Looking Ahead by Daniel Franklin

Helen Brocklebank ► Helen Brocklebank is the Chief Executive of Walpole. Immediately before joining Walpole, she ran a content agency for luxury brands, but built her career - as well as her passion for British luxury - in publishing, working on Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE and other iconic media brands. In October 2017, she was named one of Harper’s Bazaar’s 150 Visionary Women. ► A Question of Identity

What does British luxury mean? What is it about the British bit of British luxury that makes it so alluring? Is it tangible things like craftsmanship and creativity, design, quality and attention to detail, service and experience? Or is there a uniquely British sensibility, a spirit; something that’s hard to define or measure, but has to do with national identity, with idiosyncrasy and irreverence, tradition and heritage, mavericks and makers, the creative and the curious?

The 2018 Walpole Yearbook offers some responses to these questions and more. Esquire’s Alex Bilmes, writing on British luxury (see page 20), says that “to be British is to share a collective spirit” and suggests it can mean being “at once a diehard traditionalist and a committed subversive”. Lucia van der Post explores the role cultural heritage plays in setting a luxury agenda, exploring how “the myths of British country-house style have subliminally shaped the aesthetic thinking of much of the nation” (page 30). Guy Salter argues that the craft renaissance in British luxury is symptomatic of “a new, more thoughtful, openminded and knowledgeable consumer mindset” on page 40, and Jessica Fellowes, writer and niece of Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes, asks what makes Americans, the world’s number one luxury consumers, fall forall things British, and why the lessons ►

Helen Brocklebank

The Lion & The Butterfly “Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt to be mystically the same. It is the bridge between future and past.”

George Orwell

Novelist, essayist, journalist, critic