When an owner gives up: Lord Hesketh has decided to sell Easton Neston, his family seat designed by Hawksmoor. Should we care?

Apollo, July, 2004 by Gavin Stamp

The news that Easton Neston, the magnificent Baroque house in Northamptonshire of 1695-1710 designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor, is up for sale for 50 million [pounds sterling] came as a shock, and not only to the immediate family of its owner. Not only has the Fermor-Hesketh family been at Easton Neston for almost five centuries but the present Baron Hesketh seems to be reasonably well-heeled and the great houses of England no longer seem to be in danger. Besides, the possibility of demolition which overcame so many houses after World War I is no longer present: the building is listed, the United Kingdom has reasonably stringent historic building legislation and the heritage lobby is active and influential. The main threat today--other than fire--is a change of ownership and a loss of historic contents. This was the case at Tyntesfield in Somerset, rescued in 2002 by the National Trust.

Lord Hesketh seems to have tired of running Easton Neston at a loss. 'If the family's going to survive,' he said, 'the question is: is the house more important than the family? The answer to that is very simple. It's the family.' As Lord Hesketh is treasurer to the Conservative Party and a former chief whip in the House of Lords, this attitude would have surprised his nineteenth-century predecessors, who equipped their rising political star, Benjamin Disraeli, with an estate to make him a proper Tory with a stake in the country (they rallied round and bought him Hughenden--now run by the National Trust). Other old landed families, of course, have long resorted to opening their houses to the public and many great eighteenth-century houses have been accessible to visitors since they were built. That, however, is not a course Hesketh is prepared to consider. 'Part of the magic of this place is it's not open to the public. It is, in a sense, largely untouched. The other thing is, the more you commercialise it, the more you destroy its capital value.'

So perhaps the sale of Easton Neston is no loss. Most of us couldn't see it anyway, and now someone with buckets of new money will buy it, with no intention of sharing the architecture and gardens with the public. Of course there are problems with opening and commercialising country houses and the National Trust solution has not always been satisfactory. Families who have stayed on in houses taken on by the Trust have often found life difficult, and the news has also come recently that the Middleton Biddulph family is moving out of Chirk Castle as the lack of privacy and quiet has proved intolerable. The National Trust solution is, however, far from the only one and there are ways of opening houses which are perfectly compatible with continuing, comfortable residence. Another of the great inaccessible houses used to be Grimsthorpe Castle in Lincolnshire, with its rugged, powerful front by Hawksmoor's collaborator Vanbrugh, but today it is tastefully and discreetly open for half the year while remaining occupied. The Historic Houses Association points out that while the National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland own and open 279 properties, there are 332 historic houses open to the public in England, Scotland and Wales which are still privately owned. (And while 34 percent of foreign tourists in Britain go to art galleries, 73 percent visit historic buildings.)

The news about Easton Neston almost coincided with the death of the late Duke of Devonshire, and the obituaries pointed out that although the Cavendish family had been crippled by double death duties in the 1940s and 50s, he and his Duchess did not give up but made a success of Chatsworth as a going concern for the future. Indeed, that particular English baroque palace is a model of how houses can be opened without ruining them (and how the merchandise on sale can be rather better than the standard tat in NT shops) and the Devonshires seem to have enjoyed living at Chatsworth. Lord Hesketh, however, was not prepared to set up a trust so that his family could continue at Easton Neston: 'The catch in that is dead simple. If you are going to put it in a charitable foundation, you need to endow it. If I was going to do that, there would be little, if anything, for my heirs.' Lord Montagu, former chairman of English Heritage and a hero on several counts, had the answer to this: 'We don't open our houses to make money; we do it to preserve them for future generations and our family. We sacrifice our privacy for this.'

The sale of Easton Neston might seem to be as much to do with will as with money. Back in 1974, the Dowager Countess of Radnor (whose seat, Longford Castle in Wiltshire, has since, ironically, joined the select group of those never open to the public) wrote that 'if you can see no reasonable hope of a viable future for the structure, if the family cannot enjoy the ordinary standard of comfort of less ambitious houses, then the patient love which is all that keeps so many in these houses will become exhausted--and the houses will lose their owners.' That was written in the book which accompanied the Destruction of the Country House exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, organised by Roy Strong, Marcus Binney and John Harris. The centrepiece was the 'hall of destruction' in which the 250 odd houses of historic importance demolished since 1945--mostly in the 1950s--were illustrated, and their names recited in a lugubrious litany recorded by Harris. It was all very depressing, but the exhibition worked wonders in encouraging positive and constructive attitudes towards the cultural and artistic importance of the English country house. The fanfare that surrounded the sale of the contents of Mentmore in 1977 was evidence of this.