The English Country House and Chilton Lodge - Hungerford Virtual ...

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They come in all shapes as well. From the fortified manor houses of the 14C, through Tudor, Elizabethan, Carolean, Commonwealth, Jacobean, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian styles right up to the modern day, there has been a continuous English tradition of building and remodelling country houses. Some of them look as though demented children stuck them together with bits from every architectural style imaginable; others have a geometric precision and unity that is almost impossible to believe. Fashions change. Until the 18C, the 'English' vernacular style had dominated, slowly evolving over centuries and reflecting changes in society away from feudal towards more enlightened social criteria. As a result of the Grand Tour and increasing continental influences in English life, the 18C became a century of great experiment both in the design and alteration of houses, and in the landscaping of parks and estates. Some put classical facades on older houses (Welford); others built houses (Basildon Park) from scratch. As we heard in this room last year, the same phenomenon was happening in urban architecture, in towns such as Hungerford, where older houses were refaced with grand Georgian fronts. Vita Sackville-West writing at the end of the 19C best sums up how some traditionalists felt about the new neo-classical order. 'The great Palladian houses of the eighteenth century are in England, they are not of England.' I imagine she delivered her stinging epithet in tones reminiscent of Edith Evans. I remember once seeing a quotation from Bosworth or Johnson on the flyleaf of the Visitors Book at Easton Neston, which is one of Hawksmoor's finest houses. 'Mr. Hawksmoor has built a new house that commands an offensive view over the town of Towcester.' Ouch! Anyway, the classicists more or less had it their way for more than 150 years until, first under the Regency and then under Queen Victoria, owners and their architects started to hark back to the Gothic and medieval ideals. In the 19C, the Arts & Crafts Movement did much to revitalise craftsmanship in an increasingly mechanical age and contributed a great deal to the renovation of old manor houses that had been suffering from benign neglect whilst the Georgians were building their glittering boxes. However, as fortunes were made so quickly in Empire and Industry, so grew the demand for ever more ostentatious and extravagant houses. Building new houses and extending old ones to house collections of paintings, furniture and works of art, as well as large retinues of servants, laundries, breweries, etc. and to cater for the enormous house parties that were the vogue, became a sort of mania for both the 'new rich' and the 'old still rich' as the 19C drew to a close. Needless to say, the Victorian and Edwardian excess could not carry on forever. Indeed, owners whose primary income came from agriculture were increasingly under the hammer throughout the agricultural depression of the 1870's - 1890's. The First World War changed everything in British society, not least for the country house and its owner. Many owners faced more than one imposition of swingeing death duties within a few years, if not directly caused by war, then from the Spanish flu epidemic that followed. You only have to listen to the Roll of Honour on Remembrance Sunday in any village church to understand that it would be impossible after 1918 to recruit the domestic staff that was essential to the running of the largest country houses. It is also easy to forget that the period between the two world wars was of the same duration as the period from the Falkland War until today, but the 1930's encompassed the second big agricultural depression within 50 years. For many owners, their old houses, often bloated beyond recognition by Victorian additions, became an intolerable burden. For some, the pursuit of the Turf and the green baize proved their undoing. The boom in the construction and extension of country houses that had lasted from the 1840's until the 1910's went into sharp reverse from the
1920's onwards. Out came the demolition crew's ball and chain, dynamite and bulldozer. The list of country houses in Berkshire that were demolished or destroyed by fire between 1880 and 1960 includes Billingbear, Coleshill House, Holme Park, Hungerford Park, Lambourn Place, Lockinge House, Sunninghill Park, Yattendon Court and many, many more. Some counties, such as Kent, Lancashire, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, lost many more old houses. Scotland, so fashionable for the Victorians who built fairy tale monsters galore, fared worst of all. My mother's family house, Sledmere on the Yorkshire Wolds, was completely gutted by fire in 1912. It was completely rebuilt over the next five years, using the original plaster ceiling casts found in a warehouse and other wonderful craftsmanship. To the main house was added a new service wing that was apparently larger than the original house. This must have been one of the last major country house enterprises at the end of the boom of the previous century. Luckily for my cousin, the service wing was pulled down after WWII. He still lives there and the house and gardens are open to the public. The house is a popular venue for weddings and exhibitions despite its remoteness. It is hard to believe that, from its foundation in the 1890's until the late 1930's, the National Trust was almost entirely preoccupied with saving landscapes and coastlines. It was Lord Lothian in 1934 who really first rang the warning bell about the deepening crisis facing the ECH. From the late 1930's onwards, the Trust became the saviour of many important houses that could no longer be maintained by their owners. James Lees-Milne, in his book 'Ancestral Voices', records the tragic-comic negotiations that went on, sometimes over many years between the owners and the National Trust, often as not represented by Lees-Milne arriving on his bicycle. Ham House and Stourhead are but two examples of important houses saved during this most difficult period. But the destruction of other houses continued. Between 1920 and 1955 (excluding the war years) an average of 13 country houses a year were demolished. That is more than 400. Take one example, Cassiobury in Hertfordshire, the seat of the Earls of Essex. Originally a Tudor house, it was added to by Hugh May in 1674, then re-clothed as a beautiful abbey by James Wyatt in 1800. It had a splendid Restoration staircase that is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The state rooms were all decorated by Grinling Gibbons. The sale of the contents in 1922 went on for more than a week, and then the wreckers moved in and razed it to the ground. John Harris, one of the greatest experts on the ECH, pointed out in his book 'No Voice from the Hall', that 1955 was probably the blackest of all years for the ECH. More than 140 country houses were demolished in that year alone, a staggering number. He tells the story of Rolls Park in Essex, built for the Harvey family and inherited in 1939 by an impoverished parson called Lloyd. The house was mostly seventeenth century and Georgian, with a saloon credited with being one of the most beautiful rooms in England. An important collection of family portraits was set in wonderful Rococo plasterwork. The house was requisitioned by the Army for the duration. When the parson's son returned in 1945 from service overseas, he discovered that no fewer than 18 regiments had occupied the house at one time or another. The occupying forces had completely trashed the house. They had torn out the Tudor back staircase for firewood, and had started on the Grinling Gibbons front staircase. The portrait of Emma Harvey by Allan Ramsay had been used as a dartboard and she had gained a moustache. A VI bomb had blown off part of the roof. Repairs were estimated to cost £50,000 in 1946, an enormous sum. Mr. Lloyd was offered £7,000 by a grateful government. He eventually threw in the towel in 1953 and the house was demolished.
Page 1: HUNGERFORD HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION 2
Page 5 and 6: shape of the Soane villa at Chilton
Page 7 and 8: etail therapy, and put together the
Page 9 and 10: draughty piles can often be tantali

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