The country house and the neoliberal society Open Access

Abstract

In a 1997 book, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, I charted the adoption of the English country house into the national heritage over the previous 200 years, but not from the point of view usually adopted by country-house lovers, who took for granted the preciousness of their love-object and considered its heritage status as a foregone conclusion, one that had only to be achieved against a tide of philistinism and modern destructiveness. The position I adopted instead was to consider the full range of cultural, economic, and political forces bearing on the country house that determined whether it was available as a heritage object in the first place and, if so, embraced by whom and for what purposes. At the beginning of my period, the country house was just a private house; to the extent that it had a public status, it was one determined almost entirely by its private owners, who used it to exert their influence locally, regionally, and sometimes nationally. How it achieved a public status for everyone else was the story I wanted to tell.

In the last 25 years, the country house has remained a topic of lively discussion, but still mostly from a point of view that assumes its status as a heritage object, disputing what are its meanings and their implications for politics and culture. Some of the arguments of the ‘heritage debate’ of the 1980s, which drew me to the subject in the first place, continue: that British culture remains inappropriately soaked in nostalgia for and deference to the hierarchy of pre-modern rural society, as evidenced in reverential cultural products like the Downton Abbey TV series and films, or even the less reverential, like Bridgerton or Saltburn. Most recently, this contestation over the contemporary meaning of the country house has played its part in the ‘culture war’ in Britain, as the National Trust and other interpreters have chosen to highlight the entanglement of country houses, their historic owners, and associated fortunes with empire, enslavement, and nationalism, while their critics have scorned this as ‘wokeness’ and called for a return to conventional, more admiring histories of the country house based on art and architecture and the prominent figures who built and inhabited these houses.

Most recently, however, there has also appeared a renewed interest in the political economy of British elites, with the landed elite responsible for country houses increasingly included. Some of this new work has been inspired by Thomas Piketty and emerging evidence that the ‘old’ elites of the nineteenth century and before, while reduced by two world wars and to some extent by income redistribution, have been more resilient than appreciated.¹ Some of it has focused on, in the British case, the resilience of the landed elite.² Emphasis has been placed on the persistence of these elites, if not politically—as the ‘decline and fall’ of the British aristocracy from political prominence at both a local and a national level since the 1880s has been well documented³—at least economically and perhaps to some extent culturally. This persistence may not be unrelated to the issues contested in the ‘culture war’—perhaps a persistent elite has used its cultural and economic capital to shore up its reputation under the political radar, winning continued fiscal concessions and captivating public opinion by means of heritage tourism, romantic historical associations, and ‘country life’ propaganda. In this sense, the private and the public status of the country house remain entangled to some degree.⁴

In this article, however, I take up the story where I left off in 1997 and argue that the fortunes of the country house since then have revived more as a result of the general trends towards resurgent inequality identified by Piketty and others, and less due to its continuing cultural prestige. In this story, new elites buying, restoring, and building country houses are as important as older landed elites, who nevertheless also benefitted from the same trends: in the new literature on plutocracy, rentier income from land and finance (the traditional sources of income for the old elite) is at the same time responsible for enriching new elites and shoring up some of the old.⁵ It is, in this sense, more a story of the private house than of its entanglement with its public status. No doubt the high cultural prestige of the country house has motivated many owners, old and new, to lavish so much time, attention, and money on them. But this is a prestige cultivated inside the elite and less dependent on the allegiance of the wider public. Where the ‘public’ status of the country house remains significant, more indirectly, is in the effects of public policy in unleashing the power of private capital—what is commonly called ‘neoliberalism’, rampant since the 1980s—as well as in other economic trends leading to the concentration of wealth not owing to public policy, such as globalization and new sources of wealth in the financial and technology sectors.

