Alongside my professional career I have also been an architectural historian of the country house. This is a passion nurtured at Oxford, where I was President of the University Architectural Society in 1977. Between 1989 and 2001 my three volume study of The country houses of Gloucestershire was published, and my distinctive contribution has been to put together the evidence for the history of country houses and landed estates that can be gleaned from family archives and genealogy with the evidence from the buildings themselves, to tell a richer narrative than any of these sources alone can provide. I am now embarked on this ambitious web project (nominated in 2019 for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain's Colvin Prize), which aims to tell the story of every landed family in the British Isles and their country houses. If I continue working hard until I am a centenarian I might just finish the job! The Landed Families of Britain and Ireland is a strictly not-for-profit undertaking and there are no advertisements on the site either. From time to time people do offer me small donations 'to speed the plough' and I am always happy to accept these, not for myself but for the Gloucestershire County History Trust CIO, which funds the research and writing of the Victoria County History for Gloucestershire, and of which I have been Chairman since 2022. Anyone who would like to make such a donation should contact me through the contact form in the right-hand side-bar.
I have been married for 45 years to my precious and special wife Mary, who mercifully tolerates my obsessions and collections, and even my cooking. Mary had a minor stroke in December 2024, and although she has made a fairly good recovery, I have some additional caring responsibilities, which make some impact on the progress I can make with research and writing for the Landed Families project.
