to urban planning and so on, that we really regret now, I think you have to be really careful not to diminish the seriousness of intent of those people who were trying to conceive of what that world might be more egalitarian, more democratic, involving more space, more air, more light, healthier.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think this is such a good question because this is to me what the study of history is all about, which is you have to think about what it was like for that generation. You have to think of what it was like for people in the 1950s and 60s who had experienced either firsthand or very close at hand, not just one, but two catastrophic world wars in which numbers had been killed, places had been destroyed, the whole human cost of that time was so colossal. And the idea for that generation that something really fundamental had to change if we were going to be a society that wasn't going to be killing one another for all time. And this has a real kind of sort of mirror in the 17th century during the Civil War in the 17th century. There was a real feeling that something had to be done, otherwise God was going to strike down this nation, this errant nation. And I think for that generation in the 50s and 60s, the sense that we simply have to do things together.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or our children, or our grandchildren, are going to curse us for having not valued or not thought about, not considered, which is why in this country we had this thing called the listing system where there's a kind of a process of identifying buildings which are important and what's called listing them, putting them on a list, which means that if you own them, you can't change them without getting permission, which is a way of ensuring that things which you as an owner or as an owner might not treat with scorn, that the kind of the interest of generations to come are represented in that.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you don't miss something that's not there. I think it would be pretty hard to convince me that any Christopher Wren Church wasn't worth hanging on to. But your point is right, which is to say that not everything that was ever built is worth retaining. And there are things which are clearly of much less interest, were poorly built, which are, you know, not serving a purpose anymore in a way that they need to. So to me, it's all about assessing what matters, what we care about. But I think it's incredibly important to remember how you have to try and take the long view because if you let things go, you cannot later retrieve them. And we look at the decisions that were made in the past about things that we really care about that were demolished. Wonderful country houses we've mentioned. It's fantastic, for example, Euston Station, one of the great stations of the world built in the middle of the 19th century, demolished in the 60s, regretted it forever since. So I think one of the things you have to be really careful about is to make a distinction between fashion of the moment and things which we are going to”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lynn, the local Fisher Folk Museum, which documents the lives of the fishing people of that town through generations, their livelihoods, their communities, their way of life, that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the Lottery Heritage Fund. And so that seems to me to be a wonderful thing and something we should be really proud of.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That does happen in this country, as you probably know. Well, it's a good question. I mean, so the heritage lottery fund, actually I think it's now called the National Lottery Heritage Fund, receives a significant sum of money each year from the National Lottery, which was set up in the 90s to fund various things, including a lot of sport, accusing a lot of community work. So it's very broadly based, and I would say that, I mean, I think you're right to say that you have to be very alive to the demographics of those people who are buying lottery tickets. I buy them myself, so it's a broad community. And the way that money is allocated by the lottery fund is acutely conscious of that. And each project that you do, and I've done a number of them where you receive money through the lottery fund, you have to demonstrate how you are making a difference to the lives of the people who are buying the tickets. But so much of the work that is done through that program is amazing grassroots work, say, for example, in the 10 I live in Kings.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, not necessarily. I mean, a lot of people who have big historic houses, I mean, a lot of them have them in charitable trusts and do things which mean there is public benefit more generally from them and the various sorts of, I mean, it depends what sort of wealth tax them and how it's calculated, what basis of it is. But I think there are lots of ways you could formulate something that didn't penalize those who were clearly taking a very kind of responsible attitude to historic buildings. I also think that sometimes too much money is an absolute killer of historic buildings. You see the absolute ruination of wonderful buildings in, for example, the wealthier parts of London where every cornice has been stripped out, the plast has been hacked off to be redone every 10 years by the next owner and all character and patterner has been lost for them. So I think there's something to be said for poverty as a preserver as well as wealth.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A kind of club sort of a trade association for people who are private owners of big historic houses and open them to the public or do public events in them. And they have an annual conference. And if you go to it, you really wouldn't think English or British country houses in trouble. I mean, there's thousands of people there and their buildings up and down the country where they're busy putting in farm shops and glamping, which is a very big thing in the UK and amazing kind of eco-projects and so on. So the taxation system and the kind of essentially the rise of the state as an institution that needed resources to be able to fund things like universal health care, which is obviously a wonderful thing, required the kind of growth of taxation and that definitely, particularly in the mid-20th century, took a big toll on landowners and big houses.