Marching Season
In the battle of the summer festivals, Goodwood and Glasto go neck and neck. Both attract 140,000 visitors each year although we prefer the Kinrara hospitality pavilion to mud. Sorry Dolly. Great view of the house track. A black and white racing check covers the triglyph and plain friezes over the Doric and Ionic columns respectively of the double height portico. Behind the highness of the first floor balustrade stand racing royalty: the Earl of March and Kinrara chatting to Lewis Hamilton.
Goodwood House is the glorious backdrop to the frenetic collision of noise, dust, smell and fast moving visuals that are the Festival of Speed. The principal front has a nine bay centre with five bay wings on either side angled back by 135 degrees. Perhaps three-eighths of a grand hollow octagon five-eighths unexecuted? Joins and ends are punctuated by cylindrical towers with copper domed hats. Provincial facing flint softens James Wyatt’s neoclassical urbaneness. It’s a ‘fur coat’ façade clothing a long skinny building. Stripped of pretension, the rear is an unselfconscious jaunty jumble of Diocletians, Serlianas and Wyatts.
