Chris Steele-Perkins’s A Place in the Country follows a full year at Holkham, a 23,000-acre estate on the Norfolk coast whose history reaches back to the eighteenth century. Rather than treating the English country house as a sealed architectural relic, the photographer considers the estate as a functioning contemporary institution: family home, workplace, farm, business, venue and community.

The range of activity is central to the book’s account. Hunting and shooting appear alongside concerts and weddings; traditional estate life coexists with holiday-caravan rentals and sales. Steele-Perkins also turns his attention to the groups of workers responsible for Holkham’s daily operation. This breadth shifts the emphasis away from the great house alone and toward the network of labour, ceremony, commerce and land that sustains it.

Steele-Perkins was particularly interested in the friction between Holkham’s present reality and the familiar image of the country estate inherited from novels, historical films and television dramas. Those fictions commonly direct attention toward a vanished social order. His year-long study instead asks how such an estate continues, accommodating inherited customs and contemporary enterprise while remaining a lived-in family residence. The result is neither simply an architectural survey nor a specialist study of gardens, hunting or collections, but a more encompassing social portrait.

Published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in 2015, the 120-page hardcover belongs within Steele-Perkins’s sustained photographic engagement with Britain. For collectors of documentary photography, British social history and representations of class, its interest lies in the specificity and scope of the project: one defined place observed across the cycle of a year, with ceremonial surfaces set beside the people and systems that keep the estate active. It offers a measured counterpoint to the country-house mythology that continues to shape how these institutions are imagined.