Private Life in Britain's Stately Homes (31 page)

Since the low point between the wars, several things have helped those who inhabit such properties. There is now a range of government grants available, and the value of land has risen. After generations of fighting a rearguard action, owners have adapted to circumstances, and have often been ingenious in finding other sources of income. To avoid inheritance tax, for instance, an owner will often pass the house on to his heir before his death, thus shifting the burden to the next generation and allowing himself the prospect of retirement.

The future, in a country seemingly obsessed with leisure and dismissed by some critics as a ‘historical theme park’ is in making the houses – or rather their grounds – fun to visit. Knebworth’s Dinosaur Trail is simply one of many visitor attractions that can make a country house more like Legoland than the British Museum. This notion has been taken to extremes at one house, the no-longer-inhabited Alton Towers in Staffordshire. Such fairground attractions are unarguably vulgar, but they can always be dismantled by future generations if fashions change or wealth increases, and if they have enabled historic houses to survive in a difficult economic climate, the sacrifice of some dignity will have been worthwhile.

Knebworth, a house in Hertfordshire that has acquired romantic associations because of its Gothic and neo-Gothic architecture and its history as the home of a Victorian novelist (Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1803–73), has been in the Lytton family since 1490. It derives income from visitors, but also from attractions in its grounds (there is a dinosaur park as well as a miniature railway) and from hosting events. There are classic car rallies, and salvage fairs at which the public can pick over architectural curiosities. Most significantly, perhaps, Knebworth has become synonymous with rock concerts – it now styles itself ‘The Stately Home of Rock’ – the first of which took place there in 1974. Its grounds have hosted crowds of over 30,000, assembled to listen to groups like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, Dire Straits and the Beach Boys. The most valuable artefact in the house is apparently not a painting, a sculpture or a volume in the library. It is, according to the present owner, a pair of Mick Jagger’s underpants that were left behind after one such concert, for the Rolling Stones too played there, in 1974. ‘We keep them in the safe,’ he says.

Knebworth, a genuine Gothic house that was twice remodelled in the nineteenth century to make it look
more
Gothic, has a delightfully idiosyncratic, rather mad-scientist appearance. It has caught the eye of cinema location scouts, as interesting-looking houses tend to do, and has appeared to date in fourteen films as well as in television programmes. Some were less serious than others, such as
The Great Muppet Caper
, released in 1981. The house was, however, used as a substitute for Balmoral in
The King’s Speech
(2010) and as ‘stately Wayne Manor’ in
Batman
(1989). It was the major setting for
The Shooting Party
(1985), in which both interiors and exteriors were seen, and – an absolute guarantee of exposure and fame – a location in one of the Harry Potter films (
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
, 2005).

Many country houses have become film locations and, since technology made it possible to shoot inside period buildings instead of creating studio mock-ups (the first to do this was
Barry Lyndon
, made in 1975 and featuring Dublin Castle among other places), this trend has increased. For the Merchant-Ivory production
The Remains of the Day
(1993) the scenes set at ‘Darlington Hall’ were filmed at Dyrham Park in Wiltshire. For another classic country-house story, the murder mystery
Gosford Park
, some exterior scenes were shot at Wrotham Park, Hertfordshire, while indoor filming took place at Syon House in Middlesex, home of the Dukes of Northumberland whose main residence, Alnwick Castle, has also been extensively seen on screen.

Television can also be a godsend to the owners of country houses, as can be seen by the use of Highclere Castle as the location for
Downton Abbey
. Osterley Park, an Adam house in Middlesex, was convenient for both film and television studios, and was used so extensively as a location throughout the 1960s and 70s that audiences became positively bored by the sight of it (it featured, for instance, as Lord Brett Sinclair’s – Roger Moore’s – ancestral home in
The Persuaders
).

Old houses cost more than new ones to maintain and repair. If they are also very big houses, these are even more expensive. In fact the cost is three to four times as much. Flat roofs, whether on Elizabethan Hardwick Hall or twentieth-century Castle Drogo, are extremely expensive to conserve. The materials from which a house is built, though no doubt they reflected considerable prestige at the time, now mean that any faithful restoration can be prohibitively costly. The interior fittings – and one has only to think of the elaborate rococo plasterwork in some saloons or dining rooms – cannot by definition be looked after except by craftspeople skilled in this medium. With furniture it will be the same situation, though at least this can be sold and the problem solved. For houses that suffer terminal decline it is usually a matter of selling the contents first and hanging on to the building itself for as long as possible.

