Let’s make Clandon Park beautiful again
Jeffrey Haworth explains why the state rooms of Clandon should be restored
Dame Helen Ghosh assured me several months after the fire at Clandon Park, when we met at Croome, that Clandon's Fine Rooms would be restored. Years have elapsed since then and changes in Senior Staff. Architecture, Buildings and Country House assemblages have become de trop, enthusiasms have switched to interpretation of individual objects. Indeed, it has been said that the National Trust is now a national museum (of objects). Why hasn't this sudden swerve been challenged by the Trustees or the Council (does anyone believe the Council ever challenges the Trustees?).
Clandon Park by Giacomo Leoni was accepted inalienably by the National Trust because of the outstanding quality of the series of Fine Rooms with their glorious baroque plasterwork, which occupy two-thirds of the principal floor. Besides their decorative significance and striking beauty they are of the greatest importance as the only such composite interior to have endured to modern times by one of our greatest Early Georgian architects working in Britain. Most of Leoni's buildings have been demolished or altered, tantalising fragments surviving from the great house at Lathom and the double-colonnade at Knowsley is based on a plate in his influential English edition of Palladio (1721). I have written about another Lathom offshoot, also in South Lancashire (Parbold Hall, Country Life, 20 Feb 2014) and having thought about Leoni's work more than most people, I am horrified by the Trust's latest gimmick for Clandon which follows an insurance pay-out of some Sixty-three million pounds, ample funds to restore the shell of the mansion and to reinstate the Fine Rooms. The high-quality photographic record of all the Trust's historic interiors carried out in the 1980s/90s provides evidence of all the lost detail.
That it should be thought an archaeological exercise will suffice, or inspire NT Members, demonstrates in one go that the Trust no longer understands that Architecture is to be looked at and enjoyed as a visual feast. The proposal gives the lie to the much vaunted belief in 'For ever for Everyone' if the Fine Rooms are not to be kept for future generations to see.
Those of us who have been abroad will be familiar with rococo interiors of churches bombed flat in WW2 or the painstaking on-going work at the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin. Those of us familiar with Britain will have marvelled at the revival of William Adam's rich interiors by Dick Reid's team at Chatelherault (otherwise the 'Dogg-kennel at Hamilton'). No-one who was there will forget the parlous condition of Canons Ashby and the team of specialist craftsmen and their apprentices who saved it from bursting apart. I had a letter in The Times when an RIBA President pressed for the burnt apartment at Hampton Court Palace to be reinstated 'in the style of our time'. More recently, Uppark has been reinstated to be as it was the day before the fire. Those people who haven't been anywhere and 'cannot look with their eyes' may believe Clandon's Fine Rooms cannot be a revived triumph of craftsmanship.
I'm a great fan of Hilary McGrady, but in some fields she can only be as good as the bullets she is given to fire by the Executive Team, which I believe is letting her down badly re Architecture, Buildings and the 200 or so Country Houses.
Suddenly there is a ray of hope at the Trust in that the new post of Chief Surveyor and Historic Buildings Architect has been created and filled for the SE Region. Just what the incumbent will be doing is unclear, but it is the glimmer of a new dawn. What will he say about Clandon?
Jeffrey Haworth
National Trust, 1981–2010
Roger White explains how trends in the architectural establishment and the National Trust have resulted in the proposal to leave an empty shell
Most members of the National Trust will by now be aware of the terrible fire that destroyed the splendid baroque interiors of Clandon House in Surrey in 2015. They also probably remember the devastating fire at Uppark Park, Sussex in 1989. Much longer memories are needed to be aware of two other major historic houses destroyed by fire and then demolished while in Trust ownership.
Coleshill in Berkshire (pictured above) was burned in 1952, set alight by a decorator’s blowtorch while its owner was preparing to pass it to the National Trust; the property did then pass to the Trust, which subsequently demolished the shell. It was described as the most influential house of its date in England – mid-17th century, and with Sir Roger Pratt, Inigo Jones and John Webb all seemingly involved in the design. Sir John Summerson, lamenting its passing, said that it had been ‘a statement of the utmost value to British architecture’. Three sets of imposing gate piers are all that is left on site to suggest it ever existed.
Dunsland House near Holsworthy in north Devon was acquired by the Trust in 1954. Although in origin a Tudor building, it was most notable for a range of the 1690s with outstanding decorative plasterwork and panelling. All this was lost in 1967 when restoration was nearing completion and fire took hold. No post-fire attempt was made at restoration and the ruin was cleared. Of the contents, only a pair of Chinese ginger jars and two candlesticks were saved. It was certainly Devon’s most tragic country house loss.
Uppark was burnt 1989 after negligent use of a blowtorch while under restoration. Following fairly vigorous debate, with modernists arguing that the interior should be rebuilt ‘in the style of our time’ (whatever that might mean), the conservation argument – as well as the requirements of the insurance payout - prevailed and the interiors were meticulously recreated in the form that existed ‘the day before the fire’. Most observers agree that this was a conservation triumph of which the Trust could be proud, and it certainly reflected magnificently on the skills of the craftsmen involved. A less well-known example of fire damage that was made good occurred in 1980 at Nostell Priory in Yorkshire, where the Breakfast Room and adjoining rooms were destroyed but faithfully recreated without any argument.
