‘Between the Grand Tour and the Sublime Sea: Thomas Coke and William Kent at Holkham’ is a refereed article, which will be published in The Journal of Architecture in 2012. Holkham is one of the best-known eighteenth-century English estates. Acknowledging Coke and Kent’s travels on the Grand Tour, previous studies have underestimated the significance of the estate’s coastal location and assumed that the delayed construction of Holkham Hall was merely due to Coke’s financial difficulties. Instead, in suggesting that the landscape and garden buildings may have been consciously created before the house, this text considers the estate as a dialogue between the south—culture—and the north—nature—and as a negotiation between two evolving and interdependent philosophical traditions: the Enlightenment and Romanticism. A burgeoning Romanticism was particularly apparent due to the adjacent sea.