40 CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 GRAHAM TITE The destruction of the English country house The V&A exhibition The Destruction of the Country House, 1875–1975, which led to the founding of SAVE and the revision of the listing rules, is remembered 50 years on. The poor country house! In times of plenty it has been rebuilt and its estates sold off to make way for new developments. Aston Hall (1618) in Birmingham stands incongruously surrounded by the city’s later development, just as London has engulfed many other houses, such as Boston Manor House (1622), Charlton House (1607) and Eastbury Manor House (1570). They survive (like rescue dogs), finding new lives long after they were private homes. Elsewhere, in lean years, abandonment, decay and lack of upkeep brought dilapidation and ruin to other sites, often reducing the former buildings to piles of rubble. No corner of the UK is without memories of such losses. Fires have struck down even the once most prosperous sites such as Cowdray in Sussex, reduced to a masonry shell overnight in 1793. It had been ‘pardoned’ from demolition by parliament at the end of the English Civil War (an early example of listing?). After war, fire is the next apocalyptic threat to menace old buildings. When the families that had owned these mansions ran into the various later troubles that can afflict even the greatest of fortunes – as at Stowe House and Park, finally given up after years of struggle during Victorian years to open as a school in 1923 – more misadventure could follow. It is true that boarding schools, hospitals and hotels sometimes stepped in to take on the abandoned sites and put them to new uses. Here mixed results could ensue but at least the old buildings lived on to fight another day, with their gardens and parks used as football pitches or golf courses. Given the setbacks, it comes as a perfect surprise that we actually do have so many great houses left. Sometimes their treasures are still intact inside or even amplified by accumulating leftovers as family properties elsewhere were cast off. Woburn Abbey took into its care art collections from other Bedford ducal houses and thus acquired, for example, the Canaletto pictures of Venice, a unique set housed (or rehoused) for display in a spectacular single room fitted up for this purpose. Most of our greatest houses tell similar stories, in which the loss of other houses has led to the enrichment of collections in surviving properties elsewhere. Even in the ‘worst’ of times, houses such as Parham, Sussex, or Haddon Hall, Derbyshire, were saved in the 1920s to be filled with antiques with wonderful effect by their devoted new owners and restorers. In many other cases, such as Danny House, Sussex, an ‘empty’ house Haddon Hall, near Bakewell, Derbyshire, was restored in the 1920s. (Photo: Daderot, Wikimedia)
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