Charles Ryder Sebastian's rooms, the Meadow Building
Book One
The friendship that runs through the whole book begins at Oxford, when a drunken young aristocrat is sick through the narrator's ground-floor window and makes amends the next day with flowers. Sebastian's rooms, high in a heavy Victorian range at Christ Church, become the centre of a charmed undergraduate world of wine, idleness and easy talk.
Book One
inferred Waugh does not name a college, but Sebastian's undergraduate rooms are long identified with the Venetian-Gothic Meadow Building at Christ Church, where Waugh's friend Harold Acton, a partial model for the set, was lodged. Sited on that building.
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Charles Ryder The Botanic Garden, Oxford
Book One
In the first flush of the friendship Sebastian carries the narrator off to the university's old walled garden to look at the ivy, an outing that stands for the whole unhurried, slightly absurd enchantment of that Oxford summer. The garden, founded in 1621 beside the river, is real and open to visitors today.
Book One
explicit Waugh names the Botanical Gardens by the Cherwell explicitly; this is the University of Oxford Botanic Garden, still on Rose Lane.
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Charles Ryder Brideshead (Castle Howard)
Book One
The house that gives the book its title is a vast baroque pile with a domed hall and a fountain, home to the Flytes and to the faith that governs them. The narrator spends an idyllic vacation there and returns years later as an officer billeted in its grounds. Waugh built it mainly from Castle Howard, with the devout Catholic household drawn from Madresfield Court.
Book One
inspired by Brideshead is invented. Its great dome and baroque grandeur draw chiefly on Castle Howard in Yorkshire, sited here; the family's Catholicism and private chapel owe more to Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, the Lygon family seat Waugh knew well.
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Charles Ryder Lord Marchmain's palazzo, Venice
Book One
During the long vacation the two young men travel out to Venice, where Sebastian's exiled father keeps a palazzo and a mistress and lives the expatriate life he has chosen over his wife and religion. The Venetian interlude, all heat and water and easy pleasure, is the high point of the friendship before the shadows gather.
Book One
inferred Waugh sets the scene in a palazzo on the Grand Canal without naming it; this marks a representative point on the canal in Venice, well outside the book's English setting.
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