A Home for All Seasons

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As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he saw the picture of a past emerge that resonates powerfully with our present. What starts out as a straightforward house history morphs into something else, a wide-ranging meditation on place and past, taking in climate change, rural depopulation, the Reformation and folklore . The author is entitled to his opinion, but I bought the book for the house not an essay on modern climate change, criticism of government officials’ handling of the pandemic, or the merits of socialism.

Engrossingly fusing domestic history, memoir and art, Gavin Plumley’s A Home for All Seasons tells the fascinating story of a couple’s journey of discovering the full past of their ancient Herefordshire house.Keen to fit in, yet sensitive to homophobia, Plumley and his husband soon came up against the harsh realities of life in a rural community. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. It had some interesting details but I didn't enjoy Gavin reading it as there was no shading in his narration. The perfect Christmas present for anyone who has ever been curious about the house they live in and who might (or might not) have lived there before them.

If I’m honest, the art history was less interesting to me than the social history aspect of the book, but it has inspired me to take more interest in historical detail and the bibliography included will be invaluable for this. He also delved extensively into the art of the Tudor period and came across the 16th century immigration issues. His writing style is also top tier: the book is written in a way that is at once conversational, poetic and intellectual. With passion and precision, Gavin Plumley pushes the boundaries of memoir and scholarship and shows that the chronicle of a house can contain the grand history of a whole world as well as the sweet, urgent story of a life: all that intimacy within the vastness of historical time. I almost felt that I had somehow been tricked into reading it by a “false description” given by the publisher and even those who had reviewed and blurbed it.In fact, Pevsner, in a rare burst of enthusiasm, declared it to be one of the prettiest villages in the county, on account of its abundance of black-and-white buildings, ‘hardly disturbed by Georgian brick, though disastrously disturbed by some recent filling stations’. Corvus Atlantic’s commercial fiction list which includes women’s, historical, romance, sci-fi, crime and thriller. Those involved Protestants escaping mainland Europe and the consequent difficulties they had in integrating with the existing population. With ancient beams crossing the ceiling, the date they’d been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries.

Finding the date of construction takes Gavin down many rabbit holes through the seasons, and cycle of the year as well as the historical context of the home from the 1500s and beyond.I don’t know if the filling stations are still disturbing the village, but if they are, there are plenty of compensations: a 14th-century church with, so the story goes, the marks of Cromwellian musket balls still showing in its west door; a spectacular pagoda-like bell house dating back to the 1200s; an early 16th-century market hall; 17th-century almshouses; and streets stacked to the gills with picturesquely wonky black-and-white houses. Features about Gavin’s home and life in Pembridge have also appeared on Inigo, Sphere and in Herefordshire Living. It’s rare that non-fiction has the power to transport you so completely and catch you up in a world that you have never known, and that you never want to leave. A work of non-fiction, it was published by Atlantic Books in hardback and e-book on 2 June 2022 to wide acclaim and then released as an audiobook by W.