Festival of Speed is our longest-standing Motorsport event, starting in 1993 when it opened to 25,00 people. We were expecting 2000!
Legend of Goodwood's golden racing era and Le Mans winner Roy Salvadori once famously said "give me Goodwood on a summer's day and you can forget the rest".
Whoa Simon! A horse so determined and headstrong, he not only won the 1883 Goodwood Cup by 20 lengths, but couldn't be stopped and carried on running over the top of Trundle hill
The first public race meeting took place in 1802 and, through the nineteenth century, ‘Glorious Goodwood,’ as the press named it, became a highlight of the summer season
Our gin uses wild-grown botanicals sourced from the estate, and is distilled with mineral water naturally chalk-filtered through the South Downs.
The Motor Circuit was known as RAF Westhampnett, active from 1940 to 1946 as a Battle of Britain station.
"En la rose je fleurie" or "Like the rose, I flourish" is part of the Richmond coat of Arms and motto
The bricks lining the Festival of Speed startline are 100 years old and a gift from the Indianapolis Speedway "Brickyard" in 2011 to mark their centenary event!
Mattresses and eiderdowns are stuffed with wool from the Goodwood Estate.
Flying jetpacks doesn't have to just be a spectator sport at FOS, you can have a go at our very own Aerodrome!
Our replica of the famous motor show showcases the "cars of the future" in true Revival style
Sir Stirling Moss was one of the founding patrons of the Festival of Speed, and a regular competitor at the Revival.
From 2005 to present there has been a demonstration area for the rally cars at the top of the hill
Sir Stirling Moss was one of the founding patrons of the Festival of Speed, and a regular competitor at the Revival.
Whoa Simon! A horse so determined and headstrong, he not only won the 1883 Goodwood Cup by 20 lengths, but couldn't be stopped and carried on running over the top of Trundle hill
Leading women of business, sport, fashion and media, take part in one of the most exciting horseracing events in the world.
The first public race meeting took place in 1802 and, through the nineteenth century, ‘Glorious Goodwood,’ as the press named it, became a highlight of the summer season
Leading women of business, sport, fashion and media, take part in one of the most exciting horseracing events in the world.
One Summer, King Edward VII turned his back on the traditional morning suit, and donned a linen suit and Panama hat. Thus the Glorious Goodwood trend was born.
The first public race meeting took place in 1802 and, through the nineteenth century, ‘Glorious Goodwood,’ as the press named it, became a highlight of the summer season
For the last two years, 5,800 bales have been recylced into the biomass energy centre to be used for energy generation
Flying jetpacks doesn't have to just be a spectator sport at FOS, you can have a go at our very own Aerodrome!
The first ever round of golf played at Goodwood was in 1914 when the 6th Duke of Richmond opened the course on the Downs above Goodwood House.
Flying training began at Goodwood in 1940 when pilots were taught operational flying techniques in Hurricanes and Spitfires.
The first ever round of golf played at Goodwood was in 1914 when the 6th Duke of Richmond opened the course on the Downs above Goodwood House.
The first ever round of golf played at Goodwood was in 1914 when the 6th Duke of Richmond opened the course on the Downs above Goodwood House.
The iconic spitfire covered almost 43,000 kilometres and visited over 20 countries on its epic journey and currently resides at our Aerodrome.
The first thing ever dropped at Goodwood was a cuddly elephant which landed in 1932 just as the 9th Duke of Richmonds passion for flying was taking off.
After a fire in 1791 at Richmond House in Whitehall, London, James Wyatt added two great wings to showcase the saved collection at Goodwood. To give unity to the two new wings, Wyatt added copper-domed turrets framing each façade.
Ensure you take a little time out together to pause and take in the celebration of all the hard work you put in will be a treasured memory.
Ensure you take a little time out together to pause and take in the celebration of all the hard work you put in will be a treasured memory.
The first ever horsebox was used from Goodwood to Doncaster for the 1836 St. Leger. Elis arrived fresh and easily won his owner a £12k bet.
One of the greatest golfers of all time, James Braid designed Goodwood’s iconic Downland course, opened in 1914.
The famous fighter ace, who flew his last sortie from Goodwood Aerodrome, formerly RAF Westhampnett has a statue in his honor within the airfield.
"En la rose je fleurie" or "Like the rose, I flourish" is part of the Richmond coat of Arms and motto
Our gin uses wild-grown botanicals sourced from the estate, and is distilled with mineral water naturally chalk-filtered through the South Downs.
Goodwood’s pigs are a mix of two rare breeds (Gloucester Old Spots and Saddlebacks) plus the Large White Boar.
Easy boy! The charismatic Farnham Flyer loved to celebrate every win with a pint of beer. His Boxer dog, Grogger, did too and had a tendancy to steal sips straight from the glass.
A 20m woodland rue, from Halnaker to Lavant, was planted by our forestry teams & volunteers, featuring native species like oak, beech, & hornbeam
The Motor Circuit was known as RAF Westhampnett, active from 1940 to 1946 as a Battle of Britain station.
Testament to the 19th-century fascination with ancient Egypt and decorative opulence. The room is richly detailed with gilded cartouches, sphinxes, birds and crocodiles.
Whoa Simon! A horse so determined and headstrong, he not only won the 1883 Goodwood Cup by 20 lengths, but couldn't be stopped and carried on running over the top of Trundle hill
The influence of the Bauhaus art school, founded 100 years ago in Weimar, Germany, can be seen the world over – those cool, modernist lines even made it to the Sussex coast.
