Martin Wainright Says One Last Thing...

Above: Martin Wainwright

But it had to be kept quiet, as I recall, because of complications involving central Government funding and local council finance. The other cause for thought is the name itself which is replicated more famously at Birstall in The Red House where the Taylor family lived, the great friends of the Bronte sisters, especially Charlotte. Mr Taylor, a textile manufacturer and banker, was the original of Hiram Yorke whose characteristics, set out in chapter four of Shirley, are the best description of a Yorkshireman or woman that I have ever read.

Both places are called The Red House because their brick stands out in a predominantly stone landscape, a bright daub of colour on a grey palette. In art classes at school we were always told that the great painters do this, especially in landscapes. There is a streak of red on the horse tackle in Constable's Haywain (a painting I have always been fond of because it is invaluable when I have to explain the origins of my name). The principle works even better when taken to extremes. Do you know the Newlands Valley in the Lake District and its famous Purple House?

The Lakes are so beautiful and their natural colours so ravishing that it is quite an achievement for something manmade to add to the overall glory. The Purple House does. I will never forget rounding a steep bend on the narrow road from Buttermere to Keswick and seeing this extraordinary thing: a clapboard, tall, New England-style house painted in one of the few colours missing from the scenery. Bright, vivid, in-your-face purple. It has fallen on hard times recently; demolition has been talked about. But its extraordinary, Bohemian history is all on the internet, with accompanying pictures, and well worth looking up.

These exceptions prove that obvious but always interesting rule about our landscape: the way its appearance is dictated by the local building materials. I went to Fountains Abbey on Boxing Day, on the annual walk from Ripon Cathedral which I can't recommend too highly as a Yorkshire experience. One of the striking sights en route, in the lovely narrow valley of the Skell, is the omnipresence of very high quality stone.

The hillsides are gouged out by a succession of quarries whose material was cut and dressed on the spot and assembled into the abbey, less than a hundred yards away. Ditto with the limestone at Roche on Martin Wainwright. Photograph: Justin Slee One last thing... By Martin Wainwright I was once sworn to secrecy about a story that they were secretly supplying Brighton and Hove with bedding plants; an excellent piece of Northern aid to the less fortunate South the edge of Rotherham.

For this reason, you are unlikely to find many 'The Red Houses' in the East Riding, where the absence of good building stone means that almost everything is redbrick. Although, such statements can be ambushed by the unexpected reasons which sometimes prove to lie behind names. The most famous 'colour house' in the world, Washington's White House where United States presidents have lived since 1800, takes its name from the curious mixture of lime, lead, rice glue and casein (a component of milk and cheese used in mural paint) with which its walls are coated.

Underneath it's sandstone: the Pale Yellow House if the truth was revealed. It's the same with greenhouses, a word sadly in retreat before its posher rival 'conservatory'. Part of childhood for me, and I suspect for many others, was spent wondering idly why 'green' houses were always white. One answer has traditionally been that they are full of green inside or that they keep their contents green rather than bitten brown by frost. But I discovered the real reason on the only visit I have made to Calcutta.

The botanical gardens there are a wonder, both in horticultural terms and as a monument to Imperial India, and their enormous greenhouses are indeed green. The glass is coated with a super-dense version of that spray-green which dedicated gardeners use here to protect plants from too much heat in summer; something else which is in retreat, alas, because conservatories tend to go for retractable blinds.

 There may be another Red House in store for us in Yorkshire, though. I wonder if our way with words will lead to the name being given to the recently-built home in Weetwood which is made in part of straw bales. I remember researching this because in the process I came across an all-women building firm with the brilliant name of Amazon Nails (say it aloud a couple of times). But the Straw House could easily become the Reed House and thus the Red House in due course.