Writing in the 1990s, I had been dubious about the future of the ‘ensemble’ of the country house, its contents, its land, and its hereditary owners. I was aware of the pragmatism and utilitarianism of the owners—this was a major theme of the book across its two centuries—but assumed that, while old elites would find ways to preserve their wealth in some form, the vicissitudes of the land and landowning families would tend to disassemble house, contents, land, and ownership. However, I seriously underestimated the transformative effects of what we were only just then beginning to call Thatcherism—or, more broadly, what we now call ‘neoliberalism’, not a term I like to use too loosely, but which I think aptly captures, for present purposes, the distinctive mix of low taxation, deregulation, upwards wealth distribution, and, especially, dramatically enhanced incomes at the top end. The neoliberal period since the 1980s has, I will argue here, taken the country house to dizzying heights of which even in the mid-1990s I had only an inkling.

At the same time, however, the ‘privatization’ associated with neoliberalism has, to some degree, disentangled the private house from the public heritage object. While some older segments of the persistent elite have deployed their cultural capital to win public support in the ways suggested above, others—augmented by many new recruits—have deployed their economic capital to insulate themselves from the public. Much of this happens behind the scenes, carefully cloaked in commercial confidentiality and private property rights. Some of it is more visible but only to the world of the property market and property development. In the absence of a public land registry, I rely for information about land ownership and development on the property pages of Country Life, a weekly update on the country-house and estate market, and on occasional stolen glimpses wrested from other sources by enterprising journalists and countryside campaigners.⁶ In highlighting these less well-known aspects of ‘country life’, I hope here both to remind us of the large and growing number of country houses that are not so obviously in play in the culture wars, and also to extend the argument of my book to consider what houses are and are not available as heritage objects for public purposes in the twenty-first century.

I

How has ‘neoliberalism’ affected the fortunes of country houses and their owners since the 1980s?

Most importantly, the take-off of high-end incomes—in the UK and globally—has resuscitated the high-end property market and made nearly all the former white elephants into keenly sought-after objects of desire for the very wealthy. Almost unnoticed in recent writings on heritage, the period since the 1990s has seen the ‘golden age’ of the country-house market.⁷ In the decade from 1992 to 2001 alone, the number of high-end transactions doubled, and prices trebled.⁸ Although this upward trend was briefly interrupted by the 2008–09 crash, the land attached to country houses continued to appreciate, deemed a ‘safe harbour’ in periods when financial markets were in disarray.⁹ The house market soon recovered. Interrupted again briefly by uncertainties over Brexit, since 2019, it has continued to boom—the pandemic, unsurprisingly, further accelerated the drive by the rich to large country houses.¹⁰

This fashion for country houses was not fore-ordained. The super-rich could have invested their surplus cash elsewhere, but a number of factors singled out English country houses. First, the drive for security and privacy. The rich need their London pieds-à-terres, but they crave their own little kingdoms more. Secondly, the drive for luxury. English country life had had an international cachet in the building of luxury brands at least since the late nineteenth century; now, time-honoured luxury brands were in greater demand than ever. Thirdly, the flight from the city. The Internet and telecommuting—facilitated by the upgrading of regional airports and helicopter services—liberated the working rich from their workplaces. (Edward Haughey, the Ulster industrialist, provided an unhappy symbol of this new mobility by dying in a helicopter crash while landing at his English retreat, Corby Castle, in Cumbria.¹¹) ‘City boys’ still preferred the southeast, but retail, manufacturing, and tech tycoons spread out around the country, ensuring a revival of the market even in the far southwest and north.¹²

Who were these new country-house owners? Only 10 per cent of them derived their wealth from inheritance, though anecdotal evidence suggests many came from landed backgrounds. Another 10 per cent were industrialists. But a full 40 per cent had fortunes founded in financial services; following a tradition well established since the late nineteenth century, the wellspring of so-called ‘gentlemanly capitalism’, many of these City boys, too, had landed backgrounds. And another 40 per cent, allegedly a novelty, were so-called entrepreneurs: though on close inspection, many of these thrusting self-made men also came from the City and from the land but made their new fortunes in property speculation and development.¹³