Words by Stephen Bayley
Goodwood Magazine
Goodwood House
Professor Otto Silenus made his first appearance in this country in 1928 on the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. To Waugh, he was a ridiculous figure of fun: a dementedly serious and humourless German architect, commissioned by socialite Margot Beste-Chetwynde to design “something clean and square”. He had attracted her attention when his designs for a chewing-gum factory in Hungary, never built, had been reproduced in a progressive quarterly. Waugh facetiously explains Silenus’ design philosophy: “The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from consideration of form.” Soon after her house was built, a horrified Mrs Beste-Chetwynde promptly demolished it.
The second appearance of Professor Silenus was on 18 October 1934 when Walter Gropius, escaping Nazi Germany, arrived at Victoria Station. For Gropius was almost certainly Waugh’s model. He was the director of the Bauhaus, an art school, founded in Weimar in 1919, which then moved to a remarkable building Gropius designed in Dessau, a small town in Saxony-Anhalt. Shut down there by restive authorities concerned about its “bolshevism”, the Bauhaus then moved briefly to a disused factory in Berlin before the Gauleiters finally put the jackboot in. That was 1933.
The Bauhaus was not just a school, it was an idea. And that idea was, largely, based on a reverence for the machine in the same way Renaissance architects had revered God. Gropius was an officer-class Prussian who came from a family line of architects. His Bauhaus was intended to make “art and technology a new unity”. It was to realise contemporary possibilities to the full – at least as they were understood in the 1920s. To suggest something of Gropius’ austere swagger, unusual vision and mighty confidence, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky were members of his staff.
Earl De La Warr was a socialist with a taste for statement staircases, industrial lighting, optimism and white render
In London, Gropius had an extraordinary welcoming committee. Philip Morton Shand translated his first lecture at RIBA (the Royal Institute of British Architecture). Shand was a booster of modernism and a much-married oenophile. And with a nice irony – since her husband is so virulently anti-modern – he was Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall’s grandfather. Nikolaus Pevsner was in the audience. The year after his 1934 lecture, Gropius published The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. The introduction was by Frank Pick, the inspired public administrator who had made London Transport an international exemplar of modernism. Fair to say he was a Gropius fanboy.
Jack Pritchard was in the audience too. He was the plywood entrepreneur whose Isokon Flats in Hampstead became Gropius’ London home. The Isokon building was designed by a buccaneering expatriate Canadian architect called Wells Coates. It was the first significant Bauhaus inspired building in Britain: a social laboratory, undeniably elitist but communal at the same time. Agatha Christie was another resident and Gropius was soon accustomed to meeting the likes of Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth at the Isokon’s bar, the Isobar.
For the three years he was in London, Gropius was homesick and restless, building little – this hiatus before his eventual move to America is described in Alan Powers’ Bauhaus Goes West, which was published in February of this year, the centenary of Bauhaus’ founding. He did have a hand in two houses built during this time: one in Shipbourne, Kent, for Jack Donaldson, a wealthy socialist who later became prominent in Callaghan’s government, and another at 66 Old Church Street, Chelsea (recently on sale for £45m) for Benn Levy, a Hitchcock scriptwriter and Labour MP. The latter is still there but was controversially “restored” in 1969.
The spy Anthony Blunt complained in The Spectator that Gropius’ domestic architecture was not “homey”, but John Betjeman, flirting briefly with modernism, defended it, saying Britain needed a Bauhaus all of its own. It never got one, but Gropius did design Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire, open in 1939, a utopian initiative to raise the school-leaving age to 19.
Chelsea’s Peter Jones department store does not have Gropius’ name in the credits, but it is certain he influenced its design since he became close to its architect, the affable head of Liverpool School of Architecture, Sir Charles Reilly. Otherwise, the immediate evidence of Bauhaus building in Britain is surprisingly small, although its esoteric influence was eventually enormous.
If all my friends of the present and past would get together in a little fiesta – à la Bauhaus – drinking, laughing, loving. Then I shall surely join in, more than in life.
At East Preston in West Sussex, Marcel Breuer built Sea Lane House in 1936. Breuer was the Bauhausmeister who designed the famous tubular steel “Bauhaus chair”, popularised by Habitat. A hymn to contemporary living, one wing was raised on pilotis and the entire property was dedicated to the therapeutic effects of sun worship.
Also in Sussex was the De La Warr Pavilion in the town of Bexhill-on-sea, designed by Erich Mendelsohn, who also designed a house next to Gropius’ in Chelsea. Earl De La Warr was a committed socialist with a taste for heliotherapy – as well as Vitrolite opaque glass, statement staircases, industrial lighting, optimism and white render.
In 1937 Silenus/Gropius left for America. His greatest monument in New York was the bullying Pan Am (now MetLife) Building of 1963, a dark presence straddling Park Avenue. A more successful testament to the Bauhaus aesthetic is the nearby Seagram Building by his colleague, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Indeed, the big irony of the socialist Bauhaus was that its greatest monument was in capitalist America. Similarly, Gropius’ last building in London was the Playboy Club on Park Lane of 1969.
Waugh was not the only writer to satirise Gropius. In 1981 Tom Wolfe published From Bauhaus to Our House – a funny, but supercilious, account of Bauhaus influence. Taking his cue, perhaps, from that Hungarian chewing-gum factory, Wolfe writes that because of the Bauhaus, “Every child goes to school in a building that looks like a duplicating-machine replacement-parts wholesale distribution centre.” Gropius himself wrote his own Testament in 1933, a full 36 years before he died: “It would be beautiful,” he said, “if all my friends of the present and past would get together in a little fiesta – à la Bauhaus – drinking, laughing, loving. Then I shall surely join in, more than in life.” Perhaps in this anniversary year, this great, austere, disciplined, visionary man will get the celebration he always wanted.
This article was taken from the Spring 2019 edition of the Goodwood Magazine.
Goodwood Magazine
Goodwood House