Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Tag: National Trust

Newport – Tredegar House (Evan Morgan’s Bathroom)

When Tredegar House was originally built this was a room known as the Green Wrought Chamber. The Victorians turned it into a bathroom and that’s how it’s displayed today.

Visible on the right hand side on the wall, above the mirror, is a pagan style head and that’s a nod towards what the National Trust call “the “Evan Morgan’s eccentric tastes” which I assume to mean they find him a bit odd.

Evan Morgan (1893-1949) was very interested in the supernatural and Aleister Crowley, who was a character however you look at it, stayed at the house on numerous occasions. Evan, who didn’t have children and is thought to have been gay (despite two marriages) left Tredegar to his uncle, Frederick Morgan. Evan had his bedroom in his adjoining room and there are numerous reports that he would meet his guests whilst lying in the bath. How the upper classes live….

December 2, 2025
Newport – Tredegar House (Dining Room)

This is the rather grand dining room, previously known as the Best Parlour, the Great Parlour and the New Parlour. It was where the Morgan family would have dined with all sort of decadent foods such as pheasants, lamb and chicken bakes.

There was a man from the National Trust sitting on the floor and I didn’t like to ask what he was doing, but he seemed to be enjoying it. During the period that this building was in use as a Catholic girls’ school, this room was used as their chapel.

Here’s a photo of that fireplace from 1908.

I wonder if civil engineers could do this to ceilings, as it gives me a design idea. This was installed here in the 1860s, replacing an earlier one that was likely either not decadent enough or which was falling down.

A serving hatch in the room which was installed here during the Victorian period and which the note mentions is now a little rickety (they used a different word, but I think that’s what they meant). Apparently this room has apparently been used in Dr Who and Torchwood, amongst other TV programmes.

December 2, 2025
Newport – Tredegar House (Painting of William Morgan the elder)

This portrait is of William Morgan the elder (1700-1731), the eldest son of John Morgan who was a Welsh politician of some note and of considerable influence. John also owned Tredegar House and passed it down to William in 1721 when he died.

William served as the Whig MP for Brecon and later for Monmouthshire, being returned for both in 1722, but he chose Monmouthshire. There was nearly always a Morgan as the MP for this constituency from the 1650s until the constituency was abolished in the 1880s, although one of the successor seats of South Monmouthshire was represented by a Morgan until 1906.

William married Rachel Cavendish, a daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, so that was handy at keeping power in the family. William was also one of the wealthy and enthusiastic Government supporters who was created a Knight of the Bath when that order was revived in 1725 and he was wearing his sash in the painting. William died young, although I’m not entirely sure what the cause of his death was as it doesn’t appear to have been recorded, but the estate was left to his son William Morgan the younger (1725-1763).

It’s not known who the painter was, but the National Trust note that on the artwork there is:

“Painted lower frame: Sir William Morgan, K B B.1700 D.1731 married Rachel, eldest daughter of William, 2nd Duke of Devonshire, KG

Written paper on crosspiece of stretcher frame: Sir William Morgan, Knight of the Bath, eldest son of John Morgan, esqr. of Tredegar. Belonged to Ruperra, 1783″

It doesn’t take much walking around Tredegar House to realise the power and influence of the Morgans on local and national politics, they had some considerable wealth going on here.

December 2, 2025
Newport – Tredegar House (Painting of Blanche Parry)

This painting at Tredegar House is of Blanche Parry (1508-1590) and is still owned by Newport Museums and Galleries. The fashion is very similar to that of Queen Elizabeth I, but Blanche was a Woman of the Bedchamber to her, so that is perhaps not an entire surprise. I suspect that this role, which was nearly always held by aristocrats and was more about travelling with the Queen and offering social support, was likely rather an interesting one and it came with some significant power. Parry was an aide to the Queen for over fifty years, so she must have picked up some considerable gossip during that period.

It might have been painted by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561-1632) who was perhaps best known for the Ditchley Portrait of Queen Elizabeth. The information about the painting also notes that the frame is from the eighteenth century, so it is later than the artwork itself. The realistic and grand artwork is also very much a statement of power and influence, no doubt a source of some pride to her family.

