Prisunic, Tati, Virgin : la fin d’un monde français

What Life Was Like Inside a Regency Era Country House | Cultured Elegance

This Is How People Lived Inside a Georgian House in England in 1800 | AI Reconstruction

 

REMEMBERING : Dan Cruickshank's House ... Spitalfields ... More than Architectural History ... a Philosophy of Life

Being myself an architectural historian and very much concerned with restoration issues ... I recognize entirely the "obsessions" of Dan Cruickshank.
It is much more than a "specialisation" ... it is a Way of Life ... it is also the quest for your "secret garden" and the decision to reside or to live "there" ... all your life ... it is real and unreal at the same time ... placed 'somewhere' in the twighlight ...
The name of this Neverland is in my case ... "Tweedland"
Yours ... Jeeves



ALISTAIR DUNCAN
STYLING SIAN WILLIAMS
PHOTOGRAPHS MARK SCOTT
Featured in the January 2011 issue of Period Living


Historian Dan Cruickshank has employed a very sensitive approach to the renovation of his old home that respects and preserves its heritage.
Authenticity has been a constant watchword for Dan Cruickshank as he sets about restoring his Georgian townhouse. While Dan is well known as a TV presenter, the face of cerebral BBC documentaries such as Around the World in 80 Treasures and Adventures in Architecture, first and foremost he’s an academic: an architectural historian who is deeply passionate about the preservation of old houses that showcase the building styles of bygone eras. ‘Old Georgian houses like mine have a very strong, benign presence,’ says Dan. ‘Far too many have been changed too much – modern things have been inserted: heating, lighting, or a ghastly power shower. The atmosphere that is present in these buildings has been destroyed.’
Humble origins
Two local builders, Mr Bunce and Mr Brown, built Dan’s four-storey home in Spitalfields in 1727 for a wealthy silk merchant. Dan bought it more than 30 years ago, and has been painstaking in keeping it faithful to the original spirit of the house ever since. Swathed in 18th-century decorative detail and crammed with interesting – if occasionally rickety – antique furniture, the house is a gem of a time capsule.
‘I bought my house because I was intrigued by Georgian buildings,’ Dan explains. ‘The houses on this terrace weren’t built by great patrons of the arts as conscious works of art, just by humble builders trying to make some money; by chance, they have created buildings of great beauty.
‘However, the house had been empty for many decades when I found it in the late 1970s,’ he continues. ‘It had been completely abandoned, and was full of rotting furniture left by the previous owners.’
Sensitive restoration
In spite of the fact that the house had moved a fair bit on its foundations over the years, and the whole structure was visibly warped, a surveyor confirmed that the skeleton of the building was in good order. The only structural work Dan needed to organise was the rebuilding of the parapet and the relaying of some roof tiles. Inside, however, the ceilings had collapsed throughout – water had poured through the entire house for many years. After it had been allowed to dry out (the old pine floorboards, thankfully, turned out to be ‘just like hardwood – tough and durable; no rot to be found’), Dan took it upon himself to do as much of the work as he could himself, although his approach was always cautious. He went from room to room, renovating each one in as authentic a manner as possible. ‘I set about repairing it as gently as I could,’ he says. ‘I didn’t want to yank up all the floorboards just for the sake of checking; I trusted the house.’
Original pine panelling adorns most of the rooms in the house, along with dados, cornicing, doors and architraves. ‘I looked for the old, Georgian paints and kept them wherever possible – the paint was pretty good on the top floor,’ he says. ‘I just cleaned it with white spirit and linseed oil. But when I needed to repaint elsewhere, I’d look for remnants of original colours – behind shutters or in cupboards – then try to copy them.’ He discovered that the ground floor had been green, so bought some pigments and mixed his own eggshell paint – back then, finding an existing shade that matched was tricky, he says. ‘This was the 1980s; it’s a lot easier to buy heritage paints these days.’
Eventually, after agonising over the thought of modernising too much, he decided to have electricity installed. ‘I wanted the wiring to be non-destructive and reversible, rather than chased aggressively into the panelling,’ Dan explains. ‘The electrician I found managed to lodge it discreetly beneath the woodwork.’
Intriguing discoveries
As he opened up the boarded windows he found, to his great delight, original 18th-century Crown glass – an early type of hand-blown window glass with a distinctive blue-green hue and rippled effect. ‘I find it incredible to think that during the Christmas of 1940, when the family that were living here were huddled in the basement and the east end of London was engulfed in a sea of flames, even the glass survived,’ Dan says.
Averse as he was to tampering with the building, he decided upon one major change to the ground floor sitting room – and this was only to return to the original layout. ‘I realised that the room had been altered in the 19th century,’ he explains. ‘A partition had been moved. I put it back to where it was in the 1720s. Curiously, I found a roll of newspaper, crumpled up and put into the corner of the room to stop a draught. It was from 1848 – that dated the alteration.’
There were other discoveries along the way. Dan came upon old visiting cards, children’s playing cards from the first half of the 20th century, old bottles and then, while repairing one fireplace, he uncovered late 18th-century Delft tiles amid the rubble. ‘The English made their own imitations of Dutch Delft,’ says Dan. ‘These were made in either Bristol or Liverpool.’
A passion for history
In addition to the period detail of the house, which Dan has restored as accurately as he can, he has chosen to furnish his home almost exclusively with antiques. Indeed, it is an Aladdin’s Cave of eye-catching, often rather eccentric historical artefacts. Adorning the walls are prints of architectural wonders, porcelain vases and oil paintings; and every room boasts quirky pieces that Dan has acquired on his globetrotting travels. His furniture has been sourced from junk shops and second-hand markets. Oak writing desks and coffee tables bestride Persian rugs, and high-backed 17th-century chairs are dotted around many rooms.
Dan’s determination to maintain the beauty of the past applies to every aspect of his home, be it the building or its contents. ‘This house is full of mystery,’ he says. ‘It’s a living being, with its own identity and past enshrined within its own fabric. I don’t want it to change; I want it to be lived in gently, so it survives.’

