Beningbrough

Because we were staying in York yesterday we went to another National Trust place, a few miles out of the city. This was Beningbrough, a place built in the Georgian period. It now acts as home to a large number of portraits, in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery. It’s a rather unusual place, as the portraits are what dominate it: there’s much less furniture and fittings than in many of the NT houses, although there are a couple of very grand beds with their original furnishings. We listened to a lot of info on the audio phone-thingees, which made it more interesting. It’s not a very appealing house, in a way: the grand hall that you first walk into, is three storeys high, and very white and cold. It doesn’t have much of a sense of ever having been lived in, although it passed from one family to another from the time it was built - but it was different families, rather than successive generations, and that may have made a difference.