Blanche wasn’t directly linked to Tredegar House, but she was connected to the Welsh Marches, so perhaps there was some family history interlinked there. Or it might be that Newport Museums and Galleries acquired this artwork and thought that Tredegar House was the best place to just pop it.

December 2, 2025
Newport – Tredegar House (Gilt Room)

This is quite a decadent room, some suggest that it’s the finest in the house. It was designed to be one of the state rooms, primarily where guests could relax at the end of the evening. The Morgans fancied some European influences in their grand room and it’s decorated with pine panels designed to look like walnut.

Here’s what the room looked like in 1908. During the Newport Council period, they plonked a bed in the middle of the floor so that people could lie down and look at the ceiling, but the National Trust have gone for a more tried and trusted method of using an angled mirror. They also did well to ensure that this room was kept well maintained when it was a school, although the council did refresh all the gilt decoration during their ownership.

Those twisted columns are designed to look like marble, but they’re actually made of wood. This was all arranged by William Morgan who managed to complete pretty much all of the decoration in the house without needing later generations to complete the work.

November 30, 2025
Newport – Tredegar House (History)

Our visit on the way back from Cardiff was to Tredegar House, a National Trust property located near to Newport. The current property dates to the 1670s, although there are some Tudor bits still standing, paid for by the wealthy Morgan family. The Morgan family began as landowners and managed to also benefit from the industrial revolution and got themselves involved in politics as well.

The property ceased to be used as a family mansion in the early 1950s, when it became a Catholic girls school. A new school was built in the 1970s, so Newport Council ended up buying it, hence the reference to the most expensive council house in Britain. By 2012, this house was a little bit of a faff for the council, so a decision was made to lease the property to the National Trust.

I thought that the layout was a bit bodged (by that I mean that we went the wrong way) and so we missed some of the route, but here’s the orangery.

These might look like rickety pipes, but they’re the remains of hothouses which once stood here.

A tree. This isn’t a blog about trees though, so I’ll limited myself to that description.

This is the side of the house, and that large section to the right is the former Tudor house owned by John Morgan that never quite got demolished.

The formal gardens.

November 30, 2025
Manchester Trip : Quarry Bank Mill (Part Two)

I’ll have to upload these photos as a job lot as I can’t really add a great deal of context to them (it might surprise my two loyal blog readers, but my knowledge of industrial equipment isn’t perfect to say the least), but they were what turned the cotton into clothing and other items at the mill.

The volunteers turned a lot of these machines on and they’re not the quietest things. I can only begin to imagine what the noise must have been like when all of the machines were running at full capacity. It’s no surprise that many people working here lost their hearing. Some of the machinery isn’t actually from the mill, but has been brought here to show the sort of industrial equipment that was here.

Some videos of the equipment (and Richard).

An apprentice’s indenture.

A wage cup from the mill, this is how everyone received their pay.

The toilet facilities at the mill for the workers.

The main waterwheel here is enormous, of a quite breathtaking size, but it was hard to get a photo of it to show just how substantial it was. This is the original wheel pit when they had a smaller waterwheel in operation.

I did manage to get a video of the waterwheel though from the side.

Liam likes engineering projects.

In April 1847, the original 1818 shaft was found to be cracked and so it was replaced with this new iron shaft. It was repaired in 1873 and taken out of usage in 1904.

Richard then bought a load of fabrics from the shop, although Liam and I resisted such temptations.

And with that, we all had to think of getting home. Richard went off in one direction, Ross and Liam in another, but not before they dropped me off at Manchester Airport’s free drop-off car park. For the observant, this is where my little series of posts about Berlin started….. Anyway, this was a quite marvellous weekend and excellent company, I’m looking forwards to the 2025 expedition which I think is to Cardiff.

