LOCATIONS FEATURED IN THE "MIDSOMER MURDERS" TV SERIES©

This much-loved British TV series for over 20 years is currently seen worldwide in over 200 countries. The love affair with this intriguing murder mystery series is not at all surprising.  Fans of the long-running 'Midsomer Murders' are treated to weekly "whodunits" presented in a perfect combination of drama, dark humour, clever well-written stories, interesting characters and some very outrageous methods of "doing someone in", such as by being shot at by catapulted bottles of wine, drowning in a silo of fermenting beer or being crushed by heavy rounds of aging cheese -- all set in the beautiful British countryside in South Oxfordshire -- and often accompanied by visits to the local pub for "a pint" or having a cup of tea served in fine china in the drawing room of a manor house.  From local pubs to village greens, and from churchyards to country manors and estates, here are a few fan favourite locations.

MAPLEDURHAM HOUSE.   A  murder mystery can benefit from having a country house, and Mapleduram House is a perfect setting. Still a family residence to this day, it has appeared in several episodes of "Midsomer Murders" over the years in various guises, including as a health spa.  It has several buildings on site, some dating back nearly 400 years, including the last commercially-working watermill on the River Thames. 

CHINNOR.  Various areas in and around Chinnor, including the Railway Station, have been used as locations in "Midsomer Murders", most particularly in the episodes entitled "The Made to  Measure Murders" and "Death in a Chocolate Box".   Parts of St. Andrews Church in Chinnor (pictured here) date back to the 12th and 13th Centuries. Historic records reveal references to Chinnor going even further to King Edward the Confessor, a Saxon who ruled England during the 11th Century from 1042 until the Norman Conquest in 1066.


WARBOROUGH.  Warborough is home to seven locations that appear in the "Midsomer Murders" TV series. Villages in the South Oxfordshire part of England often have a village green on which cricket matches, annual fetes and historical reenactments are held, and also generally have a cozy local pub which is a regular meeting place for locals.

LONG CRENDON.  Filled with an abundance of thatch-roofed cottages along its famous High Street and a 15th century courthouse, Long Crendon has been featured numerous times in "Midsomer Murders".  Long Crendon or simply Crendon, as it was known in the Middle Ages, has a long archaeological history. At Church End a concentration of artifacts from the Iron Age, Roman and Saxon periods have been unearthed.  The Courthouse near the Church dates from about 1485 and provided accommodation on the ground floor for the poor and on the upper floor for the meetings of the manorial court. 

"Midsomer Murders" currently in its 21st Season, has amassed literally legions of fans, created enormous tourism interest in South Oxfordshire to walk in the intrepid footsteps of DCI Tom Barnaby and later on in the series, in the footsteps of his very capable cousin from Brighton, DCI John Barnaby, and has made "household names" of many of the heretofore "only primarily known in Britain" actors.  Viewers who are diehard fans immensely enjoyed "Sykes", often fondly called "Syksie", the terrier-mix who barked in his retirement notice and hung up his leash back in 2016 after being a "scene stealer" and a bit of comic relief for several Seasons as DCI John Barnaby's family dog.  

Although the idyllic villages in "Midsomer Murders" have fictional names, it only takes a little bit of sleuthing on the internet to find the actual locations to visit and to have a pint at the local pub or to take a guided tour of a local manor house. 

For more photos of memorable and popular locations from "Midsomer Murders", link to: https://www.visitbritain.com/gb/en/top-10-midsomer-murders-locations for Mark Pawlak's article of March 26, 2019.

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THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE KIMBELL ART MUSEUM in FT. WORTH, TEXAS©

Exhibit Space:  Louis Kahn Building

Exterior: Renzo Piano Pavilion

The Kimbell Art Museum officially opened on October 4, 1972. 



The Kimbell Art Foundation which owns and operates the Museum had been established in 1936 by Kay and Velma Kimbell, together with Kay’s sister and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Coleman Carter. 

Early on, the Foundation collected mostly British and French portraits of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

"The Kimbell", as the Museum is fondly known, consists of two separate buildings, each designed and constructed during different decades by different world-renowned architects, namely Louis Kahn and Renzo Piano.  

The Kimbell Art Museum’s original building designed by Louis I. Kahn has become a mecca of modern architecture. Kahn designed a building in which “light is the theme.” Natural light enters through narrow plexiglass skylights along the top of cycloid barrel vaults and is diffused by wing-shaped pierced-aluminum reflectors that hang below.  

Surrounded by elms and red oaks, Renzo Piano’s colonnaded pavilion, completed in 2013,  stands as an expression of simplicity and lightness—glass, concrete, and wood—some sixty-five yards across the tree-lined pathway to the west of Louis I. Kahn’s signature cycloid-­vaulted museum of 1972.   

For more information about each of the two Exhibition spaces at The Kimbell, visit the  Museum's  Website at: https://www.kimbellart.org/art-architecture/architecture


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