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yeah, it's true. And, you know, a lot of them were sold off, the interior stripped out. A lot of the interior sold to the states, actually. The very interesting phase in the history of British country houses really in the first 20, 30 years of the 20th century, where has that I live in this happened to, whole rooms, beautiful panelling from the Tudor period, prized off the walls, put in packing cases, and dealers would sell them to the kind of Randolph Hearsts of the world who were recreating an idea of old Europe in new buildings. So there were different, there were a series of factors at play. I think it was to do, but also to do with the First World War. I mean, the extent of the death child taken by the First World War, the impact that had on these great estates in terms of the workforce, not just of the owners of the houses, but also the people who were working on the estates was enormous. So it did make for a big shift. But, I mean, there's something called the Historic Houses Association in the UK, which is...”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was definitely a big factor at the rise of inheritance tax and various other land taxes. I mean, it didn't bring an end to them. You don't need to go very far in this country to see that, you know, that many more.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it is a sort of self selecting group of people. And I think the nature of our buildings, I think you're right, which is that on the whole people go to them because they're really interested in that kind of thing. And so it would be a counterintuitive thing then to trash it. We occasionally have people who make a bit of a mess, but it's pretty rare. And I think people respond to somewhere that feels really special and that you know is run by a charity and looked after with great care. And there's a nice member of staff who gives you the key or gets in contact with you. So I don't know. I think people's good nature and recognition, I suppose, of the specialness of what they're experiencing is pretty good kind of force for keeping the behaving themselves.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We love them all. We love them all and we don't grade them. If you did something really awful, like, you know, made a pile of adventure and set fire to it, we might not rent you another building, but we don't grade them. We are open to everybody. And we, as I say, we're a charity, so we don't price ourselves in a way that makes us available only to the super rich. All sorts of people come and stay in our buildings. And anyone can do it. You just go on our website, landmarktrust.org.uk, and you can choose from any number of wonderful follies and mini-castles. We just finished restoring an amazing castle near Inverness for people who go to Scotland, maybe following their own roots. Beautiful building built in 1550, which had no roof and no floors until two years ago. And we raised the money through people giving money philanthropically and also through grants and so on to re-roof it, re-law it, heat and power in and now you can have your own castle for the weekend.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We plough it back in. If you were staying in London this week and you weren't staying in the smart hotel, you could be staying in a silk worker's house in the East End built in 1707 or John Beckerman's own apartment, which is in Clark and Well, both of which we own. And it would be staying in a wonderful historic building, sleeping comfortable beds and everything. as well as your money being a way of paying for your stay it also helps us to run our charity and then to go on into acquire more buildings that would otherwise be lost and we have this amazing stock of buildings in this country”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we're a charity, historic buildings charity. Our job is to rescue historic buildings that are in a derelict or in a bad way, to raise the money to restore them. And then we rent them out for people to stay in. So we have 200 buildings across the whole British Isles, castles and dairies and lighthouses and all manner of things, fought, artillery fought. And we ourselves financing. So the money that runs the charity comes from letting the building. So if you were to, if you were to this...”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Separation, and there's something about a political nature of the monarchy and how incredibly careful they have to be about that, that in a wor where everything seems to endlessly be in turmoil in terms of electoral politics and so on, to have a certain kind of sense of reassurance about it. I also think that it changes. I mean, I think if you'd been talking about the success of the monarchy 30 years ago, it might have been a different conversation. I think there have been moments where the monarchies felt very successful, others where it's felt more fragile. And then I suppose you have to layer into that the facts and quite practical things like the monarchy in this country is in an Anglophone country. So the language that is spoken and the kind of traditions, Anglo-Saxon traditions, if you like, have a certain kind of familiarity around the world, which makes a connection. Obviously also, I mean, long past now, but the kind of, the sort of skeleton, if you like, of a monarchy which was once an empire that stretched around the world still has kind of connections and associations that makes”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it's interesting, isn't it? I guess it's probably a cocktail of things. I think that I suppose the kind of balance that's been struck between a non-executive head of state in the form of the monarch and the executive in the form of the government, the prime minister and so on, but without dialing down much of the bling and the splendor and the ceremony of the monarchy, even though the power has gone, has turned out to be a very successful formulation. So it's interesting because I don't know that it would necessarily have been obvious that that would have worked. There might have been a feeling that it would be absurd to continue to have all these palaces and crowns and state coaches and all this kind of stuff when you're looking at something which is fundamentally part of the kind of ritual of state, but it isn't actually exercising any kind of executive authority. But it happens to have kind of come to pass that actually that seems to be quite a sort of satisfying.