January 6, 2025
Manchester Trip : Quarry Bank Mill (Part One)

On a wet Sunday afternoon in November, we needed something to occupy ourselves for a couple of hours. A National Trust site with one of the largest waterwheels in Europe seemed like just the ticket and it wasn’t far away to drive. Fortunately, I got in free with my National Trust pass, Ross got in on that as well, with Liam having his family membership. Richard came along as well with his own specially purchased ticket and we were ready to walk in the rain for a while.

As a background to this site, it’s at its heart about cotton production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the centre of the site stands the impressive mill itself, built in 1784 and an important part of the industrial revolution. It was established by Samuel Greg, who used the River Bollin to power the water wheel, and his family kept it going into the twentieth century. The challenges were obvious in the Victorian period with more competition and the site struggled to maintain profitability. By 1939, it was realised that the site wouldn’t be profitable and Alexander Carlton Greg took the decision to donate the site and the surrounding estate to the National Trust.

We had a limited amount of time and so we focused on visiting the mill which is the main part of the site. There was plenty of walking in the parkland and estates, but we didn’t have time and it was pouring with rain anyway, but there is more to see here than we did. Above is the counting house, part of the mill manager’s offices, where the money was handed to workers.

And this is the hatch view that the workers would have had when collecting their money. At its peak, there were 250 people working here, so it was a sizeable operation.

The manager’s office. We decided Richard would like this decadence.

This was more Ross, Liam and me…..

And there’s Liam.

Some cotton and the process was explained, effectively its a matter of harvesting it, then ginning it (separately the cotton fibre from the seeds), then cleaning it (by carding and combing) and then spinning and weaving it.

And a cotton plant. The whole cotton industry was an essential part of the industrial revolution, with the spinning jenny, water frame and power loom being developed as part of the process. There was an enormous demand for cotton products both nationally and internationally, with colonies exploited to secure the raw material and then they were used as markets for the finished material.

The next part of the museum were the working machines, but that will require its own page as I took numerous videos as well as photos. Ooooh, the anticipation…..

January 2, 2025
Birmingham – Back to Backs National Trust Property

All the previous times that I’ve stumbled my way into Birmingham, I’ve promptly remembered that I should have booked in advance to visit this National Trust property, the ‘Backs to Backs’. It requires some forward planning, and in a bid to surprise and delight myself, I actually managed last week to book to visit this week. I’m a National Trust member as I aspire to be at least lower middle class, although I sometimes wonder whether I shall reach such pinnacles of sophistication any time soon. Anyway, this tour is one of the best rated in the city and it’s one of the best reviewed National Trust sites in the country. I’m very slightly nervous to write that I didn’t feel entirely engaged with proceedings, but that feels a rather pompous thing to say given the keen and generous volunteers who support this venue. I had better fall back on Jay Rayner’s line of “if someone wants to call me pompous or condescending, they can go right ahead” here…..

I can’t illustrate this riveting post with many photographs as they were banned inside the buildings, although that seemed to be the policy of the guide today rather than a general policy. Having noted that, our tour was quite busy and it’s not an unreasonable request from the guide. The tour is ninety minutes long, which did rather stretch my interest somewhat. I have to add a rider here that I’m generally boring, I read everything possible in museums, spend hours in them and frequently find myself on Google searching something new that I’ve learned during my meanderings. There was a lot of entering rooms, which in the case of the residences, were full of items that weren’t original to the properties, then listening to stories from other people on the tour about their mangles from the 1950s. Now, I have no complaint here, this is exactly the visitor that the National Trust gets and it’s the engagement that they want. I’m a life member of the National Trust (I drop that in for the reasons mentioned earlier about being aspirational), it would be ridiculous for me to be disappointed at that and it was rather pleasant to be by far the youngest on the tour. I like being the youngest, so a special award to the National Trust here for arranging this for me and also for the other tour participants for sharing their stories of how they had baths in tins around 70 years ago. One of the beauties of the tours is that over half the attendees stated that they had been brought up in houses similar to these, so of course they wanted to share their memories.

