This article has been written collaboratively by two authors. Amanda reflects on her visit to Castle Howard and Seaton Delaval Hall in 1966, while Merryn provides additional historical context to complement her memories. 

 

In 1966, Drs Patrick Nuttgens, Director of the Institute of Advanced Architectural Studies, and Bernard Harris, Reader in English at the University of York, created a joint study course on Vanbrugh as architect and playwright. 

It was just two years after the tercentenary of Vanbrugh’s birth, and one year before the third of the university’s new college buildings would be named in his honour; now, we find ourselves in the tercentenary of his death, celebrated through the Vanbrugh300 programme.  

Our small start-up departments were exceptionally close and friendly. The entire student body had just expanded to 1,000, from just 250 undergraduates in 1963, rising to 500 in the year that I came to York. We never realised how lucky we were to have such gifted tutors dedicating themselves to us and to the collective, ahead of their own ambitions or publications.  

Every lesson felt like an adventure, and at the end of the summer term our tutors took us on a journey through Castle Howard, Fountains Abbey, and the then-ruined Seaton Delaval Hall. Many of the houses taking part in the festival appear today as fully restored examples of Vanbrugh’s architecture, welcoming thousands of visitors each year. Yet in the 1950s and 1960sthey were still emerging from the scars of war, with restoration and renewal underway. Our tours offered a rare glimpse of these buildings in transition, as generations of owners, architects, craftsmen and conservators worked to secure the future of Vanbrugh’s remarkable legacy. 

On first traveling to Castle Howard, I remember sighting the Obelisk far away through the windows of our van. As we got closer and parked beside it, we were met by George Howard, who took us down the avenue to his house.  

Castle Howard was still in a state of post-war dilapidation, yet the extensive restoration work underway marked the beginning of a remarkable period of renewal. During the 1950s, the Temple of the Four Winds underwent extensive conservation, with a new dome, repaired stonework, and the careful restoration of its interior and floor. Attention then turned to the house itself. Its dome was painstakingly rebuilt between 1960 and 1961, and in the following year the restoration was completed with the recreation of Pellegrini's Fall of Phaeton on the underside, returning one of Vanbrugh's most celebrated interiors to its former splendour. 

We learned about Vanbrugh’s grand linear scheme of rooms on the ground floor - modelled on the great houses he had seen in France - as we walked through empty shells with their ‘heavy-loaded’ walls and deep-set windows. In Vanbrugh’s day, anyone so unimportant would have been kept in the outermost of anterooms, but here we were being conducted round the works by the owner. After exploring Castle Howard, we then carried on to the ruins of Fountains Abbey, where we ate our picnic, before the long drive north to Seaton Delaval Hall.  

Along the coast, passing Lindisfarne, oil tankers were outlined on a red North Sea. By the time we arrived, the sun was setting behind the Hall’s empty façade. Flaming light shone through the bare window frames, repeating the fire that had destroyed most of the building in 1822. The blaze had been so fierce that the window glass and the lead of the roof melted, cascading in molten streams down the walls. Yet from this destruction came renewal. During the 1950s and 1960s the owners led an ambitious programme of restoration, re-roofing the East and West Wings and replacing the damaged stonework of the South Portico, thus beginning the Hall's remarkable revival. 

After our trip, I wrote my dissertation on Vanbrugh and prisons, illustrating it with hand-drawn sketches of the fortress of Vincennes, whose forbidding silhouette Vanbrugh later playfully reimagined in miniature at Vanbrugh Castle in Greenwich - perhaps not coincidentally, overlooking one of Britain's principal centres of naval defence against France. 

The breadth of interests and intellectual curiosity among York’s teaching staff was remarkable. Despite my own interest in feminism, I had failed to notice that Vanbrugh’s plays often suggested marriage could be a form of imprisonment for women. Dr Harris was more perceptive in his reading of The Provoked Wife and in his introduction to The Relapse, showing how the playwright ‘presents courtship and marriage not only with cynicism, but also with moral bravery and social impudence’ (New Mermaid Classics, 1971).  

Vanbrugh’s father had long been described in scholarship as a sugar baker, while more recent research revealed wider commercial connections with the West Indian sugar trade. It is of interest that Harris also made an early intervention into questions of race and literature. * Looking back, it was this willingness to connect the humanities with wider social, historical, and political questions that made York’s teaching so memorable. 

My transition from words to images went on from there. I studied fine arts at UEA for just two terms, but ten years later I was writing about art for radical magazines. The way that younger scholars of colour are revisiting my work has been a delight.  

It all started with Vanbrugh.  

* References to his 1958 article A Portrait of a Moor, which was written during his years at the Shakespeare Institute and is a landmark in early Shakespearean race studies, can be found here.