The Crawleys are heading for the French Riviera in the new Downton Abbey film – why not follow in their footsteps…
Downton Abbey: a New Era opens in cinemas on Friday 29 April
Nick Redman - 15 April 2022
Perhaps we ought to pity the infamously vituperative Violet Crawley of Downton Abbey – she of scene-stealing put-downs including “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle class.”
After all, Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham (born 1842) has lived through some grim moments in history: the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the outbreak of the First World War… And that was just the first series, in 2010. Luckily for the Lady, times change, as we get to find out in the aptly titled new film Downton Abbey: a New Era (in cinemas from 29 April).
Picking up where the aristocratic Crawleys’ first big-screen epic ended, it pitches us into a more upbeat period: the Roaring Twenties. Cue a whirlwind of dernier-cri cocktails, jazz on the phonograph and – upstairs and downstairs – some rather ardent encounters. One intriguing plot thread is the pearl-clutching revelation that a mystery man has gifted Smith’s notoriously stiff termagant a place in the Mediterranean sun. “Do I look as if I would turn down a villa in the South of France?” she intones. Not likely – and so we join assorted Crawleys and staff as they depart their home in Yorkshire for picture-perfect Provence to piece together her curious past. What is it with the British and this crinkly stretch of 24-carat coastline, bookended by Cassis in the west and Menton in the east towards Italy?
Take a break and a hire car, make your first base Nice and, as the warmth and wine take effect, you’ll begin to find out. Not for nothing is the gargantuan pedestrian sweep around the city’s Baie des Anges (Bay of Angels) called the Promenade des Anglais – by Victorian times, the well-to-do were wintering here in numbers, the climate offering excellent relief from that most Victorian disease, tuberculosis. TB or not TB… The fit came as well as the feeble. Queen Victoria, for instance, spent her last three winters discovering Nice’s atmospheric Cimiez district. Once you’ve explored the Matisse and Chagall museums, seek out the Excelsior Regina Palace. Built as a hotel to welcome the monarch, it’s now an outrageously handsome apartment block.
From Nice you can head east, along the swooningly high Grande Corniche. Immortalised by Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, it reveals flashes of dazzling Mediterranean one way, evergreens and ice-cream villas the other, folded into the mountain slopes. Or take the looping coast road, glimpsing such stirring place names as Villefranche-sur-Mer and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat as you purr by.
Both routes lead to Menton, sheltered by the high Maritime Alps, where the British aristos settled, building belle-epoque and pseudo-Italianate residences, nurturing lemons, oranges and English gardens bursting with magnolia. Don’t miss Val Rahmeh, aka Menton Botanical Garden, acquired in 1905 by the green-fingered Lord Percy Radcliffe, former governor of Malta; its palms still sway and shimmer today. In Menton, Victoria saw the French Riviera for the first time in 1882, venturing out to see Monaco and what she called its “nasty, disreputable-looking people”. The statue of her in Menton dates from 1960 – a replacement for the original that was tossed into the sea by invading Italians in the Second World War.
Meander west the other way from Nice and, inland, pretty medieval villages speckle the hills, among them lavender-scented Grasse. Down on the coast things take a literary turn. You may have encountered chic resort Juan les Pins – all sands and resiny smells of surrounding pine – in the work of Graham Greene, resident hereabouts for decades. Reaching Antibes, check in at the reassuringly expensive Hôtel du Cap-EdenRoc. Quintessential Riviera territory dating from 1870, it flaunts grand villas, private pools and an al-fresco bar or two for champagne-laced sunsets. Staying here, you’re in F Scott Fitzgerald territory. The American in southern-French exile co-opted the place as the Hotel des Etrangers in Tender is the Night, his last novel – he began working on it in 1925, around the same time as the Crawleys from Downton Abbey hit the south of France.
Continuing west, past evocatively named classics including Cannes, Saint Raphaël and Fréjus, the route dissolves into the département of Var. Here, inland from Saint-Tropez and the Côte d’Azur, the forest-clad Massif des Maures rises in landscapes of oak and chestnut. In Var you can visit the oldest vineyards in France.
Finally, if you’ve got your sat-nav suitably tuned, a beautiful villa, Rocabella, should emerge, in the coastal commune of Le Pradet, not far from Toulon. Look familiar, with its creamy belle epoque façade and lush parkland? It will one you’ve seen the new film – it’s the Countess of Grantham’s very own Villa of the Doves. And how’s this for a happy ending? Anyone can rent it, all fondant pink walls, swirling staircase and Napoleonic-grand bedrooms. Quite what the great Lady would make of holidaymakers lounging in her treasured new premises one can only imagine – but a withering line of hers about the general inconvenience of visitors springs to mind: “No guest should be admitted without the date of their departure settled…”
Perhaps we ought to pity the infamously vituperative Violet Crawley of Downton Abbey – she of scene-stealing put-downs including “Don’t be defeatist, dear, it’s very middle class.”
