A Home for All Seasons

Product Information

We get a little of the history of Stepps House in Pembridge but then are too many "filler" sections, presumably to pad out the word count. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual. With ancient beams crossing the ceiling, the date they'd been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. Afew years ago, Gavin Plumley and his husband, Alastair, bought a house in the Herefordshire village of Pembridge.

A hybrid work of domestic history and European art, of memoir and landscape, A Home for All Seasons is both grand in its sweep and intimate in its account of life on the edge of England. With ancient beams crossing the ceiling, the date they’d been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he saw the picture of a past emerge that resonates powerfully with our present. His writing style is also top tier: the book is written in a way that is at once conversational, poetic and intellectual. The result of his labours is a fascinating comparison of the 16th and 21st centuries, not the least of which is the plague and its more modern equivalent.Mixing history and art, memoir and landscape, A Home for All Seasons is grand in its sweep and intimate in its account of rural life.

There were moments which felt “socially preachy” and I find that annoying, especially when I already feel that the book was misrepresented to me. I assumed (like other reviewers) that this would concentrate on the house and surrounding areas of Herefordshire where author Gavin Plumley lives. His efforts involved bringing in experts to assess the tree rings in the beams as they can accurately date a building.It had some interesting details but I didn't enjoy Gavin reading it as there was no shading in his narration. Finding the date of construction takes Gavin down many rabbit holes through the seasons, and cycle of the year as well as the historical context of the home from the 1500s and beyond. From a simple question about the age of a house, this book takes you on a much wider journey, encompassing art, literature, history and nature, as well as the inescapable fragility of life.

If I’m honest, the art history was less interesting to me than the social history aspect of the book, but it has inspired me to take more interest in historical detail and the bibliography included will be invaluable for this. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. The book is supposed to be about the history of a house in Pembridge, Herefordshire, (near where I live), that the author bought with his husband, according to the blurb and insinuated by the title and dust wrapper illustration, but the information assembled is so meagre that, I’m afraid, I felt that I had been conned. It’s rare that non-fiction has the power to transport you so completely and catch you up in a world that you have never known, and that you never want to leave.Keen to fit in, yet sensitive to homophobia, Plumley and his husband soon came up against the harsh realities of life in a rural community. What starts out as a straightforward house history morphs into something else, a wide-ranging meditation on place and past, taking in climate change, rural depopulation, the Reformation and folklore. I don’t know if the filling stations are still disturbing the village, but if they are, there are plenty of compensations: a 14th-century church with, so the story goes, the marks of Cromwellian musket balls still showing in its west door; a spectacular pagoda-like bell house dating back to the 1200s; an early 16th-century market hall; 17th-century almshouses; and streets stacked to the gills with picturesquely wonky black-and-white houses. This being said, lovely read but a bit of a long winded one, It could have been two books - The history of the house and the live of the author in my opinion. I really hate giving up on books I start reading, especially expensive hardback books like this one, but after persevering for days, I started skimming for information on the purported subject without luck and decided I’d wasted enough of my life on it.