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In 2019 a devastating fire consumed the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, one of the towering symbols of French identity, and it seemed that one of the greatest cultural monuments in Europe had, literally, gone up in smoke. But after only two short years, it has now been restored and John has been to see – and celebrate – the result.

The old Notre Dame had evolved over many centuries and lived through dramatic times. Sacked during the Revolution, it was returned to glory for Napoleon’s coronation. John not only discusses these aspects of its history with Clive but probes the contribution of the great 19th-century restorer Eugene Violet-le-Duc, a rationalist whose approach was unlike that of his English contemporaries, John Ruskin and William Morris. Whereas the latter believed that old buildings bore witness to the lives of the masons who created them, and that every ancient stone was therefore sacred and irreplaceable, Violet-le-Duc held that a cathedral such as Notre-Dame could be returned to an ideal medieval state. So he ruthlessly swept away later work. Not all that he did was bad. As Victor Hugo attests, the state of the cathedral in 1831, when The Hunchback of Notre-Dame appeared, was lamentable. Viollet-le-Duc, working there for 20 years, put it back in shape; but much of the decoration and roofline – the spire that has fallen, for example, as well as the gargoyles and carved monsters on the roof – were his.

Now a new layer of history has been added to the great medieval edifice. What does John make of it?

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An extraordinary cultural loan is about to take place: soon, while its home in France is being improved, the Bayeux Tapestry will be displayed in the British Museum for two years. This will give members of the British public, along with visitors to London from overseas, the chance to get up close to one of the founding documents of England’s story. One of the foremost medievalists in the country, John is in a prime position to lead the discussion with Clive on this unparallelled work of art.

The survival of the so-called tapestry – really a piece of embroidery – is itself remarkable. Only one section of this ancient textile has disappeared; the rest of the 224ft composition remains almost incredibly intact. Where was it made? Who stitched it? Who composed the design? These questions cannot be answered with certainty. There is a likely candidate, though, for the patron who commissioned it. This was William the Conqueror’s half-brother Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, who was also Earl of Kent; he may have ordered it for the consecration of his cathedral in Bayeux.

If the origins of the Bayeux Tapestry are obscure, the story-telling is not. John and Clive delight in the vivid and economical narrative, as well as the information it coincidentally displays about palaces, boats, horses, feasting and Norman armour. Although celebrated in its time, the tapestry was largely forgotten until ‘rediscovered’ by an 18th-century monk. Later, Hitler regarded the Bayeux Tapestry as an object he was anxious to display in Berlin but luckily the liberation of Paris occurred before he was able to take it out of the country.

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In advance of Remembrance Sunday on November 11, Clive has been visiting the Commonwealth War Graves in France. The Imperial War Graves Commission, as it was called when established in 1917, was the brain child of Fabian Ware, a civil servant turned newspaper editor who commanded a Red Cross dressing station during the First World War and was therefore saw the horror at first hand. Ware realised that the hundreds of thousands of young men who died for Britain deserved proper burial and commemoration. The losses were on a scale unknown in previous wars, and the monuments and cemeteries built to remember them were also completely without precedent. The British government rose to the challenge, finding a solution that was supremely well-adapted to the character of the nation. The result was one of the greatest commissions of public art ever seen.

Clive and John discuss this epic achievement. On the Somme alone there were about 450 cemeteries, requiring monumental expression. Architecturally, this gave the lead architects --
Sir Edwin Lutyens, Sir Reginald Blomfield and Sir Herbert Baker, who were later joined by Charles Holden (who twice rejected a knighthood) – an unparallelled opportunity to design structures that were both poetic and abstract, akin to music in having no practical value than in the remembering the Fallen. Today no one can see the cemeteries of the First World War without feeling deeply moved by the experience. Fortunately, the need arose at time when it was possible to find a shared architectural language for the profoundest emotions, centred on a nation’s sense of loss.

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Which cathedral is closest to the English heart? Impossible to say but it may be Salisbury, the subject of this week’s Your Places or Mine. On September 28 a special service will be held to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the dedication of the altars at Salisbury’s east end in 1225.

To many people, Salisbury Cathedral approaches architectural perfection more nearly than any of the other cathedrals in England. It is the most harmonious; the spire is the tallest (404 feet); and still see it surrounded by water meadows that are a survival of medieval farming practice. This was the view famously painted by John Constable.