After all, Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess of Grantham (born 1842) has lived through some grim moments in history: the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the outbreak of the First World War… And that was just the first series, in 2010. Luckily for the Lady, times change, as we get to find out in the aptly titled new film Downton Abbey: a New Era (in cinemas from 29 April).
Picking up where the aristocratic Crawleys’ first big-screen epic ended, it pitches us into a more upbeat period: the Roaring Twenties. Cue a whirlwind of dernier-cri cocktails, jazz on the phonograph and – upstairs and downstairs – some rather ardent encounters. One intriguing plot thread is the pearl-clutching revelation that a mystery man has gifted Smith’s notoriously stiff termagant a place in the Mediterranean sun. “Do I look as if I would turn down a villa in the South of France?” she intones. Not likely – and so we join assorted Crawleys and staff as they depart their home in Yorkshire for picture-perfect Provence to piece together her curious past. What is it with the British and this crinkly stretch of 24-carat coastline, bookended by Cassis in the west and Menton in the east towards Italy?
Take a break and a hire car, make your first base Nice and, as the warmth and wine take effect, you’ll begin to find out. Not for nothing is the gargantuan pedestrian sweep around the city’s Baie des Anges (Bay of Angels) called the Promenade des Anglais – by Victorian times, the well-to-do were wintering here in numbers, the climate offering excellent relief from that most Victorian disease, tuberculosis. TB or not TB… The fit came as well as the feeble. Queen Victoria, for instance, spent her last three winters discovering Nice’s atmospheric Cimiez district. Once you’ve explored the Matisse and Chagall museums, seek out the Excelsior Regina Palace. Built as a hotel to welcome the monarch, it’s now an outrageously handsome apartment block.
From Nice you can head east, along the swooningly high Grande Corniche. Immortalised by Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, it reveals flashes of dazzling Mediterranean one way, evergreens and ice-cream villas the other, folded into the mountain slopes. Or take the looping coast road, glimpsing such stirring place names as Villefranche-sur-Mer and Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat as you purr by.
Both routes lead to Menton, sheltered by the high Maritime Alps, where the British aristos settled, building belle-epoque and pseudo-Italianate residences, nurturing lemons, oranges and English gardens bursting with magnolia. Don’t miss Val Rahmeh, aka Menton Botanical Garden, acquired in 1905 by the green-fingered Lord Percy Radcliffe, former governor of Malta; its palms still sway and shimmer today. In Menton, Victoria saw the French Riviera for the first time in 1882, venturing out to see Monaco and what she called its “nasty, disreputable-looking people”. The statue of her in Menton dates from 1960 – a replacement for the original that was tossed into the sea by invading Italians in the Second World War.
Meander west the other way from Nice and, inland, pretty medieval villages speckle the hills, among them lavender-scented Grasse. Down on the coast things take a literary turn. You may have encountered chic resort Juan les Pins – all sands and resiny smells of surrounding pine – in the work of Graham Greene, resident hereabouts for decades. Reaching Antibes, check in at the reassuringly expensive Hôtel du Cap-EdenRoc. Quintessential Riviera territory dating from 1870, it flaunts grand villas, private pools and an al-fresco bar or two for champagne-laced sunsets. Staying here, you’re in F Scott Fitzgerald territory. The American in southern-French exile co-opted the place as the Hotel des Etrangers in Tender is the Night, his last novel – he began working on it in 1925, around the same time as the Crawleys from Downton Abbey hit the south of France.
Continuing west, past evocatively named classics including Cannes, Saint Raphaël and Fréjus, the route dissolves into the département of Var. Here, inland from Saint-Tropez and the Côte d’Azur, the forest-clad Massif des Maures rises in landscapes of oak and chestnut. In Var you can visit the oldest vineyards in France.
Finally, if you’ve got your sat-nav suitably tuned, a beautiful villa, Rocabella, should emerge, in the coastal commune of Le Pradet, not far from Toulon. Look familiar, with its creamy belle epoque façade and lush parkland? It will one you’ve seen the new film – it’s the Countess of Grantham’s very own Villa of the Doves. And how’s this for a happy ending? Anyone can rent it, all fondant pink walls, swirling staircase and Napoleonic-grand bedrooms. Quite what the great Lady would make of holidaymakers lounging in her treasured new premises one can only imagine – but a withering line of hers about the general inconvenience of visitors springs to mind: “No guest should be admitted without the date of their departure settled…”
NICK REDMAN