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, of course, there are also all those other symbols of status, so there are several scepters as an orb. There are spurs, there's rings, there's a whole wardrobe of regalia, as it's known. But essentially, it's about the echoing with an amazing sense of continuity of what was done by your ancestors back to the kind of origins of your institution. So it's very interesting that if you look at images of monarchs within Britain going right back into the early middle ages, they all are wearing a ceremonial thing on their head. And then even if you look outside, you know, you look outside the British tradition, you see it in other nations, you see it in other traditions which are complete, which had no connection and no kind of interaction, for example, in traditional African societies where you see headdresses and the wearing of ceremonial thing, which denotes a person as being other than those around them more important, more special, elevated.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Her husband is King of Spain, so he's not really around very much. And then, of course, famously Elizabeth I is a singleton sovereign, unmarried and with no children. So I think a lot of it is about practicality. But there's also, you know, you can add into the mix the extent to which you see, and there are obviously people who did on top of those more practical issues, building as a way of expressing your status. And so if we think of somebody like Louis XIV in France, it's clear that over and above any of those practical requirements or questions of means, the magnificence of the monarch and therefore of the institution of monarchy and so on was something that he realized and expressed in buildings on a massive scale.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's usually a pretty practical reason. Well, two, one is to do with money and one is to do with scale of your court. So Henry VIII, famously, by the time of his death, had something like 60 palaces. But that was partly funded, of course, by the dissolution of the monasteries, which involved the government raking and state raking in huge amounts of money, which meant you could build and acquire on a huge scale. And secondly, he had a big family and a big court. So you needed to have palaces for the queens because there were separate palaces for queens, for the prince of Wales, and for your other offspring and so on. So Henry VIII built palaces on a great scale. He then passed the palaces on to his successors, who to begin with and inherited a huge patrimony so they didn't, you know, the kind of requirement or the need for more buildings had been sated. But also, of course, you go onto a series of singleton sovereigns. So the sixth has obviously basically a boy. He never gets beyond his teens. Mary Tudor is an adult woman, but she's married but has no children.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At this great forward looking nation that could be kind of model for modernity, could potentially have been very productive.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be a good governor, what he absolutely was somebody who saw past because it didn't interest him prejudice and sort of traditional English dislike of the Irish because he was interested in things empirical and he'd also been trained by Catholics and so he didn't share most English people's horror of Catholics and so I think he was well placed to advise on the business of running Ireland. He wouldn't have been good at doing it himself. And had Henry Cromwell to whom he gave this advice and who had been given the job by his father, Oliver Cromwell of Governing Ireland, had he been given more time to do that, I think it could have well have been very successful, but it was very short-lived because when Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, Henry Cromwell lost his position effectively. And so the period of time when William Petty and Henry Cromwell were together working on the business of the reconstruction of Ireland was very short. But I think the evidence is their aspirations for founder university.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so William Petty is a scientist and an economist, as we would term it now. And he went to Ireland as a doctor. And because he had this very brilliant brain and analytical scientific mind, he kind of diagnosed what he saw as the, not so much the problems, but as the kind of the nature of Ireland, how many people lived there, how many had been dispossessed by the wars and conflict of recent times. he undertook remarkable business of mapping Ireland as part of the redistribution of land, you know, which was an extraordinary and horrific undertaking in many ways. But he wasn't a person who had any experience of governing a place. He was hopeless with people. He was rude and abrasive and direct and would tell them that they were ignorant and third, in which he may well have been right, but as we know in society, governing a place doesn't necessarily work well if you tell them. So I don't think he was temperamentally in any position.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Modern terms was to read the works of classical antiquity and to understand what Aristotle or whoever it was had said about the nature of the world. So it was a new dawn and Boyle learned from petty an approach, I suppose, to inquiring and looking for yourself to understand from how things behaved when you, you know, cut them or inflated them or expose them to light, what the properties of the world were.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is the real quick fire questions. What did Robert Boyle learn from Petty? Okay, so Robert Boyle obviously was as a young Irish nobleman, was a student of the So, I think Robert Boyle, yeah, Robert Boyle learnt from William Petty a lot about what was being embarked upon by this group of young men in Oxford in the middle of the 1650s, which was utterly revolutionary, really, which was the beginning of what we would regard as proper scientific process and scientific inquiry through experimentation. They were a group who would form the Royal Society when it was reformulated in the early 1660s. And at William Petty's rooms on the High Street in Oxford rooms that still exist, this group of men gathered. Christopher Wren was among them and they carried out experiments. And so Boyle learned from William Petty all sorts of things about the circulation of the blood, about vacuums, about the different characteristics of the human organs, all sorts of things, because they had these amazing broad areas of inquiry. And of course, this is an age where until now, really, the job of anyone who we were considered to be a scientist in.”
2023-04-19 · Conversations with Tyler · Anna Keay on Historic Architecture, Monarchy, and 17th Century Britain · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source