Whereas other cathedral builders in the Middle Ages had to contend with previously developed sites, Salisbury’s Bishop Roger Poore had no such bother. In 1219, he abandoned the previous cathedral at Old Sarum, which stood inside the banks of an Iron Age hill fort. Old Sarum had little water and was inconveniently close to a castle full of disputatious knights. ‘Let us descend joyfully to the plains, where the valley abounds in corn, where the fields are beautiful and where there is freedom from oppression,’ declaimed the papal bull of Honorius III which approved the move. Poore and his unknown architect could lay out at the cathedral as they liked; except for the 14th spire, most of it was built over a period of sixty years – hence it is unified in style.

Whereas the stone used to build Old Sarum had come from Caen in Normandy, Salisbury was made of English stones; the nave is an unusually disciplined essay in creamy Chilmark limestone, from around Tisbury in Wiltshire, and dark grey Purbeck ‘marble’ – not actually marble but a polished limestone -- from the Isle of Purbeck in Dorset. Purbeck marble, rich in fossils, was also used for the floor.

John and Clive discuss all these points as well as controversial 18th and 19th century restorations, not to mention a clock that may be the old working piece of machinery in the world.

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The creation of Regent Street under the Prince Regent is a rare instance of a master plan that reshaped London. It linked North and South, starting in the new Regent’s Park and ending at the Prince’s Carlton House on the edge of St James’s Park. Clive and John celebrate this extraordinary achievement, which sprang from the brain of the no less extraordinary John Nash.

A triumph of the Picturesque Movement, the line of the Regent Street scheme remains unchanged and the Nash terraces around Regents Park are a byword for domestic elegance. Regent street opened the area of London to development, by providing easy access to the West End.

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Today, the Cotswolds are famous around the world, as can be seen from the number of celebrities making their homes here. They are a brand which commands instant recognition. This, however, is a recent phenomenon, and visitors from past centuries – such as the journalist and contrarian William Cobbett – did not take anything like such a favourable view. The change came with the Arts and Crafts Movement, many of whose leading lights loved the round-shouldered hills, villages of honey-coloured stone and old-fashioned rural ways.

In this episode, Clive and John discuss the combination of history, architecture and geology that make the Cotswolds so special. And they look at some of the individuals whose passion for an unchanging English countryside led them to preserve and enhance the area. The Cotswolds that are now so widely loved were in many ways their creation – we see them through their eyes.

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Sennowe Park in North Norfolk is one of the most ebullient country houses built during the swaggering Edwardian decade at the beginning of the 20th century. It reflects the personality of the man for whom it was built, Thomas Cook, grandson of the Thomas Cook who founded the travel business. The latter, born in 1808, had been a Baptist evangelist and temperance campaigner. His epoch-making first excursion took place in 1841, when a special train took 570 people from Leicester to attend a Temperance meeting in Loughborough. By the end of the century, when the grandson cashed to buy a sporting estate and build Sennowe, the firm had developed highly profitable banking interests through investing the large sums left with it, interest free, for travellers’ cheques. Thomas Cook of Sennowe described himself as a banker, not travel agent. A painting shows him on the box of a carriage driving horses four-in-hand through the park. It is the image of a man who enjoyed life.

Cook’s architect was Skipper of Norwich, who had a genius for flamboyant effects. Unusually for an Edwardian house, Sennowe not only survives, due to the love and care of successive generations of Cooks, but it remains family home. Much of the Edwardian technology that helped run the house is still in place, including the centralised vacuum cleaning system (a central motor was connected to the different rooms in the house, with openings into which house maids could insert a hose).

In discussing this exuberant country house, John and Clive ponder the glamour of the period in which it was built, evoked by TV dramas such as Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age. For domestic architecture in Britain they were golden years.

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The Romans arrived at Bath in AD43, calling it Sulis Minerva – a combination of the goddess Minerva with the local deity of Sulis. They loved the hot springs, practically the only ones in the country, which gush from the ground at 40 degrees Celsius. Their bathing complex came to include a huge, vaulted structure, which collapsed at some point after the legions left Britannia. It became so derelict that the source of the spring was lost and only discovered again in the 1870s.

Clive and John discuss the origins of England’s most beautiful Georgian city, along with the Abbey that was built immediately next to the baths in the Middle Ages. They analyse the personalities of Ralph Allen, the entrepreneur who owned the quarry that supplied the stone from which Bath is built, and the architect John Wood the Elder, another enterprising man, some of whose theories seem weirder now than they might have done at the time. They set Bath on its way to becoming a social centre, in which invalids could drink the waters in the hope of becoming cured of a wide range of disorders, while their friends and family pursued a round of visits and (sometimes) flirtation. Wood is credited with the English fashion for designing terraces of joined houses that look as though they are really palaces. His son John Wood the Younger designed Royal Crescent of 30 houses, overlooking a landscape park complete with haha – one of the great statements of the Picturesque.