In the summer of 1974, one Welsh estate was in serious trouble. A six- million-pound bill for death duties hung over James, Lord Gethin and his family patrimony, the baronial seat, and many acres of land in the beautiful Trethowan valley. At the age of fifty-eight, Gethin was ready to give it all up and make a new life with his personal assistant, with whom he had started a romantic relationship. But family ties ran deep. The more he was hounded by the tax authorities (there was a particularly zealous official, Mr Mackie, in charge of his case), the more Lord Gethin felt obliged to defend his position.

Gethin's son, Michael, was certainly not ready to let his father head off into the sunset. One day, after all, Michael would inherit the title as well as the estate. Michael knew that the battle was not just with the taxman. The tenants on the estate could cause problems too, as could his father's scheming London lawyer. That six-million-pound bill was a major worry, but so was the discovery that valuable copper deposits lay below the ground. It posed the very real threat that the estate could yet be broken up and then exploited for its mining. Lord Gethin was not averse to the idea if it resolved the tax demand. But it was anathema to his son, who even, horror of horrors, contemplated gifting the estate to the National Trust to protect it from exploitation. Such a drastic step was only considered because a whole way of life faced imminent extinction – a direct consequence of government fiscal policy.

The Inheritors was a six-part television drama that was broadcast on ITV in August 1974. Veteran Scottish actor Robert Urquhart played the lead role of the embattled Welsh aristocrat, while Peter Egan played his son. The series was produced by Wilfred Greatorex, who had a track record of creating dramas that centred on conflict and power struggles among elites. His previous hit for ITV was Hine (1971), in which the eponymous hero was an international arms dealer. Before then, The Power Game (three series, from 1965 to 1969) focused on high drama in executive boardrooms and was the successor to another corporate drama, The Plane Makers (three series, between 1963 and 1965).

Nothing symbolised the revival in the fortunes of British country houses so much as the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition that opened in Washington DC in November 1985. Ten years on from the V&A's Destruction of the Country House exhibition, the Treasure Houses show saw more than seven hundred works of art from over two hundred of the largest and most prestigious of British country houses assembled at the National Gallery of Art. Arranged in the east wing of the gallery in a sequence of interiors conceived by curator Gervase Jackson-Stops, the exhibition brought together portraits of British royalty, furniture, tapestries, and works by Constable, Canaletto, and Velasquez.

The show had been a long time in the making. The minutes of the HHA's first annual general meeting in October 1974 recorded that a feasibility study had been commissioned into the possibility of a “Treasures of Britain exhibition” being toured in America in the winter of 1976. The original idea was for a show that would travel around the United States for six months – the condition being that it would need to be entirely “self-supporting”. The enthusiasm for the idea from the HHA's executive committee followed on from research trips that a number of them had made across the Atlantic (Lord Brooke had been unable to attend the 1974 AGM because he was on one of these trips). The Destruction show had been a direct inspiration. The director of the National Gallery, J. Carter Brown, had visited the V&A in 1974 to witness Destruction, and recalled the “sickening” sense of loss that the show had inspired. This sense of loss had stayed with him in the intervening period, providing some of the “driving spirit” behind the Washington exhibition. Treasure Houses was just as much a political statement as the Destruction exhibition had been, but now aimed to imprint on visitors another set of messages: that British artistic culture was alive and well, and continued to be looked after on the walls of its country mansions, which in turn were the powerhouses of the tourism and leisure industry.

Scratch the stone, stucco, or brick of the walls of any of Britain's estimated two thousand country houses and you will find a multitude of survival stories. The owners and custodians of these houses have found unique and diverse ways for each of them to remain standing into the twenty-first century, when so many other houses have been lost. These owners and custodians have developed coping strategies that have enabled houses not only to weather storms – whether literal, or of fire, flood, war, or pandemic – but subsequently to enjoy renewed strength, vitality, and resilience.

The stories that are told about country houses often begin with the ambitions and achievements of the generations that first commissioned mansions to be built. Such foundational owners may have hoped and anticipated that their descendants would enjoy untroubled lives amid verdant and productive farmland and harmonious local community relations. This was rarely, if ever, the case. All too frequently, the early aggrandisement of landed families, as expressed through the building of country houses surrounded by substantial gardens and parks, would give way at some point to hubris, and occasionally a dramatic fall.1 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sto-ries that were increasingly being told about the grandest country residences involved themes of decay and decline. Nevertheless, periods of demise might be followed by phases of revival, as owners found new purposes for the houses that they had inherited or acquired. This was certainly the case for some country houses in the 1950s and 1960s, when they opened for the first time to paying tourist visitors. Revival stories involved enterprise, initiative, clever financial management, and sheer hard graft, coupled with benign economic, political, and social circumstances as well as, sometimes, the good fortune of a successful marriage match.

