The Historic Houses Association can congratulate itself. This pressure group for country houses, founded in 1973, has proved to be one of the most effective lobbying organisations of our time. When it came into being, the future, according to the architectural historian John Cornforth, was ‘full of gloom’ for the country house.
The Destruction of the Country House exhibition of 1974 revealed the extent of the crisis, which had set in a century earlier with the agricultural depression of the 1870s. That was when aristocrats who had previously relied on the income from their estates built their hopes on landing a transatlantic beauty with ‘plenty of tin’. The supply of heiresses dried up in about 1912, just before the first world war. Taxation later followed, and it was Götterdämmerung for a thousand habitations of the gods.
Dickens had already foreseen the social change in Bleak House, where Sir Leicester Dedlock is eclipsed by the son of his housekeeper, a thrusting ironmaster. A rout of Dedlocks might have followed in the 20th century. It was the HHA which rallied the troops and led the counter charge against Denis Healey’s wealth tax. Not only was the country house saved, but it underwent the astonishing revival that is the subject of this book. As director general of the HHA, Ben Cowell is ideally placed to tell the story.
He does so with aplomb. Triumphalism would be distasteful at a time of social division. We have now returned to the Edwardian age when it comes to disparity of incomes – which is one reason, indeed, that the country house is on a roll. Billionaires are building and restoring, and no doubt their lifestyles will be studied by future historians.
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