WORK

In 2025 Clive was honoured to receive the Board of Directors’ Award from the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art at the Arthur Ross Awards in New York.

One of Clive’s most recent ventures is the podcast ‘Your Places or Mine’ (ypompod), in which he and John Goodall, architectural editor of Country Life, discuss the different places that they have visited - their architecture, the stories behind them and just about anything else. Clive himself worked on Country Life for many years, 13 of them being spent as editor of the magazine.

He is now publisher of Triglyph Books, the publishing house that he founded with photographer Dylan Thomas in 2019. His most recent book is King Charles III: 40 Years of Architecture, published by Triglyph: a tribute to the King’s long-standing passion for architecture, seen in the numerous causes he has championed as well as the model development undertaken by the Duchy of Cornwall while he was Prince of Wales.

Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect?, published by Triglyph Books in 2023, is the product of a lifelong engagement with the subject. It brings new insights to Lutyens’s life and work, as well as important new research.

In 2021, The Story of the Country House (Yale University Press) provided a short narrative history based on decades of writing about country houses. Reviews can be seen below.

Clive’s first novel is The Birdcage, published by Sandstone Press, which appeared in 2012. Set in Salonika during the First World War, it evolved out of the letters, diaries and memoirs that he read while researching his book War Memorial. 

Having directed an architectural summer school for the University of Buckingham in 2019, he became instrumental in establishing the Ax:son Johnson Centre for the Study of Classical Architecture at Downing College, Cambridge, which opened in 2021.

Clive often writes about issues concerning the countryside, planning, the provision of new homes and British history.

HOME

Married to Naomi, who is a publisher, with three sons, William, Johnny and Charlie (sometimes known as Jojo), Clive divides his time between Pimlico, in central London, and Ramsgate, on the Kent coast.

Clive loves all the arts. He also likes gardening. He sometimes cooks — not very well but he enjoys the pleasures of the table. He travels quite a lot. 'I am lucky,' he says. 'My working life is organised around all the things I adore.' He wrote A Horse in the Country about his (once) budding equestrian life but is now safely back on two feet. In another existence he would like to be an opera singer, a competent chef or William Cobbett.