This book attempts to tell some of these stories. In doing so, it shows how an important part of what used to be called ‘the national heritage’ – the British country house – has been saved in ways that involve far less reliance on direct state support than other categories of heritage.

When the Conservative minister for the environment, Baroness Young, addressed the inaugural general meeting of the Historic Houses Asso-ciation in November 1973, she made a point of emphasising the importance of family life to the continuing vitality of country houses. “It is still part of the great appeal of our historic houses that so many are still owned by the families which have played so great a part in their history”, she said, demonstrating a shrewd understanding of her audience. The advantage, Lady Young continued, was that lived-in houses remained homes, “rather than merely still-life muse-um pieces”. Lest this be construed as too obvious a swipe at the National Trust and its mansion properties, she went on to emphasise the “immense contribu-tion” made by the Trust and its “high standards of maintenance and display”. Yet her preference was clearly for a house, any house, to remain as a domestic residence. Her message in conclusion was to stress the importance of individ-ual owners being “helped and guided in ways of managing and restoring their properties”, such that these buildings remained, above all, homes.

Baroness Young was a stalwart defender of the traditional family throughout her career. In this she shared some similarities with her contemporary as a parliamentarian, Margaret Thatcher, who at that time was serving as secretary of state for education in Edward Heath's cabinet. Both women were advocates for traditional, Christian family values, even while they doggedly pursued political power in a manner that was somewhat out of kilter with the housewifely public images that they sometimes sought to project. Lady Young's commitment to the conventional family informed her political positions: later, in the 1990s, she would make bitter enemies when she opposed moves to give equal rights to gay men and women, such as in relation to the adoption of children.

Lady Young's summary definition of privately owned country houses as lived-in family homes was entirely accurate. It was the clear difference that set the HHA's houses apart from those managed by the National Trust or by local or national government. This fact had been highlighted by Sir Ernest Gowers’ committee's report in 1950, which listed as a policy recommendation that important country house properties should, so far as was possible, “be preserved as private residences occupied preferably by the families connected with them”.

A monument in the park at Holkham Hall in Norfolk pays tribute to Thomas William Coke (1754–1842), agricultural improver and first earl of Leicester (of second creation). The foundation stone for the column was erected in 1845, three years after the earl's death, to mark his achievements as landowner, farmer, and steward of the family estates. The monument stands on an incline that overlooks the mansion. An imaginary line of symmetry would run, north to south, from the middle of the monument through the centre of the house before continuing beyond to connect with an obelisk built more than a century earlier, the towering grandeur of which the Coke monument replicates.

Four decorated panels make up the base of the monument and relate to Coke's life and work. The first features a scene of farm hands attending to sheep, indicating the importance of livestock to the Holkham estate. The second shows cattle, each of a substantial size and proportion. A third panel depicts the earl himself seated at a table, consulting maps and documents alongside his estate managers and agents. The final panel is a dedication to the earl inscribed in bronze, which recalls “a life devoted to the welfare of his friends, neighbours and tenants”. The inscription goes on to note for posterity that Coke “pre-eminently combined public services with private worth”, and that the loss of such a “father, friend and landlord” was felt keenly in the worlds of politics, the arts, and agriculture.

Farming, livestock, and land management were the principal sources of the wealth that financed the building of the Palladian-style mansion at Holkham. A visit to the estate today, more than two centuries on from Coke of Norfolk's time, makes clear that its income is now derived from a variety of wholly different sources. On a blazing hot summer's day in 2022, the grass in the park turned yellow by the effects of an ongoing heatwave, the estate is alive with all sorts of activity. Crowds of visitors arrive in a steady stream of cars, which rapidly fill the parking spaces nearest to the house. Soon there will be so many cars that vehicles must be directed towards another section of the park roped off for the purpose.

By the early 1990s, country houses were in a better position than they had been a decade or so previously, but their future remained far from secure. This chapter returns to the pivotal question of how houses have been rescued and restored over the last half century, and the changing contexts within which this has happened, particularly in the last few decades.

