The Attingham Summer School 2026

The 73rd Attingham Summer School, a 16-day residential course directed by David Adshead and Tessa Wild, will visit country houses in Sussex, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. From West Dean, our first base, we will study, amongst other houses and gardens: Petworth House, where the patronage of great British artists such as Turner and Flaxman enrich its Baroque interiors; Parham, a fine Elizabethan house in an unrivalled setting; and Standen, an Arts and Crafts reinterpretation of the country house.

In the Midlands, a series of related houses will be examined: Hardwick Hall, unique amongst Elizabethan houses for its survival of late 16th-century decoration and contents; Bolsover Castle, a Jacobean masque setting frozen in stone; and Chatsworth, where the collections and gardens of the Cavendishes and Dukes of Devonshire span more than four centuries. Other highlights include Robert Adam’s crisp neo-Classical interior and Fishing Pavilion at Kedleston Hall.

The final part of the course will focus on the rich estates and collections of Oxfordshire. Our itinerary will include Broughton Castle, a moated and fortified manor house with a chapel first consecrated for Christian worship in 1331, and Buscot Park, with its superb collection with works by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Rubens, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and furniture by Robert Adam and Thomas Hope. While at Buscot we will have the opportunity to explore one of the country’s finest water gardens, designed by Harold Peto in 1904 and extended from 1911-13, and a surviving country house theatre created in 1936 for the 2nd Lord Faringdon. We will also visit the much more modest 17th century stone-built, Kelmscott Manor, the beloved country home of William Morris and his family, and the place that he described as ‘Heaven on Earth’.

Image: Buscot Park, Faringdon, Oxfordshire, courtesy of The Faringdon Collection.