A QUEER INHERITANCE

Drawn to the land.

Hall, the author of several books on architecture and country houses, delivers an eye-opening account of how queer lives have both shaped and been shaped by the English landscape. Rather than treating Britain’s National Trust properties as static memorials to aristocratic lineage, Hall uncovers a deeper story: These houses, gardens, ruins, and woodlands often became empty spaces onto which queer people projected desire, identity, and reinvention. The Trust’s original vagueness—its mandate to protect “natural beauty” and “historic interest” without specifying why—becomes, in Hall’s telling, a liberating canvas onto which generations inscribed personal meanings, including queer ones. Drawing on his background as architectural editor of Country Life, the author moves with assurance through the Trust’s holdings, from the decayed grandeur of Knole, where Vita Sackville-West first learned the pain of exclusion, to the ruin she later refashioned at Sissinghurst, a masterpiece of queer self-invention. From the coded eroticism of William John Bankes’ correspondence with Lord Byron to Bankes’ transformation of Kingston Lacy while in exile for sodomy, Hall shows how queer desire shaped not just private lives but entire estates. Lamb House in Rye, East Sussex, becomes another touchstone in this emotional geography, absorbing the sensibilities of gay writers such as Henry James and E.F. Benson, each layering new meanings onto its rooms and gardens. The book reaches its philosophical heart with E.M. Forster, whose bequest of Piney Copse embodies his belief in landscape as a place where erotic, ecological, and political freedoms converge. Like Willa Cather wandering Wenlock Edge in search of A.E. Housman’s England, Hall invites us to see the Trust’s holdings as queer topographies—sites of reinvention as vital as any official history.