After the turkey, chocolates and mince pies comes lusciously escapist TV and this year, for country house lovers, the outstanding original series was surely Netflix’s Bridgerton.
If you were expecting historical drama, intellectual literary interpretation or historically appropriate language, this adaptation of a novel by American author Julia Quinn, will have disappointed. But if you were in that post-feast state of indolent tipsiness where only romantic escapism will do, Bridgerton was perfect fare. Historically accurate it was not, but if you could turn a blind eye to the jangling colours, the 21st century sentiments and the brilliantly blooming wisteria everywhere (in 1813?!), you were in for a treat. Focussing as much on lust as love this colourful bonk-fest is irresistibly contemporary. Best of all, Bridgerton is truly colour blind. How nice to find, rather than dropping in the occasional black maid to jerk your reality, here it really didn’t matter what shade of skin the characters had. Perhaps using the fashionable rumour that Queen Charlotte had black ancestry, writer Chris van Dusen has given us a Regency that is refreshing forward looking.
For once too, the interiors were as lush as the drama. We are used to the choice of cool classical interiors as the backdrop to Georgian/Regency dramas – try any Jane Austen adaptation. Bridgerton producer Shonda Rhimes, whose name is legend to lovers of long-running series Grey’s Anatomy, fell headlong for full-on Baroque spectacle. If you were going for the most eye wateringly gorgeous country house locations in Britain, any list should include Wilton House in Wiltshire and Castle Howard in Yorkshire. And here we are, a regency-ish Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel) sits in state in front of the fabulous Van Dyck of the Herbert family in the Double Cube Room at Wilton House designed by Inigo Jones in the 1653. Perhaps Britain’s most jaw dropping interior. Then, hey presto, when the Duke (Rege-Jean Page) and Duchess (Phoebe Dynevor) pop off to the Duke’s country house, there they are mounting the steps and swirling around the glorious central hall of Castle Howard, the product of playwright Sir John Vanbrugh’s architectural genius in 1700.
They even managed to have sex in Castle Howard’s Temple of the Four Winds - if this isn’t already one of your favourite fantasies, just add it now. More over-the-top architecture came two hundred years later with the influx of dubious taste and extravagance that came with new money under Victoria. The sweeping staircase at the Bridgerton’s London house is actually at Halton House in Wiltshire, where surely only Rothschild millions could have realised a central stairway of such Hollywood proportions. The French chateau-style mansion was built as a rival for Waddesdon Manor by banker, Alfred de Rothschild, in the 1880s in what became known as ‘le gout Rothschild’. Join the RAF if you want to float down those steps; it’s an RAF station due to be decommissioned in 2022.
Watch Bridgerton and you can’t help playing the location game and trying to place every scene in its rightful spot. Leigh Court, near Bristol, a proper Regency house built in 1814 by Thomas Hoppner for banker, Philips Miles, provides many of the fancier gilded interiors but you need to watch carefully to see just how many locations were used in this series.
Off the Duke and Duchess go to their London house to trot through Robert Adam’s 1762 black and white entrance hall at Syon Park, Brentford. The Chinese Bridge at Painshill Landscape Garden in Surrey was unmistakable in the picnic scene at the ‘Botanic Gardens’, the colonnade at the Queen’s House in Greenwich stood in for a London street and the Temple of Venus at Stowe in Buckinghamshire for Vauxhall Gardens. Rangers' House in Greenwich provided the Bridgerton's front door adorned with that as-yet-unkown wisteria. Easier to spot were scenes filmed at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, the Great Hall floor, Tapestry Room and gilded ceiling in the Long Gallery are just too distinctive. Meanwhile, the lovely Palladian villa which is now Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, but which started out as a hotel in 1794, made an elegant home for Lady Danbury, just one of Bath’s many date appropriate exteriors.
One stupendous baroque interior was missing - the Heaven and Hell rooms at Burghley House. You’ll remember how the writhing fleshiness of the murals made such a startling contrast to the upright, uptight figure of Lady Catherine de Burgh in Joe Wright’s film of Pride and Prejudice. Let’s hope that Shonda Rhimes is keeping this one up her sleeve for a future series.
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