Avant Les Hypermarchés : Comment Les Français Faisaient Leurs Courses en 1960

GILDED AGE FASHION with Elizabeth L. Block

 

Gilded Age Fashion: More than 50 Iconic Looks and the Stories Behind Them by Elizabeth Block

 

Gilded Age Fashion: More than 50 Iconic Looks and the Stories Behind Them

by Elizabeth Block (Author)  Format: Hardcover

 

Transport yourself to the glamour of elite American society in the 1870s–90s. 

 

Showcasing stunning gowns from the late 19th century designed by founders of couture, Gilded Age Fashion draws from the finest museum collections to tell the story of an era defined by opulence, when families like the Vanderbilts, Astors, and Rockefellers dressed exquisitely for the grandest events on both sides of the Atlantic. 

 

Author Elizabeth Block details the social customs that guided the sartorial choices of the fabulously wealthy. Each sumptuous gown featured tells a story about its creator and the woman who wore it, and the opulent balls, opera nights, charity benefits, and society weddings she might have attended. Gilded Age Fashion opens a dazzling window into America's most extravagant age.

 

Fifty exquisite gowns: The finest couture of the era drawn from renowned museum collections, led by the legendary House of Worth

 

Rich social history: Author Elizabeth Block brings the etiquette, customs, and personal narratives of Gilded Age society vividly to life

 

Beautifully organized: Three illustrated sections organized by the times of day when the clothing was worn

 

Perfect for history and fashion lovers: Essential reading for fans of the HBO series The Gilded Age, costume history and period drama enthusiasts, and anyone captivated by this glittering era

dame penelope keith dies

O'Connell's Clothing Store

https://oconnellsclothing.com/

O'Connell's Clothing is an iconic, family-owned traditional clothier established in 1959 and headquartered in Buffalo, New York. Widely revered in traditional menswear communities, the shop is famous for keeping the "Ivy Style" and classic American "trad" aesthetic alive with zero compromise on period-correct tailoring.

Specialty Categories & Inventory

O'Connell's maintains an exceptionally vast inventory of high-quality garments primarily sourced from the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Their hallmark offerings include:

• Shetland Sweaters: Famous for an extensive array of authentic, vibrant colors and high-quality wool imported directly from Scotland.
• Natural Shoulder Blazers & Suits: Rare, time-honored three-button sack suits and worsted wool blazers crafted without heavy shoulder padding.
• Unlined OCBDs: Classic Oxford Cloth Button-Down shirts prized for their unlined and unfused collars that create the perfect historic collar "roll".
• Premium Outerwear: Authoritative stockist of heritage brands like Barbour, Baracuta, and Chrysalis field coats.
• Fine Trousers: Known for precise in-house tailoring on exceptional fabrics, ranging from military-grade army drill to heavy wool flannel and corduroy.

Where to Buy

• Official Storefront: You can explore their full catalog online through the O'Connell's Clothing Official Website.
• Flagship Brick-and-Mortar: If you are near Western New York, you can shop their tightly packed, legendary racks in person on Main Street in Buffalo.

 

What Prince William is like behind closed doors | Simon Case Exclusive Interview

 

The moment Harry gave up any chance of reconciliation with William

Prince Harry may cancel UK family visit after being refused police protection

Prince Harry is reconsidering his upcoming trip to the UK with Meghan Markle and their children after his request for taxpayer-funded police protection was rejected.

