28 August 2024

Can the country house survive?

Tristram Hunt’s Radio 4 documentary The Grand House: Boom or Blight? charts the English manor’s contested legacy.

Photo English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images

Tax breaks for wealthy, aristocratic owners of country manors is not a policy that many would call “radical”. But Tristram Hunt would. In this programme, the former Labour MP and current director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum revisits an exhibition held there in 1974, “The Destruction of the Country House, 1875-1975”. The V&A’s then-director, Roy Strong, drew attention to the 1,000 country houses demolished over 100 years (it is now estimated that one in six of all English country houses were demolished in the 20th century). Strong felt that the country house represented England’s greatest contribution to the visual arts, and that death duties, capital gains tax and wealth taxes were responsible for the erosion of its historic buildings. “Here,” Hunt says, “you have a museum which was then part of the Ministry of Education, actively complaining against a Treasury-led government policy: that’s pretty radical, isn’t it?”

A V&A colleague replies: “Hugely radical.” Of course, no single policy can be blamed for the sweeping socio-economic changes that rendered these grand houses obsolete as family homes. These were monuments to inequality, servitude and primogeniture: built on an agricultural economy and a brutal class system that privileged the gentry. As the Second World War broke out, even the Times knew the landscape of British society had to change: “A new order cannot be based on the preservation of privilege, whether the privilege be that of a country, a class or an individual.”

And yet most of us would be sad to see more of these historic buildings crumble. They speak to us of the past, and their seductive pleasures remain: it is undeniably delicious to spend a Sunday strolling around a big, beautiful old house. In this programme, Hunt speaks to owners, conservationists and historians about how to preserve them (“It’s not just a matter of sitting and clapping your hands and someone bringing the sherry,” a plummy voice claims defensively in an archive clip. “It’s endless, skilful maintenance!”), and asks what the role of the country house might be in 21st-century Britain.