Indeed, most new buyers were in some senses property speculators. They bought a large country house when sufficient funds were available, and often when growing families required space and, normally for this group, rural boarding schools. The very richest might purchase a so-called ‘turnkey’ house, already fully furnished and decorated and upgraded to the height of luxury, requiring no-one to lift a finger. But the average merely very rich new owners, especially the property developers, were often keen to turn their new house into a project. A gendered division of labour was common.¹⁴ The husband spent much of his time in the City, commuting now more easily to the country retreat. The wife supervised not only the family but also the upgrading of the house. Many of these wives had backgrounds in art history or interior design useful for these purposes; if the couple were lucky, they might have also had an abbreviated career in law, accountancy, or business. Over the course of their ownership of the house, money continued to accumulate from the husband’s business, but it was also being made through the wife’s improvements.¹⁵ At some stage, often when the children had left home, the parents then ‘downsized’ or ‘moved on to new projects’, to use some common euphemisms, cashing out at a substantial profit. Much was often made of the couple’s devotion to the house, its history and surroundings, its aesthetics, and domestic tranquillity. We do not need to be cynical about this; such wealthy couples had no need to choose between Art and Mammon; in ‘taking on’ a country house, they could have both, with one enhancing the other.¹⁶

The result of these joint efforts was not only a raising of the monetary value of hundreds of country houses around the country; it also led to a substantial upgrading of their heritage value. Of course, these houses were furnished with the necessary modern luxuries: heated swimming pools, tennis courts, polo fields, and so on. For some of the very rich, these modern luxuries were all that mattered, for both comfort and display. But for others, with more traditional values, they were also redecorated and refurnished, often in the height of period taste. In some cases, original contents—long sold by their historic owners—were reclaimed at auction, and amenity land was extended through purchases. Surprisingly often, enormous Georgian country houses were re-created from scratch. A lot of attention has been paid to the National Trust’s patronage of traditional crafts, most recently in the reconstruction of Uppark and Clandon with insurance monies after disastrous fires. But far more of this kind of patronage was bestowed by rich private owners.

More attention has also been paid to the entirely new houses built by the super-rich, such as Sebastian de Ferranti’s Hanbury Hall or Wafic Said’s Tusmore Park. But many hundreds of houses were re-created from shells or ruins or just thorough makeovers. It was easier to get planning permission to replace a house on the footprint of the old house than to build from scratch. Even Tusmore—which had to be cut back in size by 10 per cent because the owner’s requirements were distorting the neo-Georgian design out of recognition—was hardly a ‘new build’ but rather a replacement for two previous houses on the same site.¹⁷ Thus, some country houses marked as ‘lost’ in 1974 have now been ‘refound’.¹⁸ At least one house that had been listed as II* in its derelict state was upgraded to Grade I after the restoration of its ‘original’ Georgian interiors.¹⁹ Most remarkably, these makeovers involved a major reversal of the trend during the postwar decades for private homes to become institutions. Now, from the 1990s onwards, institutions—schools, colleges, local authority buildings, youth hostels, care homes—were reverting to private homes, with their original interiors often carefully reinstated. Even the National Trust’s headquarters, a grand mansion in the heart of the City of Westminster, was sold to a private buyer, who spent £25 million converting it into ‘a vast family home’.²⁰

Indicative of the dramatic transformation in fortunes was the fate of the Country Houses Association (CHA). Founded in 1955 to save the best country houses threatened with demolition, the CHA acquired nine Grade I and II* houses and divided them up into 280 flats, letting them unfurnished to retired people and raising just enough funds to keep the houses in reasonable nick.²¹ The CHA’s shaky finances caused it to collapse in 2003. But instead of slinking sadly off to their graveyards, the white elephants thus abandoned instantly became hot properties on the market and were mostly quickly snapped up by ‘the new “oligarchy” of super-rich international businessmen’, as Country Life exulted. One family of former owners, the Rumbolds, exercised their right to reacquire Pythouse in Wiltshire, reunited it with the parkland and estate buildings which they had retained, and sold the nifty package at £7 m to one such oligarch.²² Aynhoe Park in Northamptonshire, probably the jewel in the CHA’s crown, was acquired by property developer James Perkins, who lavishly redecorated it, and filled it with his striking contemporary collections, while developing part of its grounds with luxury homes and using the big house as his main seat of operations, featuring lavish corporate events.²³ So much money was raised from the sale of the CHA houses that a new Country Houses Foundation was set up with the proceeds to give restoration grants to non-super-rich owners for preservation purposes.

