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Podcast: Arts & Ideas
Episode: The Strange Case of the Huge Country Pile
Description: Nosing around Osterley House, currently owned and run by the National Trust, Matthew Sweet and guests discuss our enduring fascination with the grand country estate.Countless stories, films and plays are set in the rarefied and actually very rare setting of the country estate, a world of valets and scullery maids, viscounts and self-mades, Kind Hearts and Coronets. This year has seen the TV series Downtown Abbey become a film. Every weekend hundreds of thousands of us visit the former homes of the 1% to gawp at the gardens and taste the tea. Have they become a place...