Glamour or guilt? The perils of marketing the British country house

The most angst-ridden sub-category of the very rich – admittedly a lucky bunch to start with – must surely contain those who have inherited a British country house, along with the exhortation to keep it up. Imagine the anxiety of knowing that one is custodian of a large, crumbling pile of distinguished architecture, stuffed with meaningful antiquities and perpetually besieged by damp, dry rot and taxes. For those of us who are already reliably paralysed by small-scale admin, it would be enough to drive you to drink or worse. In contrast, the landed gentry who survive best in this modern terrain must be energetic, ruthless and ingenious; in all probability possessing similar characteristics to those which propelled their ancestors to social prominence in the first place.

This is the territory of Radio 4’s The Grand House – Boom or Blight?, narrated by the director of the V&A, Tristram Hunt, who says that ‘the purpose of a visit to a country house is under debate like never before’. Well, it is in some quarters: I imagine that a sizeable section of the visiting public is still perfectly happy with an extended gawp at a magnificent house and gardens and a slice of lemon drizzle cake in the café. But the wider ‘cultural conversation’ is certainly increasingly conscious of the often unsavoury sources of wealth which contributed to a fair proportion of such homes, in particular slavery and colonial plunder.

What has helped to preserve Britain’s great houses in the past, however, is the argument that they are irreplaceable repositories of history, architecture, art and craftsmanship. It was another V&A director, Sir Roy Strong, who in 1974 sprang to the defence of country houses after a long period of unchecked destruction. His landmark exhibition, The Destruction of the Country House, simultaneously celebrated what many have called ‘England’s greatest contribution to the visual arts’ and lamented their ongoing ruination, a loss of more than 1,600 properties between 1875 and 1975.