Britain’s country houses were constantly in the news a generation ago. In 1974 The Destruction of the Country House, an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum curated by Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris, offered a dismal chronicle of the houses that had disappeared in the past century. It proclaimed their importance to the national heritage, boldly urging that country house owners ‘deserve consideration and justice as much as any other group within our society as they struggle to preserve and share with us the creative richness of our heritage’. This invocation bore fruit in the mid-1980s when Kedleston Hall, Calke Abbey and Weston Park, all threatened with dispersal, were preserved by the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
A series of memorable publications including Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House and James Lees-Milne’s diaries heightened interest in the subject. Country houses were a hot topic, not least because of their association with the country-house look of faded grandeur in interior decoration, a style easily recognisable to Spectator readers.
Nowadays, they are not so hot. Relatively little is published about them, and there have been few crises to whip up excitement. A crisis is invaluable: when a big estate like Tyntesfield House is likely to be dispersed, the heritage brigade wheels into action and money is often found to preserve it for the nation. More usually now, hard-pressed owners (usually fiercely loyal to their house) react to financial pressures by exploiting the value of individual works of art from well-provenanced collections, rather than throwing up their hands and selling everything.
Even in difficult times, houses are surviving. In the privately owned sector, the largest estates such as Chatsworth and Castle Howard continue to attract crowds of visitors and only in the next layer of houses do visitor numbers show signs of decline, especially when it rains all summer.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in