I’ll have to phrase this carefully, but I haven’t quite reached the higher levels of being ‘woke’ yet, but the tour guide did meander into discussion areas, shall we say, that the National Trust themselves might not have been entirely happy with. It’s too easy to be critical, but I suspect there’s quite a difference in style between the different tour guides, so experiences will likely differ. Anyway, back to the very many positives and that was the enthusiasm of the guide, but there was also one standout room which was on the top floor and was left in an unrestored condition. This clever idea showed more architectural history, which is very much my thing, such as the divide which was put in during the nineteenth century when the house was split, the staircase that was added and the layers of paint on the walls. I thought, just for my interest levels, that most of the other rooms were a little over-restored and stripped of some of their architectural relevance, although one room did contain an interesting photo of how it looked before restoration. I would have quite liked that to have been the case for all of the rooms, just to see how they ended up before they were tidied up. There were a few original traces though, such as stencilling on the walls and some original wallpaper.

Photos of the toilets were permitted. Here’s an early toilet before sanitation was added, they were only connected to the sewerage network in the early twentieth century and none of the properties ever had bathrooms fitted.

I’m pleased that I went on this tour, not least because more urban sites such as these are exactly what the National Trust need to reach out to a new audience. The story of working class people is often overlooked and the National Trust of course inevitably have to focus on their country houses. They’ve ensured that these properties survive, some of the very few ‘back to back’ houses to still be standing, so they tell an important story. I also understand why the National Trust have restored the rooms to three different periods of history and they’ve certainly spent a lot of money making these structures accessible to visitors. The awkward nature of the buildings is why they can’t easily allow visitors to walk around on their own, although they’ve got a lot of space that’s closed off at the moment (they were holiday lets for a long time, but it seems they closed during Covid) and there’s no access to any of the cellars. The old sweet shop on the corner has also closed, although has been turned into a little waiting area for visitors.

Being pre-prepared, I had read the visitor guide book in advance of my visit, and that is very well written and provides the sort of architectural information that I was interested in. As an observation rather than as a complaint, there were numerous slight inconsistencies with the guide book and the tour guide, the former notes that, unusually, there was a gas lamp in the courtyard that ensured it wasn’t dreary, whereas the tour guide mentioned that there was minimal light entering the properties. The guide book says that there were four toilets, the guide said that there were three, the guide book says that this wasn’t a Jewish court, the tour guide said it was. It’s all minor, but I sort of like a little bit of accuracy in the story telling and so I did rather glazed over some of the guide’s little facts that seemed quite odd to me. It’s thought that there were over 500 different families who lived in the houses during their 200 years of occupancy, although the National Trust have strongly focused on three families and that’s what the guide spoke about.

The guide book goes into plenty of detail about the slum clearances and the almost random nature of why these properties weren’t demolished in the 1960s. It appears that it’s simply because the ground floors were being used as shops and the council never quite got around to demolishing them. They were listed in the 1980s and then thanks to funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the European Regional Development Fund they were saved and then placed in the hands of the National Trust.

This is a fascinating location to visit for anyone and I’d merrily recommend it, it’s a piece of history that could have easily been lost. There isn’t actually anything particularly special about these houses and their yard in terms of saving them, it’s just that they represent where tens of thousands of people once lived. Many former residents of yards such as this were never that impressed about the tower blocks that they were moved to, but the survival of these units is a credit to the National Trust and those who funded their restoration, including many members of the public who sent their own donations in to help. The volunteers are doing a marvellous job in their story telling and it’s clear that their efforts are resonating positively with the vast majority of visitors. So, they don’t really need to change anything, although speaking just personally, there was a bit too much social history here for me and not enough architectural and building history. But, different things for different people and it’s clear that the National Trust have got the balance right judging by the reviews. All rather lovely and it’s just over £10 for the tour, or free for National Trust members. They don’t advertise it, but apparently it’s always worth wandering in when the tours are meant to start just in case they have any no shows.

September 4, 2024
Friday : Off To Wales (Part Two – Hanbury Hall)

In the next riveting instalment of the expedition that Liam and I went on to Wales, we stopped off at Hanbury Hall, primarily to get value from my membership. Not that I would have paid to go in at £13 per person, or £14.30 if Gift Aided, but that’s a different matter.