Overall, between entirely new houses, reconstructed houses, reconverted houses, and just refurbished or redecorated houses, the private investment in country-house heritage over the last 25 years must run into billions. What it did not do, however, was contribute much to the public status of the English country house. The point of private investment by the super-rich was to create and protect intensely private pleasures. Even the pages of Country Life, from which I have drawn much of my evidence, offer only a carefully tailored glimpse, fashioned by the owners and their cooperative journalists, rich with euphemism, as I have mentioned, and often shorn of vital details about costs and benefits. Virtually none of the houses that come into this category were open to the public, and in a few cases, they were withdrawn from public view, having been subject to public-access conditions attached to tax exemptions held by the previous owners that were extinguished by the sale.²⁴

The public view of the country house relied as always, first, on houses that had been previously converted permanently into public property—mostly via the National Trust—and secondly, more extensively, on the private houses of landowners that had opened to the public after the war, either as a condition of a public grant or tax exemption, or in a desperate attempt to maximize income (for those who held back from demolition or sale). The stock of houses in public ownership has not changed much in the last 25 years²⁵; the National Trust, by design or out of necessity, has only acquired a few new houses; and after all, such has been the strength of the country-house market since the 1990s that there have been only a small number of true white elephants that could not be more effectively, and certainly economically, ‘saved’ by private purchase. What, however, of the privately owned houses—depending on your definition, from 300 to 500 of them—that remained in private hands and yet, in the postwar period, had become accessible to public tourism?

Incongruously, while Country Life was hymning the ‘golden age’ of country-house life enabled by the apparently inexhaustible supply of new billionaires, it was simultaneously deploring the ‘desperate struggle’ of hereditary landowners to maintain their houses and the general breakdown of traditional country life, which it associated with the new century.²⁶ The driving down of agricultural prices to please urban consumers, acts of God like foot-and-mouth disease, and acts of government like the hunting ban and other misdeeds of mistrusted New Labour ministers (with John Prescott at DEFRA as the biggest bogeyman): all these things were said to spell continuing decline for the landed classes. Perhaps it was necessary for advocates of those classes, like Country Life, the Country Landowners Association, and the Historic Houses Association, to keep up the pleas of ‘remorseless gloom’ in order to continue to win tax, subsidy, and regulatory concessions for their heritage owners.²⁷ But in truth, old families were often able to benefit quite as much as new money from the changed political and economic climate since the 1980s, in a number of easily explicable ways.

First, there was that same long tradition of blending old and new money—‘gentlemanly capitalism’—that had benefitted hereditary landowners for at least a century or more. Lord Edward Manners, who restored Haddon Hall to its role as a family home, was not only the younger son of the Duke of Rutland but also an airline executive who ended up in corporate finance. He was not short of a bob or two, quite apart from the 3,500 acres of tenanted farms he oversaw on the Haddon estate.²⁸ The Camoys of Stonor Park had lost much of their land in the bad times and, as a notoriously impoverished landed family, had been generously awarded government grants to keep Stonor intact; but now Lord Camoys’ career as a banker has turned it around.²⁹ James Hervey-Bathurst’s ability to reverse 50 years of neglect at Eastnor Castle owed something to grants from English Heritage and the Country Houses Foundation but also, surely, a good deal more to his own career as a tax solicitor, headhunter, and ultimately merchant banker.³⁰ Very often, the same gendered division of labour remains in place. The man of the house devotes the bulk of the week to a lucrative occupation in the City, while the woman of the house—nowadays likely to be an art history graduate or an interior decorator—supervises the family, maintenance of the house, public opening where required, and generally keeping up the tone.