Despite these disasters, the Trust failed to install a sprinkler system at Clandon, arguing (I gather) that this might damage the contents. So instead we are left with a gutted shell, with the contents destroyed anyway (including the wonderful Gubbay Collection that was displayed on the upper floor; I particularly remember a spectacular Chinese Chippendale cabinet). The Trust’s decision to do no more than roof the shell can be speculatively attributed to various factors, including push-back (as at Uppark) by modernists opposed to recreating historic interiors, and more generally the evident feeling in some Trust quarters that historic buildings and ‘the mansion house experience’ are old hat (‘boring’, apparently according to Hilary McGrady), even if they do appeal to a very significant element of Trust membership.
Is it perhaps relevant that the curriculum vitae of the Trust’s Deputy Chairman (a trustee since 2015) includes previous roles at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art? Or that the Trust’s so-called ‘Director of Curation and Experience’ (who on earth thinks up these titles? Under different names the job was formerly held by such distinguished historians as Gervase Jackson-Stops, Simon Jervis and Tim Knox) is essentially an ‘objects’ person with no experience or expertise in the country house field? There is in fact currently no senior post specifically covering the historic architecture element of the Trust’s portfolio, which is extraordinary in an organisation which has the world’s finest portfolio of historic houses.
In any case, if this really is the attitude of influential members of the Trust hierarchy, would it not be better to split this cumbersome and over-large behemoth into two, vesting the historic properties in people who actually believe in them and have the curatorial expertise to conserve and cherish them, and leaving land and landscape in other hands?
Roger White
Secretary, The Georgian Group 1984–91
Executive Secretary, Garden History Society 1992–6
Restoration and ‘authenticity’
Clandon Park is to be left as an empty shell, even though the National Trust said in 2015 that it can “reassure all those who love Clandon that we will be rebuilding it in some shape or form”. Some argue that a restoration would not be authentic. Here are some other buildings which do not pass the authenticity test.
Uppark, which burned down in 1989 (below left) and opened to the public again in 1995 (below right) is the most famous example of a National Trust property being restored to its former glory. The restoration provided many opportunities for training in traditional crafts such as woodcarving and plasterwork.
The Clergy House at Alfriston, East Sussex, the first historic building acquired by the National Trust’s in 1896. Much of the thatched roof and walls were missing from the medieval timber structure (below left), but it was restored with the help of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings so that we can see it today as it would have looked in the 14th century (below right). Merlin Waterson writes in The National Trust: The First Hundred Years: ‘On 26 July 1894 the vicar of Alfriston, the Rev. F.W. Benyon wrote in desperation to Canon Rawnsley. The fourteenth-century timber-framed Clergy House had been abandoned by the vicar in the early nineteenth century, divided into cottages and by 1879 was in such decay that the bishop had authorised its demolition. A local appeal for its repair had failed and the building was only reprieved thanks to the efforts of the Sussex Archaeological Society. On 16 April 1896 the house was sold to the Trust by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for the nominal sum of £10. At that point the headaches began. Octavia Hill greatly admired the house, which she described as “tiny but beautiful, with orchard and a sweep of lowland behind it”, and she involved herself in both the fundraising for repairs and the way they were to be carried out. Money came in painfully slowly, but she would not countenance the thought of failure, insisting that to allow the Clergy House to deteriorate further would be “a sort of breach of trust … because it is ours now, given in the expectation that we could preserve it. Besides, all this hope is a great factor in inspiring people to work and gift, and if our National Trust failed in these small schemes in this the opening of its work, it would throw back our future work.”’
At Stourhead in Wiltshire the central section of the house was gutted by fire in 1902. It was almost entirely restored to its original state, so that we are able to see the 18th-century rooms today.
Elsewhere, many buildings we treasure today are in fact reconstructions. When a fire destroyed the interiors of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1837 they were reconstructed using evidence from watercolours. The famous dome of Castle Howard in Yorkshire was rebuilt after it was destroyed by fire in 1940. La Fenice opera house in Venice was destroyed by fire in 1996 and recreated exactly as it was before to open again in 2003.
St George’s Hall at Windsor Castle was gutted by fire in 1992 and restored with a new oak hammerbeam roof, similar to what would have been there in the 14th century. The Green Drawing Room and Crimson Drawing Room which suffered damage were restored to their original appearance. Many of the craftsmen involved subsequently worked on Uppark.
In 1986 a fire at Hampton Court Palace severely damaged the King’s State Apartments, created for William III. The rooms were restored to their 18th-century appearance, as designed by Christopher Wren, and opened to the public again in 1992.
Prior Park College, housed in an 18th-century building outside Bath, was gutted by fire in 1991. Specialist work was carried out by a team of craftsmen to recreate panels of freehand plasterwork in the famous piano room.
Runnymede Park in Surrey, built by Samuel Wyatt between 1789 and 1792 and listed at Grade I (below), remains a private house and has recently come onto the market. The house stood empty from 1945 until 1977. The previous owner told how ‘by the 1970s, most of the roof had gone, the interior was a demonstration case of dry rot and the subsidiary service wing was teetering on the brink of collapse. That part of the house subsequently fell down, with a loud crash, one night’. It was bought that year by Mr and Mrs Robert Collins who, in the course of the ensuing 20 years, painstakingly repaired the fabric of the building, redecorated and furnished the interior and rebuilt the stables.
