Clive Aslet

London

Journalist, writer, novelist. Former editor of Country Life. Author of The Birdcage, WW1 story set in Salonika, coming in paperback shortly. Parent

Articles

Without second homes, many Cornish villages would be dead

2 weeks ago | telegraph.co.uk | Clive Aslet
Sir Edwin Lutyens and the architecture of the biggest bank in the world

2 weeks ago | countrylife.co.uk | Clive Aslet

This is the second of two articles on Edwin Luytens and Reginald McKenna — the first part is here. By the time Reginald McKenna died in 1943, many people had forgotten that he had been First Lord of the Admiralty, Home Secretary and, for a year during the First World War, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Instead, he was known as the man who, for nearly quarter of a century, had been at the helm of the Midland Bank.
'There are architects and architects, but only one ARCHITECT': Sir Edwin Lutyens and the wartime Chancellor who helped launch his stellar career

3 weeks ago | countrylife.co.uk | Clive Aslet

Of all the front-line British politicians during the First World War, Reginald McKenna is hardly the best known. Yet the year that he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1915–16, gave him an awesome responsibility, as conflict on a rapidly increasing scale could not have been pursued without money. If he is remembered at all, it is likely to be for his contribution to architecture.
Meet RenĂ© Olivieri, the American National Trust chair navigating an iconic British institution through transformative times

Jan 16, 2025 | spearswms.com | Clive Aslet

I have a new hero: René Olivieri, chair of the National Trust. He begins the interview by asking me about a book I once wrote. Fair enough, as we're in the former stables of Osterley Park, on the Heathrow side of London, where the main house is being readied to contain the late Sir Brinsley Ford's collection of Baroque paintings. But the idea that this busy man would remember my modest volume - hardly a bestseller - makes its way (as possibly calculated) straight to my heart.
Urban dwellers are the latest victims of the net zero crusade

Nov 11, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Clive Aslet

The Lillington and Longmoore Gardens estate is charging private residents for energy upgrades Fifty years ago, our Pimlico street was, in architectural terms, a happening place. This was not because of the stucco-fronted terraces built, like the rest of Pimlico, in about 1850 by the great 19th-century developer Thomas Cubitt, but a pioneering alternative to the hated high-rise blocks of flats that local authorities had been inflicting on London since the Second World War. In 1961, Westminster...
Samuel Lysons: The man who revealed the Roman Cotswolds

Sep 28, 2024 | countrylife.co.uk | Clive Aslet

The antiquarian Samuel Lysons played an important role in recording the Roman villas of the Cotswolds. Clive Aslet looks at his remarkable career and methods. For an archaeologist such as Samuel Lysons (1763–1819), the Cotswolds was a good place to be born.
Entitled cyclists are about to get even more insufferable

Sep 11, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Clive Aslet

Credit: Heathcliff O'Malley Solihull Council is testing a new kind of “intelligent” traffic light. Top marks to those who can guess what’s so clever about them: they can be programmed to prioritise cyclists over other kinds of road user.
Sir Edwin Lutyens: Campion Hall's maestro and Britain's greatest architect?

Aug 23, 2024 | catholicherald.co.uk | Clive Aslet

Towards the end of his life, Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens received his last major commission: Campion Hall in Oxford. Whether by luck or intention, it gave him the opportunity to reprise several of the important themes of his career, bringing a blend of the Surrey Arts and Crafts of his early period – a trifle more spartan, perhaps, but then he had never been much of a one for comfort – and the geometrical language that he had developed for his war memorials and Liverpool Cathedral.
New towns, old problems

Aug 19, 2024 | engelsbergideas.com | Clive Aslet

It’s bad luck for the residents of Tempsford, all 600 of them. Their village in Bedfordhire, in the south-east of England is being eyed as the strategically optimum place to create a new town. New towns were a phenomenon of the postwar years, when successive governments believed that the state should finance the homes needed after the Blitz.
The Romans make English vandals look well-behaved

Aug 9, 2024 | telegraph.co.uk | Clive Aslet

Credit: Shutterstock My first reaction on seeing a person’s initials odiously carved into one of the ancient stones of Pompeii was to bemoan what a fallen world we live in. Is nothing truly sacred in our day and age? My second was: inevitably it had to be a Brit.