More commonly, especially on the larger estates, the man of the house makes his money on the estate. Just as in some senses, most new owners were property developers, so on a grander scale, most old owners were property developers too. Agriculture remains more profitable than is often admitted, and some ‘neoliberal’ reforms have helped here too: the Agricultural Holdings Act 1986 and the Agricultural Tenancies Act 1995, for example, shifted more of the balance of power from tenants to landlords. But the name of the game on landed estates since the 1990s has been diversification.³¹ Many estates have reported over the last generation a shift in the balance between agricultural and other income, from 70:30 to 30:70.³² Forestry, hydro-electric power, local craft production, tourism, fishing, and shooting are all much better exploited.

But most important has been the value gleaned from property development itself. Roger Tempest of Broughton Hall, North Yorkshire, was from the 1990s, the pioneer in developing business parks in country-house parks, again taking advantage of telecommuting to make viable business units out of dilapidated estate buildings that had long before been written off. Today, rental units on the Broughton estate house 600 employees and yield the estate enough to hire 30 employees of its own and to restore ‘one of the most complete Regency interiors in England’ in a house that had been slated for demolition in the 1970s.³³ Many other owners have followed Tempest’s example.³⁴

Even more lucrative are residential lets, also facilitated by neoliberal legislation transferring power from tenant to landlord, in this case, the Housing Acts of 1988 and 1996, which introduced assured shorthold tenancies. Tied cottages emptied by the collapse of the rural labour force are now prized properties for residential and holiday lets. The scale of residential letting on some estates can be colossal. There are 250 residential lets on the Blair Castle estate, not to mention workshops and business units, 10 tenanted and 2 directly managed farms, forestry, and the castle open for tourism, weddings, and events.³⁵

More ambitiously, estates on the urban fringes—or even in the increasingly deregulated green belt—offer incredible opportunities for property development. It is worth emphasizing that the development value of land can fluctuate dramatically and unpredictably over time, depending not so much on land markets as on changing political conditions that retain or release land for development. For this reason, it is difficult to assess the ‘long-term’ value of land, and the long-term fortunes of landowners; historians seeking to extrapolate from their own period or their own present are liable to be wrong-footed, as I was to some extent after 1997.³⁶ What we can say is that those who are able to hold on to land without draining their resources over multiple generations are always going to be able in this small archipelago (with a long tradition of private property rights) to find the right time to sell tiny portions of a larger estate for a killing. When the journalist Kevin Cahill estimated estate values in 2001, he allowed for an average of 1 per cent of the estate to be saleable as development land at what was then an average value (it could be much higher near cities) of over £400,000 an acre—vastly more than its agricultural value. Even in 2001, he allowed for 2 per cent for home-counties estates, where development pressure and development land values were highest, and even then appreciated that he was undervaluing home-counties estates.³⁷ Those valuations have swelled considerably in the new century and form an ever-growing proportion of asset wealth today, when pressure for housing and urban development is high and governments are responsive to it.³⁸ Many traditional landowners have taken huge advantage of this moment. The Dukes of Buccleuch re-roofed two of their several country houses with the proceeds of urban property development.³⁹ Sir Philip Naylor-Leyland and his heir Tom have redeveloped the centre of Malton in North Yorkshire as a ‘food town’ for tourists.⁴⁰ A total of 1,600 new-builds have been sold on the Blenheim Palace estate, 2,000 on the Bathurst Park estate, 2,000 are in progress on the Burghley estate, 4,000 on the Rockingham Castle estate, and 6,000 on two estates bordering Fareham in Surrey.⁴¹

With this intensified and professionalized exploitation of estate resources, even relatively small estates—of 1,000 acres or so—can support a big house. But the big houses themselves are also lucrative—so much so that they can at least ‘wipe their faces’ without needing much external support.⁴² The major development has been in weddings, permitted on a wider range of sites since 1994. The average wedding today costs about £25,000, and country-house weddings are no average weddings.⁴³ Filming for TV and cinema pays at a rate of between £2,500 and 4,500 a day, and even still photography can earn between £1 and 3,000.⁴⁴ City boys will pay as much as £20,000 a day for a shooting party.⁴⁵ And tourism, of course, which has been a growing money-spinner since the 1960s, continues to turn a pretty penny, as visitor numbers to historic houses have continued to rise, premium prices can now be charged, and wise owners know how to squeeze further spend out of affluent consumers from retail and catering. ‘Chatsworth and Goodwood are now among Britain’s most powerful luxury brands’, but such luxury marques are not confined to such well-known estates: in its own market, the Glanusk estate in South Wales is also a well-known brand for shooting, fishing, local crafts, tourism, and a folk festival.⁴⁶

