Hello and welcome to the LRB podcast and the first episode of a new short series of close readings, looking at how history was transformed in the romantic period.

I'm Rosemary Hill, and over the four episodes, coming out every other week for the next eight weeks,

my guests and I will be examining how the study of history and attitudes to the past changed radically in the decades after 1789.

We'll be going to Balmoral in the British Museum via Wardour Street, the Bayer Tapestry and the Battlefield of Waterloo.

But we're starting this week with the place, or at least one of the places, where it all began.

Salisbury Cathedral in 1789.

And to help me, I'm joined by Dr Thomas Stammers, Associate Professor of Modern European

Cultural History at Durham University. Hello Tom. Hello, Rosemary. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too.

And I know you're going to want to take us to France in the summer of 1789. But before we go there,

I want to talk about what was happening in Wiltshire in the summer

of 1789 which was that there was a huge row going on at the cathedral at Salisbury Cathedral

and the essence of the row was about the work that was going on inside the cathedral at the behest

of the bishop paid for in part by King George III, and being carried out by James Wyatt, who was a kind of star architect of the day.

And what they were doing was improving the cathedral in line with Georgian neoclassical taste.

So Wyatt was removing medieval tombs, moving the body of St. Osmond, the founder of the

cathedral, of the original cathedral, taking out stained glass, generally kind of lightning and

brightening the interior, whitewashing over the ceiling paintings. And this was pretty much

standard Georgian practice for improvement.

And what was unusual in this case was that a small group of antiquaries,

chiefly Richard Goff, who was the director of the Society of Antiquaries,

actually stood up and said, you shouldn't do this.

And nobody had really taken that line before that you would preserve historic fabric

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