Holiday in Hampstead – Days Two and Three – the House of Lords and a Victorian Paradise
Sue Garden is a Deputy Speaker in the House of Lords. The Woolsack is uncomfortable but she spoke enthusiastically about the place itself and its role. Holding the Government to account is vital – more so in these uncertain times. Preventing bad legislation through as many as 200 amendments to a single Bill, the Peers are a hardworking bunch – at least, the 450 out of 830 members who regularly attend. Sue emphasises their ordinariness: visiting a school in an old car, without an ermine robe, can disappoint teachers and pupils alike. Covid has cut the numbers of attendees to 30, the others following (and voting) via Zoom, while the dilapidated – not to say dangerous – state of the Palace of Westminster will soon mean that both chambers will be re-located. But the 12-hour sittings will no doubt still remain.
The 19thC philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts was the subject of Sheena Ginnings’ entertaining talk. ‘The richest heiress in England’, and a friend both of the Queen and Dickens, she inherited the Coutts banking legacy in 1837. This included a house in Piccadilly and the (then) country house of Holly Lodge in Highgate, with its 60-acre estate. Beside her many charitable works – for the poor, for children, for animals, in Britain and overseas – she developed the estate into a ‘Victorian paradise’ with a forest glade, a rose walk, tulip and monkey-puzzle trees and rhododendron groves. The estate was later broken up, but through her utopian Holly Village, her model farm and her famous and extensive kitchen garden she pointed the way to an alternative, ecological lifestyle.