Hereditary owners tend to be more secretive about their finances than those with flashy new wealth.⁴⁷ However, we do know that, whatever the vicissitudes of agriculture, the value of ordinary arable or pasture has continued to rise ahead even of financial assets.⁴⁸ And the evidence is there for you to see for yourself in the sparkling condition of those 300–500 historic interiors open to the public, nearly every one of which is described in Country Life as never having looked better, even in their pomp.⁴⁹ Many families have been able to buy back grounds, parkland, or estate stripped away from their houses, or contents consigned to the salerooms, and lost in the postwar decades. Some are employing more people on-site than they did in their salad days, when they presided over fleets of indoor and outdoor servants; the staff of Powderham Castle increased from seven to twenty-five in a few years in the 1990s, with up to thirty more casual staff seasonally.⁵⁰ If the modern country house is more of a business than a home, it is nevertheless a lucrative business, for the first time since the last heyday of commercial agriculture in the mid-nineteenth century.

One interesting consequence of this appreciation of value is that it is now much easier than it has been for the last century or so to ensure the continuity of family ownership of a country house. As the fabric of country life unravelled in the period since the late nineteenth century, and especially after the war, when big houses became terrible burdens on families with little after-tax income, estates were sold, and houses demolished or abandoned, often because it was impossible to get the younger generation to take them on. But—quite apart from the revived fashion for country life that I have already noted—now that country houses and their estates have become a family’s biggest asset, heirs are all of a sudden easy to find. Successive tax exemptions for house and contents, along with the growing practice of vesting house, contents, and endowments in a charitable trust, have meant that the house can be passed down without paying a high price in inheritance tax. Any agricultural land still attaching benefits from longstanding inheritance-tax exemption, which was increased from 50 per cent to 100 per cent in the 1992 budget and extended to tenanted properties in 1995. The tax advantages of holding agricultural land are now so great that it is sought by the newly monied as an inheritance-tax hedge, further boosting its market value.⁵¹ The more relaxed structure of inheritance also helps old families hold on. Strict settlement, which used to govern the passage of estates by male primogeniture, was abolished in law in 1996. More options are open now. Daughters, especially if married to rich husbands and carrying those decorating or artistic skills often found in well-bred young women, may be even more attractive than sons. As always, the husband or the children can help maintain the fiction of continuity by hyphenating their names, though even that does not seem to be as necessary as it once was.⁵²

All in all, for both old and new money, and for many of the same reasons, the country house does seem to be enjoying a golden age. While most houses rescued from dereliction and institutional use are not accessible to the public, houses that had been open to growing numbers of tourists since the 1950s are generally much better looking, much better interpreted, and offered much more to visitors than they had ever done, returning glamour as well as luxury appeal to a sector that by the 1970s was feeling stale and a bit threadbare. Most significantly, the panics over threatened treasure houses and the mourning of countless destroyed houses, which regularly punctuated the postwar decades right through the 1980s, have come virtually to an end. Even SAVE Britain’s Heritage, founded in 1975 by Marcus Binney mostly to save threatened country houses, granted in 2007 that ‘the war is being won’. ‘Almost any house in the South or the Midlands can find a restoring purchaser’, wrote Binney, ‘unless the setting is hopelessly blighted. The problem houses are all special cases needing individual attention’.⁵³ The buildings that dominate SAVE’s lists of heritage in danger are now much more likely to be commercial, institutional, or especially public buildings—mills, breweries, libraries, swimming baths, chapels, and cinemas.