The fate of Pitchford Hall in Shropshire, a half-timbered house held by the Colthurst family for nearly five hundred years, was a reminder of how wider political and economic events could have implications for heritage. The family was hugely invested in Lloyds of London, which suffered catastrophic losses in the aftermath of the Piper Alpha oil rig disaster of 1988. The losses forced the family to sell Pitchford and its contents, but not before they offered it and seventy-six acres of grounds ‘to the nation’ for just under two million pounds. The house was arguably of some significance: it had been selected as one of the residences to which the royal family might be taken in the event of evacuation during the war. The National Trust expressed an interest, but that year had already offered to take on Chastleton in Oxfordshire with support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The Conservative heritage minister, David Mellor, rejected the idea that Pitchford might be saved by direct government intervention, which led to the arrival of Christie's auctioneers in September 1992.

As with Mentmore fifteen years earlier, the government had passed up on a bargain. Those who came to watch the auction get underway in the marquee could see the quality and significance of the collection. The sales catalogue featured paintings by Hoppner, Reynolds, and Cornelius Jonson, as well as furniture, silver, ceramics, glassware, and books. Rowena Colthurst, the daughter of the owners, was studying at Bristol University at the time. She later described the loss of Pitchford as “like a bereavement”. Her husband James recalled people “sitting in a tent bidding for paintings by Reynolds, or the lumpy bed that Queen Victoria had slept in … And then a porter would just carry them to the front of the house to be put in vans and cars and driven away. It was surreal.”

In his valedictory address as inaugural president of the Historic Houses Asso-ciation, Lord Montagu gave a bravura account of his five years in the role. Over the course of those years, he said, a mixed economy approach to country houses had been adopted. No longer was the government at odds with owners. A true partnership was now in place, involving the triangulation of the state with, on the one side, an emboldened and growing National Trust, and on the other the private sector. The formation of the association was essential to the working of this heritage triumvirate; it was, after all, “a coherent and effective lobby to represent private owners … a body representing the private sector which the State could itself consult.” It was in the best interests of private own-ers to keep their houses and to pass them on to their successors. It was equally in the government's interests for this situation to prevail. Therefore, the gov-ernment needed to avoid constantly changing the rules relating to taxation: the “altar of fiscal egalitarianism” that dictated draconian new capital tax policies needed to be shunned if heritage was to survive intact. It was hard enough living in one of these houses, Montagu argued, let alone being bled dry by the tax authorities for the privilege. The government needed to make concessions, or else owners would simply give up the ghost. After all, Montagu went on, “we know the hardships of living above the shop – how much more comfortable we would be in a smaller, warmer house.”

With these words Lord Montagu effectively summarised the existential dilemma faced by those responsible for privately owned country houses. These places were lived-in family homes. Yet their ongoing survival was also dependent on those houses being active places of business, whether as tourist attractions or as hospitality venues. Living above the shop was a practical necessity for anyone born into the life of a country house owner. Owners wanted both to maximise their business revenues and minimise the impact that business activity had on the day-to-day lives of them and their families. They could not depend on direct help from the government: which government, after all, would see their mission as being to enable the owners of stately homes to maintain their lifestyles?

When Biddy and Bill Cash saw a tumbledown, brick-built Jacobean manor house on a list of ‘Threatened Houses of Architectural Interest’ in June 1970, they couldn't resist the urge to investigate further. Bill was thirty-one and making his way in a career as a lawyer. Their son, William, had been born four years earlier, and Biddy and Bill liked the idea of establishing roots by means of a place in the country. On their first visit to Upton Cressett in Shropshire they found a completely derelict ruin. Pigs roamed freely around the wood-panelled rooms of the main house. The previous tenant, a farmer, had left behind the detritus of piles of grain and abandoned farm equipment. “It was a hot day,” Bill later remembered, “the ground floor stank like a summer farmyard. There was chicken and pig manure everywhere.” But there was to be no turning back. Biddy and Bill had fallen in love. William, their son, now explains that “my par-ents had become afflicted with that most British and expensive of diseases: the ‘dream’ of finding an old English manor house and restoring it, the more of an overgrown ruin beyond hope, the better.”

The family moved in and began the slow and painstaking task of restoring the property. None of it was easy. Bill decided that the best option, as a way of keeping control of budgets, was to renovate one room at a time, and never to spend more than a few hundred pounds per room. Plaster was repaired and painted white. Floors and roofs were made good. Biddy and Bill spent as much time as they could there, supervising builders when they weren't doing the work themselves. It was the saving of Upton Cressett. As William now says, “if a buyer or leaseholder hadn't been found, the house might have been yet another to fall victim to the wreckers’ ball as a way of avoiding a costly Conservation Order.” Instead, Bill applied his detailed understanding of the law of listed properties to the business of his own restoration work. Bill shared his expertise by preparing a “Manual of Legislation Affecting Historic Buildings and the National Heritage” for the HHA in 1976.