For owners who do not have houses that are sufficiently historic or beautiful enough to attract either the paying public or camera crews, maintenance can be a terrible struggle. Even those with both charm and interest can fall victim to impossibly high running costs. In 2009 Noseley Hall, ancestral home of the Hazlerigg family (which had lived there in unbroken succession since 1419), was put on the market by the current head of the family, even though the grounds included the nearby chapel in which his ancestors were buried. It must be agonizing to be the one who must call an end to such a heritage, yet those who inherit such a responsibility often cannot make any career for themselves because their whole lives must be devoted to maintaining their homes, running their estates and providing work for those who live on them. For people in the area the pain of such a loss can be almost as great as it is for the family themselves, but it is easy to see how, once the awful decision has been made and the sale has gone through, there will be a considerable measure of relief as well as sadness.

Since governments, even if they are egalitarian in hue, tend to accept that, as one organization’s website puts it: ‘private owners remain the most economic and effective guardians of these properties’, there is often funding available to help with the upkeep of these houses. Country estates do not as a rule come cheap, and the National Trust does not necessarily have the money simply to buy one. As was seen in the case of Tyntesfield in 2002, there must sometimes be a scramble to raise funds. If this cannot be done, or done in time, a whole heritage can be lost.

The passing of ownership to the National Trust can come as a godsend to proprietors who know that the contents of their family home will be kept intact forever, but it is not always such a blessing. Sir Francis Dashwood, heir to West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire, was horrified to learn from his father, after the fact, that the house had been offered to the Trust and accepted. The younger man could have afforded to run the house, and it need not have been given away after all. Once a house becomes the property of this organization the family themselves may well be able to continue living there by arrangement, but there are usually restrictions regarding what they can do and what rooms or facilities they can use. The owner of Brympton d’Evercy, a glorious house in Somerset, expressed a view shared by many others when he said that: ‘My chief objection is that there is no way of ever getting the property back once you have given it over. My grandson or daughter could make a million or two at the pools or dealing in African cocoa futures. But there is no way of getting the house back or even of getting a guarantee of becoming a tenant.’

There is also the Historic Houses Association. This exists to advise owners of houses that are still privately owned, and represents about 1,500 such properties (a figure that is more than double the number cared for by the National Trust and English Heritage put together). For houses too remote to attract visitors, too small to accommodate streams of visitors or unable to pay for the necessary Health and Safety precautions, such a body is of vital importance.

Despite their architectural or historical value, the best thing to do with a country house that is too expensive to maintain and too impractical to live in may well be to abandon it to its fate. Once it is roofless, Council Tax (formerly rates) no longer needs to be paid, and some owners have resorted to this. The elements will swiftly reduce even a mansion to a ruin, though it is easier to have it demolished outright. Kilmaron Castle in Fife, for instance, was built in 1820, became derelict after the 1960s, and was finally destroyed in 1984 because the remains had become dangerous. Rather than pay for demolition, the Royal Engineers were invited to blow it up as a training exercise.

In the last 200 years, 1,800 country houses have vanished from the British landscape through neglect, decay and demolition, some of them lamented. Of those that remain, by no means all are worth saving or investing in. But those that offer something, not only the splendour of their architecture, surroundings and contents, but the atmosphere – indefinable yet pervasive – of a way of life refined to near-perfection over centuries of peace and stability, deserve our love, our loyalty and our protection. Not only their beleaguered owners but all who appreciate beauty and history must fight for the stately homes of England.

The dream of countless wealthy Britons was to own a house like this, a place of historic beauty surrounded by a landscape of park and pasture. An entire, well-defined lifestyle came with such houses. This one was Heanton Satchville in Devon, the home of the Clintons. They were created barons in 1298, making them one of England’s oldest aristocratic families.

Supply of country houses could not meet demand and the Victorians, who acquired vast wealth from commerce and industry, therefore built more of them than any previous era. Buildings were usually designed to look centuries old, implying long pedigree. The one seen here harks back to the Georgians of a hundred years earlier.

An eclectic example of the ‘tudorbethan’ style, based on English domestic architecture of the sixteenth century. In this case, the left-hand side seems grafted onto an earlier house, seen at right. Sometimes the client’s needs, and the architect’s vision, could produce catastrophic results. As tastes changed, a surprising number of such houses were abandoned or demolished.