Most of the longstanding problem houses have found a resolution. Wentworth Woodhouse—the largest, or at least the longest country house in Britain—is now in the hands of a preservation trust, propped up with very large grants, while the 10,000-acre estate remains in family hands.⁵⁴ Dumfries House in Ayrshire, a cause célèbre in 2005, was saved by another preservation trust set up by Prince Charles (who before his accession to the throne used the house as a pied-a-terre when in Scotland).⁵⁵ Trafalgar Park in Wiltshire, famously described in 1997 as ‘the Flying Dutchman of the property world’, has been ‘spectacularly’ restored by a City underwriter and investor who also reunited it with some of its grounds; recently, it came back onto the market but now at a premium price of £11 million.⁵⁶

How far has the broader cultural context to which I alluded at the beginning contributed to this renaissance? What about Gosford Park and Downton Abbey? What about the National Trust and its membership? What about the opening up of country-house gardens and servants’ quarters? What about country-house opera, country-house hotels, the Heritage Lottery Fund, Princess Diana, and Earl Spencer? Undoubtedly, they do contribute to the cultural standing of the country house, for better or worse. But in my analysis here, the ‘neoliberal’ political economy—changing tax structures, appreciating land values, new fortunes seeking old forms of cachet, deregulation of business, and the capital-rich generally getting much richer, whatever form their capital takes—looms larger in the present and future fortunes of the country house even than Downton.

The various cultural appropriations of the country house in the twenty-first century sprint off in so many different directions that it is difficult to weigh them up. On the one hand, Gosford, Downton, opera, and luxury retailing have restored some of the lost glamour, and perhaps restored that ‘rosier view of this way of life’ that Julian Fellowes (who was responsible not only for Gosford and Downton but also for the TV series Monarch of the Glen) avowedly seeks to convey.⁵⁷ On the other hand, the growing interest in downstairs life—for which Fellowes also claims some credit—and recently in connections to slavery and empire has been putting country houses in very different and hardly ‘rosier’ contexts. While it is occasionally claimed by country-house boosters that there has been recently yet another ‘surge’ of interest, both foreign and domestic,⁵⁸ in the country-house portions of the heritage, in fact, historic buildings have benefited from tourist growth (up 62 per cent overall in the last 30 years) somewhat less than most visitor sites, compared to real surges in interest in gardens and farms.⁵⁹ Since country houses open to the public have in the last 30 years been able to draw on a new professionalism backed up by deeper pockets, but in an increasingly competitive tourist environment, their performance in the twenty-first century has been encouraging, though hardly a triumph.

Returning to the longer term with which I began, since the nineteenth century, country houses first lost the underpinnings of wealth and power that had supported them but then, more encouragingly for their heritage status, benefitted from the loss of that wealth and power, as their owners no longer seemed a threat and the heritage they offered more genuinely seemed to be everyone’s. As the President of the Historic Houses Association put it in 2005, ‘the greatest achievement is the way Chatsworth is now regarded not as a bastion of inherited privilege but as everyone’s heritage’.⁶⁰ That status is not, however, a given, not secure forever. As landowners pick themselves up off the floor and start to look again like—well, like inheritors of privilege, they gain in strength and glamour but may lose some of the sympathy of the general public. As they have gained financial independence through the more aggressive exploitation of their assets, they have lost some of their dependence on the public that created a bond in the late twentieth century just as it did (in very different circumstances) in the mid-nineteenth century. There are fewer appeals to the public by the likes of SAVE to save the country house from destruction, because they are being saved by private capital. There are fewer public grants and subsidies, but there are also fewer obligations to the public. The country house as a private house has undoubtedly enjoyed a golden age this century; but the country house as a public property, ‘everyone’s heritage’, has entered into a more ambiguous status, perhaps growing less familiar and even less interesting to most people.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

For comments on early drafts, I am grateful to the audience at the symposium on ‘The Great House in the 21st Century’ at the Oxford Department of Continuing Education in January 2022 (especially to Steven Parissien for the invitation, which instigated this article in the first place), and, on later drafts, I thank Ben Cowell, Jeremy Musson, Lisbet Rausing, Peter Baldwin, and some very constructive referees for this journal.