At Home - Bill Bryson [240]
When the owners had sold everything of value from walls and floors, they sometimes sold the walls and floors, too. A room with all its fittings was extracted from Wingerworth Hall in Derbyshire and inserted into the St. Louis Art Museum. A Grinling Gibbons staircase was removed from Cassiobury Park in Hertfordshire and reerected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sometimes entire houses went, as with Agecroft Hall, a handsome Tudor manor in Lancashire, which was taken to pieces, packed into numbered crates, and shipped to Richmond, Virginia, where it was reassembled and still proudly stands.
Very occasionally some good came of all the hardship. The heirs of Sir Edmund Antrobus, unable to maintain his estate, put it on the market in 1915. A local businessman and racehorse breeder named Sir Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge for £6,600—roughly £300,000 in today’s money, so not a trifling sum—and very generously gave it to the nation, making it safe at last.
Such happy outcomes were exceptional, however. For many hundreds of country houses there was no salvation, and the sad fate was decline and eventual demolition. Almost all the losses were unfortunate. Some were little short of scandalous. Streatlem Castle, once one of the finest homes in County Durham, was given to the Territorial Army, which used it, amazingly, for target practice. Aston Clinton, a nineteenth-century house of vast and exuberant charm once owned by the Rothschilds, was bought by Buckinghamshire County Council and torn down to make way for a soulless vocational training center. So low did the fortunes of stately homes sink that one in Lincolnshire reportedly was bought by a film company just so that it could burn it down for the climactic scene of a movie.
Nowhere was entirely safe, it seems. Even Chiswick House, a landmark building by any measure, was nearly lost. For a time it was a lunatic asylum, but by the 1950s it was empty and listed for demolition. Fortunately, enough sense prevailed to save it, and it is now in the safe care of English Heritage, a public body. The National Trust rescued some two hundred other houses over the course of the century, and a few survived by turning themselves into tourist attractions—not always entirely smoothly at first. A grandmother at one stately home, Simon Jenkins relates in England’s Thousand Best Houses, refused to leave one of the rooms whenever horse racing was on the television. “She was voted the best exhibit,” Jenkins adds. Many other large houses found new lives as schools, clinics, or other institutions. Sir William Harcourt’s Nuneham Park spent much of the twentieth century as a training center for the Royal Air Force. It is now a religious retreat.
Hundreds more, however, were unceremoniously whisked away. By the 1950s, the peak period of destruction, stately homes were disappearing at the rate of about two a week. Exactly how many great houses went altogether is unknown. In 1974, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London staged a celebrated exhibition, “The Destruction of the Country House,” in which it surveyed the enormous loss of stately homes. Altogether the curators, Marcus Binney and John Harris, counted 1,116 great houses lost in the previous century, but further research raised that number to 1,600 even before the exhibition was over, and the figure now is generally put at about 2,000—a painfully substantial number, bearing in mind that these were some of the handsomest, jauntiest, most striking, ambitious, influential,