Country Life Magazine

Let’s deal with the price first, because £450 stops people. Country Life is a weekly, and a thick one, so that figure buys you over 50 issues of what is probably the most expensively produced magazine in Britain. Break it down per issue and it’s less than a copy costs at the newsagent, and considerably less than losing a Saturday to driving out and viewing a rectory you were never going to buy anyway.

Which brings us to the property pages, the real reason half the readership subscribes. Country Life has carried the finest country houses for sale since 1897, and flicking through them is a national pastime in itself. Manor houses, farmhouses, estates in Scotland, the occasional castle. Some readers are genuinely in the market. Most are just dreaming with intent, and the magazine has never judged anyone for it.

Around the property sits the rest: serious gardening writing, architecture, art and antiques, rural affairs covered properly rather than sentimentally, and the famous frontispiece portrait that has opened the magazine for over a century. The whole thing is printed on heavy stock and photographed beautifully. Nothing else on our shelves comes close on production.

Who it suits: anyone who lives in the countryside, anyone plotting an escape to it, and as a gift it carries real weight for the person who has everything. Delivered weekly to your door, and we remind you before renewal.