The alarms started clanging at 2:30am that Sunday morning. Each of the volunteer firemen in the village had a bell fitted in their house, to alert them to when they were needed at the station. In a rush, Barry Heaton got himself ready; within minutes he was out of the front door and running to join his crewmates at the fire station on Debden Road. Eric Byford was already there, having switched on the station lights and started up the communications equipment. Barry heaved open the metal concertina doors and started to put on his gear.

At first, Barry couldn't believe it when Eric shouted that the fire was at Shortgrove Hall. Shortgrove was a constant backdrop to village life. Built in 1684 for Giles Dent, it stood at the top of a hill to the north of the village, reached through ornate iron gates and across a classically designed bridge over the river Cam. The house was now empty, the Butler family having sold it a few years earlier to a Mr Geoffrey Allen. Barry remembered that Mr Allen lived at Duddenhoe End and had not yet moved in to Shortgrove. It must be a false alarm, surely?

It wasn’t. “We drove through the main gates past the Lodge and over the old bridge”, Barry later remembered, “and then in front of us, between the oak trees, was a scene we shall never forget.” The entire house was ablaze, and it was serious. “On every storey flames were pouring out of every window, with very little smoke.” Arthur Butler, the son of the previous owners, was staying that evening at his parents’ new house in the grounds of Shortgrove Hall. He vividly recalled the conflagration: “A huge ball of flame was shooting out of the front door and was curling upwards and backwards over the roof. The heat was intense, but the really terrifying thing was the noise of the flames – like two express trains passing simultaneously through a station.”

Immediately the fire crews set to work, connecting the hoses to the water mains. As well as Barry Heaton and Eric Byford, up to sixty firemen and a dozen pumps were called to the house from across north-west Essex and east Hertfordshire, from Thaxted, Stansted, Bishop's Stortford, and Harlow.

One index of the revival in fortunes of privately owned country houses from the mid-1970s was the sharp fall after this point in the number of houses being offered to the National Trust. Those mansion properties that are nowadays held ‘in trust for the nation’ by either of the UK's National Trusts are mainly legacies of the post-war slump in country house fortunes in the 1940s and 1950s. Compared to this earlier phase of growth, relatively few mansion properties have been acquired by either of the Trusts since the conditions for country house owners improved so markedly after the finance acts of 1975 and 1976.

Perhaps we should not be so surprised by this. In many ways the high period of country house acquisition by the National Trust, from the 1940s to the early 1970s, was an aberration from its founding mission. When the Trust was established in 1895, its focus was not so much on houses, or even on built heritage more generally, but on land and landscape. The social housing cam-paigner Octavia Hill is often presented as the Trust's founding spirit, given the missionary zeal with which she pursued her energetic campaigns to improve the lives of the poorest in society. Yet at the very heart of the National Trust was an idea about legal rights to property and ownership, which was wholly original, indeed radical, in its conception. For this, the Trust's founding chairman, the lawyer Robert Hunter, deserved full intellectual credit.

The ability to hold land in trust was not itself original. Such concepts dated back to the Middle Ages, developed, it was said, to ensure that the estates of crusading knights were protected during their long periods of absence. Houses and estates might be placed into trust in situations where an heir inherited before his majority, or where the owner was incapacitated because of illness or some other misfortune. Trustees for estates took responsibility for the property and sought to manage it not for personal gain but in the interests of beneficiaries. Landed estates could be further bound by the practice of entail, where an owner was cast as merely a temporary custodian, holding property on behalf of as-yet-unborn heirs.

A mostly instrumental long-player record that took its inspiration from the English landscape dominated the album charts in October 1974, and in the week of the opening of the V&A's Destruction of the Country House exhibition. Hergest Ridge was Mike Oldfield's follow-up to the phenomenally successful Tubular Bells, his bestselling debut of 1973. The sleeve of Hergest Ridge featured an aerial shot of the titular landscape feature: a distinctively shaped hill outside Kington in Herefordshire, close to the Welsh border. Oldfield had retreated here, to a house called The Beacon, as a way of coping with his sudden fame and public profile as well as to draw inspiration for his music.

