visiting Shaws Corner

After collecting our new pet cow, we went exploring. It turned out that Shaw's Corner, the Arts & Crafts style house where George Bernard Shaw lived, was only 15 minutes drive away.

We really liked the house, it was quite modest compared to the usual National Trust mansions. It was the kind of place you could actually imagine living in comfortably.


From a distance it may have looked reasonably straightforward in layout but it had all these little quirks, unusual little porches and windows jutting out. I especially loved the windows joining onto the chimney:



We're beyond the point of being able to incorporate these sorts of details into Amherst now, but I still like looking at them.

There's one exception however: the notion of a rotating summerhouse. This was quite famous as the place where he wrote a lot of his plays at the end of the garden. It was on a kind of track so he could easily rotate it to get the best of the sunshine. Dave was much taken with it, spending a lot of time peering underneath to try and work out the mechanism.



You can see all the photos I took including the lovely garden here. Sadly there are none of the inside as they don't let you take photos there (and there were too many 'guards' around for me to sneak a few!). But there are lots in the BBC article.