Fact and fantasy

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.