Ten years after a catastrophic fire, Clandon Park remains a ruin – and a potent symbol of the National Trust’s muddled priorities

Simon Heffer explores the National Trust’s motives for not restoring the interiors at Clandon Park in the Daily Telegraph.

In April, it will be 10 years since Clandon Park, the Georgian seat of the Earls of Onslow, in Surrey, suffered one of the most catastrophic fires for the nation’s heritage in peacetime. The house, designed by the Italian architect Giacomo Leoni and finished in the 1740s, had been run by the National Trust since 1956. After the fire, Helen Ghosh, who then led the organisation, said “the enduring significance of the house is its architecture and so we would like to return it to the 18th-century design – making it a purer, more faithful version of Clandon as it was when it was first built”.

However, in 2022, a new regime at the Trust announced that Clandon would be kept as a ruin, “thoughtfully conserved in its fire-damaged state” to give visitors “a unique ‘X-ray view’ of how country houses were made”.

This is clearly preposterous.

The house was famed for its lavish interiors, key parts of which (such as the odd fireplace) survived the inferno. While the Trust has been restoring the grand but quite plain exterior, it remains resolute that, with the exception of one largely undamaged room, it will do little to the interiors – even though an extensive photographic record of their previous state makes precise reconstruction possible.

The insurance money has been collected: it might not be enough for a total reconstruction, but the Trust had always anticipated needing to ask for donations to complete the project. The original decision by the Trust was morally right, since when it took the building on, it committed to conserving it. It did not promise to preserve a ruin.

Almost a decade later – a decade in which reconstruction costs have, inevitably, risen – the ruin remains. Yet, the National Trust is being pursued by the pressure group Restore Trust to change its mind and rebuild. Restore Trust has published a detailed document that not only explains the rationale for rebuilding, but also speculates on the reasons why the Trust might have changed its mind.

It suggests the Trust might have come under undue influence from the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which propounds an ideology minted a century and a half ago by William Morris, who lambasted “fake” restorations. Morris was outraged by the over-restoration by the Victorians of so many medieval churches, and rightly so; whether the ideals can be applied to Georgian houses is another matter.

There may be another reason, though Restore Trust has not advanced this. The Onslow family became rich partly by owning slaves. The National Trust’s obsession with identifying connections with slavery as a means to signal virtue has been well documented. Do those now responsible for the future of Clandon feel that by not rebuilding it they are avenging the inhuman treatment of people dead for two or more centuries, and showing their solidarity with them? I have no idea, but it would be as mad a reason as any. Whatever the real motivation behind the decision not to rebuild Clandon, it compounds a loss to the nation’s heritage first suffered in the fire itself.

As Restore Trust points out, such rebuilding is not “fake”: if it were, then large parts of Dresden, St Petersburg and other European cities ravaged by war would be fake. Many of the Wren churches in London, left as shells after the Blitz but rebuilt in the post-war years, would be fake, too.

It has been argued that the specialist craftsmen required to reconstruct features such as the elaborate ceilings for which the house was famed either do not exist, or are insufficient in number. This is disputed, and a contrary point is made that to embark on this project would be an opportunity to create apprenticeships in these trades, and to ensure the skills needed to preserve our heritage were secured for the future.

Getting Clandon rebuilt is not merely important for that remarkable building; it is crucial in showing the present politicised management of the National

Trust that enough is enough: modern ideological obsessions are simply not compatible with the preservation of our heritage.