42 CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 was saved because its extensive grounds were too valuable to lose and residential conversion was permitted in a listed setting. With thoughts like these in mind, one day in 1974 I got off a No 49 bus at South Kensington to see the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition The Destruction of the Country House, 1875–1975. I needed to be convinced that it was actually ‘destruction’ that I was about to view. The losses due to world wars and the depression years that followed, as endured by great families, were well known to me, as vividly evoked in Waugh’s post-war novel Brideshead Revisited. Evoking the crisis years of decline, 1912–26, the television drama series Downton Abbey still lay well in the future, being first screened in 2010. Downton Abbey is really Highclere Castle, just as Brideshead is really Castle Howard in the television version. Costume dramas on the screen, fashionable after 1975, may be other by-products of the V&A exhibition. The use of real buildings as settings for the action was rather rare for television or film locations until that time. By making use of multi-media displays, and with taped sounds of buildings crashing down, The Destruction of the Country House was a shock to my eyes and ears. Nothing like it was known before, outside of cinemas, least of all in the staid exhibition halls of the V&A. The exhibition was a historical account with a message: wake up, the heritage is being trashed, soon nothing will be left! The pictures of houses already lost or of empty buildings in the process of falling down or being knocked down were deliberately displayed to displease the viewer. Violence and loss without mend were implicit in every image. Reeling from the shock, I left the V&A without giving even a glance at any of its usual art displays. The exhibition’s after-effect is much documented. The catalogue now sells secondhand for about £100. Where is mine? Long lost, I am afraid. What followed was the founding of SAVE, the revising of the listing rules to include more Victorian and 20th-century heritage, and a considerable boom in attendances at country houses open to the public. Ten years after the V&A exhibition, The Treasure Houses of Britain: 500 years of private patronage and art collecting opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, with a splendid catalogue by Gervase Jackson-Stops. That show and its catalogue provided reassuring evidence of what had survived, at least inside the houses. In the new atmosphere that the V&A exhibition helped to create, more attention was paid to the country houses of the 19th century. These were still being undervalued in 1974, often regarded as freaks in their design, too big or too ugly, and they stood at great risk. Mentmore Towers reached a crisis point in the late 1970s, for example, and this mid-Victorian great mansion has once more declined into being at risk. In the aftermath of the show, with Mentmore much in the news, I arranged a group visit there for friends, with me at the wheel of a minibus. I transformed this pursuit into a part-time paid occupation for about two decades, taking my passengers to many sites from Castle Howard in Yorkshire to Kingston Lacy in Dorset. I realised that heritage was not merely a subject for enjoyment, historical research and accumulating knowledge, but that it could instead be a vital pursuit with practical outcomes. Graham Tite is an independent heritage advisor. Highclere Castle, Hampshire, aka Downton Abbey (Photo: Haley Blackmore, Wikimedia)
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