The family had planned a five-day visit to Britain in early July 2026 to attend events marking the "One Year to Go" countdown for the Invictus Games in Birmingham. They were also scheduled to stay at a royal residence as guests of King Charles III. However, the Royal and VIP Executive Committee (RAVEC) denied his application for state security during the trip.

 

Key Details of the Security Dispute

• The Denial: RAVEC informed Prince Harry that his application for a state security package was denied shortly after details of the family trip were made public.
• The Core Conflict: The Duke of Sussex has stated that he feels it is unsafe to bring his family to the UK without armed police protection. While the family would be safe inside royal residences, they will not receive taxpayer-funded protection when moving around Britain.
• Private Security Limitations: A source close to the Sussexes stated that their private security team identified serious safety concerns. Private teams cannot replicate state-level protection or access local intelligence.
• Potential Compromise: Insiders report that Prince Harry is currently looking at alternatives, which include flying his family into the UK for just a single day instead of five.
• Legal Context: This dispute follows a string of legal defeats for the Duke. He previously lost a high-profile Court of Appeal challenge to fully reinstate his automatic, taxpayer-funded security, which was downgraded to a "case-by-case" basis after he stepped down as a working royal in 2020

 

"Tweedland" has reached 10.000.000 page views ! Thanks to you all ! Jeeves.

 

Royals Have No Savings: Why MPs Approved £369m Palace Refurbishment | Baroness Margaret Hodge

The king, his millions, and the first public royal tax bill | The Latest

 

Now we know how much tax King Charles pays, and it is very little

 

Analysis

Now we know how much tax King Charles pays, and it is very little

Juliette Garside

The monarch’s declaration does not tell us much, except that his bill is lower than for people with much smaller fortunes

 

Fri 26 Jun 2026 18.23 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jun/26/now-we-know-how-much-tax-king-charles-pays-and-it-is-very-little

 

The veil of secrecy that surrounds the royal finances was nudged aside a little on Thursday to allow the release of a new piece of information. We learned for the first time how much the king’s annual tax bill comes to.

 

This was not a full tax return. It was a two-sentence declaration, stating his tax payable amounted to £12.9m in 2024-25, and a slightly smaller sum the year before. His total tax payable since accession comes to £30m.

 

It has been a long time coming. Unlike other citizens, the monarch is not liable for tax, but the king and his mother before him started paying it voluntarily in 1993.

 

The declaration was short on detail. We don’t know what his total income was for those years. We don’t know the total value of his private fortune. And we have no idea how much his tax bill was reduced by for expenses such as those incurred performing royal duties.

 

The small nugget of new information has brought to light one startling fact though. The king’s tax bill is low, even when compared with those who have smaller fortunes.

 

Thanks to painstaking investigations by the Guardian, in its 2023 cost of the crown series, the king’s private wealth, known as the privy purse, is estimated to be at least £1.8bn. This includes the Duchy of Lancaster estate – a £690m land and property portfolio handed from one monarch to the next and which provides him with income of £25m a year; and an even larger pile of other assets, such as cars, jewels, art and the private residences of Balmoral and Sandringham. We have very little idea how much the king holds in financial investments, or what the revenues from these are.

 

The tax the king pays covers all of the privy purse, all £1.8bn or more of assets.

 

Because we don’t know the total income, we are not able to check what the king’s effective tax rate is, but comparisons with other taxpayers raise questions.

 

A scan of this year’s Sunday Times tax list shows that the hedge fund boss Suneil Setiya, also estimated to be worth £1.8bn, paid £114m in annual tax. This is 10 times the sum the king paid in 2023-24.

 

The musician Ed Sheeran, whose fortune at £410m is a fraction of the king’s, paid £20m to HMRC. The author JK Rowling, worth an estimated £975m, was billed £47m on her earnings and gains.

 

Even the Manchester City footballer Erling Haaland, who is Norwegian, pays more than the king – his most recent tax bill was £17m.

 

Without more information about the size and shape of the privy purse, it is impossible to say why the king’s bill is so low.

 

What we do know is that the Duchy of Lancaster is not liable for the kinds of taxes that might be paid by a company or a trust. The capital gains made by buying and selling property, and the rents received from tenants, can all accumulate and be reinvested tax free, allowing the king’s wealth to grow more quickly than that of his subjects.

 

The privy purse could be described as operating like a mini-tax haven. The assets held by the duchy are untaxed, while the king’s other holdings are undeclared. The palace says the king voluntarily pays capital gains on his privately held wealth, and that the accounts are externally audited each year. They say this part of his personal holdings remains private, as for any other citizen. But no other citizen has such discretion over the tax they choose to pay.

 

The palace was approached for comment.

