Shandy Hall, Coxwold, and Jonathan Meades

I visited Shandy Hall in Coxwold, North Yorkshire for the first time this weekend. I was particularly privileged to do so. My brother had bought me tickets for Jonathan Meades’ Laurence Sterne lecture, which turned out to comprise a walking tour of Coxwold, ending at Shandy Hall.

 Meades was celebrating the publication of his new book, Museum without Walls. Fraternal kindness enabled me to acquire a copy, signed by the man himself. It is a collection of Meades’ essays, mainly on place and architecture. It starts:

We are surrounded by the greatest of free shows. Places. Most of them made by man, remade by man. Deserted streets, seething boulevards, reeming beaches, empty steppes, black reservoirs, fields of agricultural scrap, cute villages and disappearing points which have an unparalleled capacity to promote hope (I am thinking of the aspect north up rue Paradis in Marseilles).

And so it continues: deep intellectual theorising about place, expressed often in seemingly random lists, and paragraphs that alight suddenly on specific vantage points that trigger particular memories in the author’s mind.

 

Meades’s talk was a suitably Sternian digressive ramble, seemingly taken from an as yet unpublished memoir. Starting at the church we heard of a childhood love for a girl from the Indian subcontinent; moving to the garden in the village we heard of radical French politics of the 1970s; moving back to Sterne’s gravestone we heard of the manufacture and use of LSD in the 1950s.

Finally at Shandy Hall itself we heard Meades reflect once again on his lost childhood love. I’m not sure what any of it meant, except that there were certainly glancing references to Sterne at various points.

Shandy Hall itself was a delight – we stepped into Sterne’s study, soaked in the atmosphere of a Georgian vicar’s home, and perused the collection of experimental novels. The garden featured an installation about self-publishing, fittingly given the way that Museum without Walls has been published.  I am looking forward to watching more Meades (a good selection is on YouTube), and trying to read Tristram Shandy in time for the tercentenary of Sterne's birth next year