A mile or two from Hergest Ridge, and therefore just off the edge of the aerial photograph on the sleeve of the record, was an equally distinctive country house and garden. Hergest Croft had suffered the depredations of wartime requisition after it was converted to a boarding school for girls. Nevertheless, it had narrowly escaped a listing in the catalogue for the Destruction show, and the family had resumed residence in 1953. In a clear case of nominative determinism, the Banks family made their money in banking (as well as in industry and the law). But successive generations of the family were also keen on banking of a more physical kind: building up the embanked surroundings of their house through plantings of trees and shrubs. William Hartland Banks married Dorothy Alford, daughter of the dean of Canterbury and, like her husband, a talented natural scientist. Together they first laid out the gardens at Hergest Croft in 1895, around the time that the house had been built to a fashionable arts and crafts design. The gardens became known for their exotics and other distinctive plantings: azaleas, cedars, rhododendrons, maples, and birches. The trees planted after the war by William and Dorothy's son Dick Banks, an industrialist and director of ICI, now have national collection status.

Dick's eldest son, Lawrence, made a career in banking, but also had a passionate interest in gardening. The two sides of his life were combined when he became treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society.

Easter weekend is normally one of the busiest for those country houses that open as attractions. Places that target family groups will often advertise special events, such as Easter egg hunts or cream teas. If the weather is kind – which cannot be guaranteed for an event that could in theory fall as early as late March – then large crowds can normally be expected. Mothers’ Day can also be another occasion that brings out lots of groups, to visit gardens or to enjoy a family meal. Mothers’ Day on Sunday 22 March 2020, however, was an unusually muted affair. A few days earlier, the British prime minister had announced that cafes, restaurants, and pubs must close their doors because of the growing numbers of cases of a new coronavirus, Covid-19. A day later, on Monday 23 March, large parts of the economy ground to a halt as the first government-mandated nationwide lockdown was announced.

At the time, most hoped that such measures might only be needed for a matter of weeks. Things did not quite turn out this way. Three national lockdowns followed, each lasting several months. The period from March 2020 to early 2023 saw an unprecedented level of state intrusion into private life and activity. All sectors of the economy suffered, but the hospitality and attractions sectors were hit harder than most. Every time new public health measures were introduced in response to sudden surges in case numbers, social events such as wedding celebrations were hit with especially tight controls. At one point, the only type of wedding that could take place involved no more than six people, with no celebratory event of any kind afterwards. Symbolising the effect such measures had, the British monarch was photographed attending the funeral service of her late husband in 2021, sitting alone and isolated in the pews of the chapel at Windsor Castle.

Those country houses that depended for their income on wedding events, or on income from tourist visits, faced horrendous business conditions. Although the government moved swiftly to provide emergency incomes for millions of workers now no longer able to work, the medium- to longer-term financial outlook was bleak.

The plot of one of the most popular BBC television comedies of the late 1970s and early 1980s hinged upon the fate of a minor country house and estate. To the Manor Born was first broadcast on 30 September 1979 and from the beginning the show received consistently high viewing figures. The narrative arc of the series would have been familiar to anyone who had taken an interest in what had happened to country houses over the course of the previous century. In the opening episode, recently widowed Audrey fforbes-Hamilton took control of Grantleigh Manor, the ancestral home with which her family had been associated for four hundred years. She discovered that her late husband's debts had put the house at risk. She subsequently lost the house at auction to Richard DeVere, whose personal fortune derived from the company he founded, Cavendish Foods. Despite the pedigree implied by these names, DeVere in fact represented new money, having risen from roots in the East End of London. Audrey resented his ascendancy as lord of the manor and looked on, with disapproval, from her new home – a cottage on the estate.

The final episode of the first series of To the Manor Born was watched by nearly twenty-four million people, making it the fourth most popular television event of the decade. The show was recommissioned for a further two series, before it finally ended in 1981. The success of the situation comedy showed, perhaps, that the UK television-viewing public intuitively understood distinctions between old and new money, and the humorous potential in the reversal of traditional class roles. The series appealed to the same underlying consciousness of British class culture that had driven the success of films such as Joseph Losey's 1971 adaptation of L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between, or the television drama Upstairs, Downstairs, first broadcast in the same year. The Go-Between, filmed at Melton Constable Hall in Norfolk, used the mise-en-scène of an Edwardian country house to tell the story of a love affair that crossed class lines. The film was a critical and box office success: Harold Pinter's screenplay won a British Academy Film Award, while Margaret Leighton was nominated for an Oscar for her role as the matriarch of the house.