Behind the Scenes: Chariots of Fire (Hudson, 1981) with Ben Cross and Ian Charleson

The Story of Eric Liddell

.The new UK Olympic kit / REMEMBERING CHARRIOTS OF FIRE and the Great Milena Canonero ..

 

 

The new UK Olympic kit looks something straight outta Sports Direct

https://twitter.com/anouj?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

The GB olympic kit is absolutely revolting. Looks like something co-designed between Lonsdale and Tommy Robinson.

pic.twitter.com/tEWAY8x9Mz

These are just some of the remarks which are going around in the net concerning the kit designed by Stella McCartney . Let's just revisit this post by Tweedland and get some real references about heraldic/s and sense of representation and circumstance

JEEVES

REMEMBERING CHARRIOTS OF FIRE and the Great Milena Canonero ...

Born in Turin, Italy, Canonero studied art, design history and costume design in Genoa. She then moved to England, where she began working in small theatre and film productions. While designing for commercials in London, she met many film directors.

Her first major film work as a costume designer was in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) after having met Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). She worked with Kubrick again on Barry Lyndon (1975), for which she won her first Oscar with Ulla-Britt Söderlund, and The Shining (1980). Her second Oscar win was for Chariots of Fire (1981), directed by Hugh Hudson.

Canonero has also designed the costumes for several stagings directed by Otto Schenk, such as Il trittico (Puccini, Vienna State Opera 1979), As You Like It (Shakespeare, Salzburg Festival 1980), Die Fledermaus (Strauss, Vienna State Opera 1980), Andrea Chénier (Giordano, Vienna State Opera 1981), and Arabella (Strauss, Metropolitan Opera 1983). For director Luc Bondy she created the costumes for new productions of Puccini's Tosca (Metropolitan Opera, 2009), and of Euripides' Helena (Burgtheater, Vienna, 2010).

In 1986, Canonero became the costume designer for the television series Miami Vice.

In 2001, Canonero received the Career Achievement Award in Film from the Costume Designers Guild. In 2005, Canonero won the guild's award for excellence in contemporary film for her work on Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004). She won her third Oscar for Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette (2006).

Canonero reteamed with Anderson in 2014 on The Grand Budapest Hotel, for which she received her ninth nomination and fourth win at the 87th Academy Awards. She also won a BAFTA award for her work on the film

The Real Chariots Of Fire

Rowing Blazers by Jack Carlson.

Henley Royal Regatta: secrets of the rowing blazer

A new book reveals the history of the rowing blazer – and explains why Dutch rowers have to wear blazers covered in sweat, beer and river water

Posted by

Lauren Cochrane

Friday 4 July 2014

theguardian.com

http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/fashion-blog/2014/jul/04/henley-royal-regatta-secrets-rowing-blazer

Jack Carlson's new book Rowing Blazers is dedicated to an oddity of British style – one that is now nearly 200 years old. As a professional rower taking part in the Henley Royal Regatta this week, rowing apparel is a subject that the American knows a lot about, and his access to this privileged, preppy world, provides stories from clubs all over the country. Here is Carlson's crib sheet on the history of the rowing blazer.

• "The Oxford and Cambridge boat race started in 1829, while Henley is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year. Although rowers wore blazers from the beginning, they weren't originally called blazers. Clubs in Oxford and Cambridge would compete against each other and they wore brightly coloured jackets so those watching on the bank could distinguish between teams."

• "The bright red jacket of the Lady Margaret boat club in Cambridge was the first to be called a blazer, because of the 'blazing' red colour. We found the first mention of it in the Cambridge University Almanac of 1852, where the word blazer is in inverted commas; you see its usage evolve over the next 10 years. By the 1890s, people talk about the cricket blazer, for example."

• "The blazer crossed the Atlantic in the 1910s. Universities such as Cornell and Princeton began to have blazers on their campuses in the mid-1910s. It is part of the Ivy League look, based on the Oxford and Cambridge blazers. It has been part of the preppy style vocabulary for the past 100 years – brands such as Ralph Lauren, Hackett and Gant use it. There is a huge market for vintage rowing blazers in the US and Japan – they can fetch thousands of pounds, even when they're riddled with moth holes."

• "New clubs in Australia, America and Japan often have blazers. It's all about looking the part and fitting in. Oklahoma City is racing this year and it has a blazer. It's a horrible thing – cream with turquoise binding."

• "The Dutch have interesting traditions. No one owns their own blazer there – they're handed down to the next generation. The result is that they're often terribly fitting – you'll see a little coxswain in a huge jacket or a massive guy in a tiny jacket from 100 years ago. They're not allowed to clean them unless they win the varsity race, which doesn't happen very often. That means most blazers aren't cleaned in decades – they're covered in sweat, beer and river water."

• Rowing Blazers by Jack Carlson is out on July 7.