Something is very wrong in the way the UK is being marketed. Of the top 20 paid visitor attractions, only four are outside London, and when you discover that they are Lake Windermere cruises, North Yorkshire’s Flamingo Land and Chester Zoo, with Chatsworth as the sole, if glorious, representative of art and architecture, you realise that the world is not seeing the best of Britain.
It seems that our visitors from abroad do not even know that the British countryside is ravishing. The 2014 Anholt GfK Roper Nation Brands Industry survey puts the UK in 20th position as regards its natural beauty. Foreigners are unaware of the Yorkshire Dales, the Scottish moors, the gentle hills and golden stone villages of the Cotswolds, the wildness of Cumbria, even the well-kept farmlands of Surrey—above all, the beautifully tended and protected nature of our landscape. And as for the provincial towns, apart from York, Bath, Oxford and Cambridge, they have almost no tourism profile at all.
Beyond London
This is serious because nearly one in ten jobs in the UK is supported directly or indirectly by tourism, worth £21bn a year in inbound tourism, but London gets the lion’s share—52% of expenditure by foreign tourists, compared with, for example, Yorkshire’s 3%.
Now, at last, the money-granting marketing quangos are beginning to look beyond the capital to try to remedy this, and Arts Council England (ACE) has joined forces with Visit England, as the tourist board is now called, to reward deserving regional projects.
To make the provinces seem more vibrant, they have been given snappy new names, so the East Midlands is called the D2N2 (Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire) Growth Hub, and, despite this silliness, the new organisation, led by the local enterprise partnership (LEP), has managed to achieve an almost unprecedented collaboration for this and next year between two of the greatest historic houses, Chatsworth and Welbeck, both private, and Nottingham Contemporary and Derby Museums respectively.
The theme is the Grand Tour, the long journey that British aristocrats used to make around the continent, but especially to Italy, in the 18th century, bringing back art, architectural language and cuisine to their country houses. The difference is that this Grand Tour will be of the houses themselves by contemporary artists, who will produce their own works of art inspired by them, while the houses will make top masterpieces of historic art available to their partnering institutions. The artists are Pablo Bronstein, Peter Blake, Simon Starling and Rose English, with Rem Koolhaas, the architect.
Great lenders
The Duke of Devonshire, owner of Chatsworth, and Alex Farquharson, the director of Nottingham Contemporary, talked to The Art Newspaper about this year’s project, which involves Bronstein, sel ected by Farquharson, making his Baroque-inspired work for Chatsworth and selecting 60 to 70 masterpieces, among which are a Salvator Rosa, a Frans Hals, a Rembrandt drawing, Boulle furniture, silver, Delft tulip vases and more to go on display at Nottingham Contemporary in a manner orchestrated by himself, against digital Baroque wallpaper of his own design (4 July-20 September, both venues).
“We are great lenders,” says the duke. “At any given time we have about a dozen works out and about, but this is the first time we are sending so much to a British institution. The loan is the message.”
In fact, with 300,000 visitors a year to the house and another 350,000 to the park, compared with Nottingham Contemporary’s 180,000, the duke does not need to take part in this project to boost his numbers, but the Devonshires have a long tradition behind them of public service and believe that this will be good for the wider community. “The national museums may think they are having a hard time, but it is nothing compared to the provincial museums,” says the duke. “Raising money for them is almost impossible because there isn’t the civic pride; Sheffield has real difficulty finding even £5,000 from private sources. But there are very talented younger directors in the museums around here and the cuts have energised them.”
The duke and his son are also keen followers of contemporary art and feel that a great house must not be allowed to atrophy, so they are intrigued to see what Bronstein will come up with.
Another exhibition of Season One is Rem Koolhaas’s show, Elements of Architecture, from last year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice, re-presented at Welbeck to incorporate the underground corridors and ballroom built by the very strange Fifth Duke of Portland, who was so pathologically shy that he preferred not to surface during the daytime (4 July-20 September).
Great expectations
At Derby, in the meanwhile, the great collection of paintings by Joseph Wright of Derby, the 18th-century painter of the Industrial Revolution, will be shown in the museum’s new space, with the addition of two paintings by Wright that have not been on display before because they were in need of conservation. There will be organised walks in the sublime countryside, a dinner cooked with recipes brought back from Italy and even an exhibition of penal practices copied from foreign countries toured by 19th-century reformers.
Apart from contributions in kind like the duke’s, funding is £350,000 from ACE and £35,000 seed corn money from the LEP. The Grand Tour is an experiment and everyone is counting on the project attracting visitors who will have to spend the night to see both exhibitions. The performance indicator assessment will be judging success or failure by bed nights, ticket sales and visitor figures “using the Caledonia method”, said the duke’s curator. A lot of energy is going into the marketing through the internet and social media (@TheGrandTourUK).
If this is a success, it could be the beginning of a great linking up between regional museums in the towns and the country houses that are one of the glories of Britain. For there are still more historic houses, complete with their collections and landscaped parklands, than in any other country. Three hundred of those in private hands are open to the public, as well as 330 belonging to the National Trusts of England and of Scotland. Between them, they represent one of the greatest museums in the world, without the disadvantage of actual museums, which is that they are full of works of art that have lost their human context.
Country casuals
Strawberry Hill welcomes some curious guests
Strawberry Hill, in the south-west suburbs of London, was once the country villa of the great 18th-century wit and collector of historic relics (but he hated being called an antiquarian) Horace Walpole. It is the first house in the neo-Gothic style, and for this alone it would be worth a visit, even though it has lost all its famous contents. It has, however, been perfectly restored, with all the right fabrics, colours and gilding and now, until 20 November, it is a stage set for the curious sculptures and installations by the UK artist Laura Ford, which animate the rooms, sometimes in a slightly sinister “Don’t Look Now” way, and sometimes amusingly, as with poodles based on a famous painting of the three Waldegrave sisters that once hung in that room. The curator of the show is Stephen Feeke. A.S.C.
Moore and Vasconcelos at Waddesdon Manor
In Henry Moore: from Paper to Bronze (until 25 October), 100 drawings from the sculptor’s foundation are on display at Waddesdon Manor, the historic home of the Rothschild family in Buckinghamshire, in the south of England. The survey ranges from Moore’s early years as a student to his prolific but overlooked late period, and includes his wartime sketches of Londoners sheltering in underground stations during the Blitz. Waddesdon’s recent contemporary art acquisition, Lafite (2015), a pair of oversized candlestick sculptures fashioned from wine bottles by Joana Vasconcelos, is installed on the north front of the property. H.M.
Houghton Hall’s lightscape
For the Marquess of Cholmondeley, staging Lightscape: James Turrell (until 24 October) at Houghton Hall, his Norfolk estate in the east of England, fulfilled a “long-held dream”. The show focuses on works from the Houghton collection, including projections from the 1960s, holograms and a Tall Glass piece. Turrell has also created a site-specific illumination for the west façade that is only visible at dusk, while two major works have been installed in the grounds. H.M.
Charles Jencks’s Crawick Multiverse
Around 2,000 boulders make up the Crawick Multiverse, a new work of cosmology-inspired land art designed by Charles Jencks in the hills of Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland. The £1m project, which is funded by the Duke of Buccleuch, transforms 55 acres of a former open-cast coal mine on the duke’s Queensberry Estate. It is due to open to the public on 10 July. H.M.