From October 2007 to November 2018 inclusive the Society’s current (2023) Co-Chairman, historian David Winpenny, composed these Heritage articles for publication in the Ripon Gazette, part of the Johnson Press local newspaper Group.

  • THE ARCHITECTURE OF ANXIETY

    March 22, 2018 In 1947 W H Auden published a long poem called ‘The Age of Anxiety’; it inspired Leonard Bernstein to write a symphony with the same title. For Auden, the post-war world was his ‘Age of Anxiety’ – but architecture shows that past ages were equally beset with worries and fears. What we might call the ‘Architecture ...Read more...
  • THE PORCH – MAKING AN ENTRANCE

    March 15, 2018 This week, let’s make an entrance – and think about porches. Not, perhaps, something you often consider; you pass through – perhaps having paused to shake your umbrella or clomp the snow from your boots, before entering the main body of wherever it is you’re visiting. But porches can be important in their own right – ...Read more...
  • A GEORGIAN GENTLEMAN’S ARCHITECTURAL BOOKS

    March 8, 2018 One of the pleasures of visiting a country house is to look at the shelves in the library and see what past generations have read. Did they go in for racy novels or for sporting manuals? Was their taste for local history or for the classics? Did they really read any of them, or were they ...Read more...
  • HOW BUILDINGS MAKE US LIVE

    March 1, 2018 Ichabod. Not a word you meet every day, but one that has its uses. Ichabod was the son of a priest at the shrine of Shiloh, noted in the 1st Book of Samuel. He was born prematurely after his mother went into shock on hearing that the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest that contained ...Read more...
  • ICHABOD – DEPARTED GLORY

    February 28, 2018 Ichabod. Not a word you meet every day, but one that has its uses. Ichabod was the son of a priest at the shrine of Shiloh, noted in the 1st Book of Samuel. He was born prematurely after his mother went into shock on hearing that the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred chest that contained ...Read more...
  • ARCHITECTS – GENTLEMEN v PLAYERS: 2: GENTLEMEN

    February 15, 2018 ‘Players’ – the professional architects who did their work for payment – so this week we’ll consider the ‘Gentlemen’ – the amateurs who did their architectural design for the love of it. The distinction between the two, as was pointed out last week, is not a hard-and-fast one; some of the ‘Gentlemen’ were paid for their ...Read more...
  • ARCHITECTS – GENTLEMEN V THE PLAYERS: 1: THE PLAYERS

    February 8, 2018 There used to be a fashion for cricket matches to be arranged between ‘Gentlemen and Players’ – the implication being that the gentlemen did it for love, the players for money. This didn’t stop them all enjoying the game; the third Duke of Dorset, though Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and later British Ambassador to France, seems ...Read more...
  • CASTLES IN THE AIR – AND ON THE PAGE

    February 1, 2018 For many people, one of the pleasures of travel is to visit some of the castles that open their doors to visitors. Since the Middle Ages, castle-visiting has been done first by the upper classes and then, since at least the 18th century, by the middle classes. From the latter part of the 19th century, ...Read more...
  • PLAYING TO THE GALLERY

    January 25, 2018 The phrase ‘Playing to the gallery’ suggests some type of over-the-top acting by a not particularly talented actor – the sort of performance that might once have been on display at Ripon’s long-gone Theatre Royal.In the days of Charles II, theatres were not always the highest-class places, and some of the people who worked there ...Read more...
  • FREDRICK JOHN ROBINSON, PRIME MINISTER AND 1ST EARL OF RIPON

    January 18, 2018 The 1st Marquess of Ripon has often been mentioned in this column, both as national statesman, Viceroy of India and as Mayor of Ripon (you will recall that he gave the city the Town Hall during his mayoralty) – but we have never considered his father, an equally interesting, if ultimately less-successful, man. He was Frederick ...Read more...

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