The building seems well proportioned to my non-architecturally minded eye, looking rather beautiful in the sunny weather.

The entrance to the property, which has a date of 1701 visible above the door, but that’s a made up addition from the Victorian period. It was probably finished in 1706 and replaced Spernall Hall which was previously on this site.

Ooh, books. Not quite as decadent as the selection at Blickling Hall, but still plenty of interesting titles.

I can’t actually remember why I was taking photos of the bookshelves.

I’m not really into interior design and don’t subscribe to Homes and Gardens, but I liked this room, very peaceful.

I’m sort of pleased that the National Trust put up a sign about this painting, as it is more complex than it at first appears. It was painted in 1836 and is of Thomas and Harry Vernon, painted as girls to prevent them from being kidnapped and ransomed. I must admit I’m not entirely convinced by this, there were child abductions in the early nineteenth century, but documents such as https://www.jstor.org/stable/41999356 don’t suggest they were wealthy children being pinched. Indeed, I’m suspicious enough to suggest that the National Trust have made this up, as breeching is well documented and I’ve never seen kidnapping having been given as a reason.

Another view of the same room, it’s clear this was my favourite in the house. The National Trust took over the property in 1953 and after some work was done on the house, it was primarily rented out as private apartments. I’m sure that it must have been a grand place to live, but it has now been fully opened up to the public.

I was less interested in this room. But Liam and I were amused to hear a child complain that they were bored and wanted to leave, with the parents saying “there’s just a few more rooms left to look in”. The child had at that stage only been in two rooms, so I’m not sure that a future in historical properties is beckoning.

Liam in a room, the details of which I’ve forgotten.

They’ve gone to some effort with the staircase, with the painter being James Thornhill, in whose studio William Hogarth was a student.

I’m not convinced that this is entirely comfortable and it all feels a bit excessive, but each to their own.

There’s some work going on at the site at the moment with the construction of a new restaurant, with these being some of the artefacts (if you can call them that) that they’ve found. The National Trust have been keen to push on with the work as visitor numbers to the property have continued to rise, so the facilities need to be improved.

The engineering project going on, I think this was Liam’s favourite part of the visit.

The effort made to use bricks that will fit in.

They’re going to unblock this archway which seems like a good idea.

I’m always pleased to see a bit of Hogarth.

One final bedroom to visit before our tour of the house was complete. The volunteers were friendly and engaging during the visit, but they were kept busy as there was a constant flow of visitors. Unusually for a National Trust property, visitors could walk around the rooms in whatever order they wanted, there wasn’t a directional flow that had to be followed.

A rather pleasant view from the window of the bedroom. The gardens had been left to go to rack and ruin since the grand days when they were laid out by Capability Brown, but work started to restore them in the 1990s and they look suitably grand again now.

Another photo of the construction work and although it was Friday, there wasn’t much going on.

The National Trust are certainly spending some money on gardeners, everything is immaculate.

Less money has been spent on the window closing mechanism, which looks more like I’ve been put in charge of it.

Liam took the opportunity to get an ice cream.

And a little collection of photos of the gardens and the exterior of the house. It was pleasant to have a little meander around the house and gardens for an hour or so, although we were getting towards closing time and so we didn’t have much more time. It’s well reviewed on-line, with the majority of the grumbles seemingly being the cheap Christmas decorations they used a couple of years ago. I’m in agreement with those reviews, there’s no need for Christmas decorations when you have such a grand house to show off.

Properties like this are fortunate to survive, there was a period in the early twentieth century when so many of these glorious residential buildings were pulled down to avoid paying death duties. The owners of Hanbury Hall have had to sell their furniture on more than a couple of occasions, but the building itself has remained intact. One of those instances was in 1935 when Sir George Vernon refused to pay the tithe dues and his items of furniture was seized and sold by public auction at the hall. He was the President of Worcestershire Tithe Payers Associations and I’m sure he was pleased at the passing of the Tithe Act in the following year.

Anyway, it was all rather lovely to have a quick visit to the house, before we started on the drive to Gloucester (we do eventually get to Wales).

June 16, 2022