The English countryside is full of grand stately homes surrounded by large landscaped estates. Once exclusively private, today many are struggling to survive, as a result they have had to call in bodies like the National Trust and English Heritage in order to survive. A favoured few have become sucessful places of tourism. The tables have been turned!

The Georgian Landscape ‘Improvers‘

In the Georgian period William Kent, ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphrey Repton had, between them, ‘improved’ over 1000 country estates, including:

the homes of gentlemen of more modest situation, anxious to make their acreage as up-to-date and impressive as possible.

These ‘improved’ landscapes. had wide open vistas, artificial clumps of trees, man-made hillocks and excavated lakes with temple, statues and mock ruins in the distance. Today we would call this devastation!

Humphry Repton’s Red Book

Humphry Repton (1752–1818) ambitiously styled himself ‘Capability Brown’s successor: the century’s next great ‘improver’ of landed property’! His famous ‘Red Book’ glamourously pictured to clients the before and after views of their estate after the work was done.

The novel Headlong Hall by Thomas Love Peacock published in 1815 characterizes the likes of Capability Brown, and later, Humphry Repton as the character Marmaduke Milestone “a picturesqe landscape gardener of the first celebrity’. Here he meets a potential client with this claim:

My dear sir, said Mr. Milestone, allow me your permission to waive the wand of enchantment over your grounds. The rocks shall be blown up, the trees shall be cut down, the wilderness and all its goats shall vanish like this. Pagodas and Chinese bridges, gravel walks, and shrubbery, bowling greens, canals and clumps of lodge shall rise upon its ruins.

Quoted in ‘ Life in the Garden’ by Penelope Lively

One example is Stowe, landscaped by William Kent and others. The place was all about prestige and making a statement. This is the grand vista facing south from which all signs of village life have been moved! Oliver Goldmith’s poem The Deserted Village condenms the take-over of the common land of the poor by wealthy landowners:

The man of wealth and pride
  Takes up a space that many poor supplied;
  Space for his lake, his park’s extended   bounds,
  Space for his horses, equipage, and   hounds:
  The robe that wraps his limbs in silken   sloth
  Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their   growth.“

Sadly, in Scotland it has been the same story. In the 18th century Highland Clearances crofters were driven off the land by the big landowners to make way for sheep and, more recently, fishing, grouse shooting and deer hunting.  See my post ‘Autumn in Scotland’.

On his travels on horseback throughout Southern England William Cobbet sought out the labourers and working people living at a subsistence level and campaigned on their behaf in Parliament.See my post Rural Rides with William Cobett.

But even as late as the 1880s, as Richard Jefferies records, as the poor farm workers passed the barns full of grain, they watched the sparrows flit in and out of the barred gates helping themselves, something  the humble cottagers would never dare to do.

Heritage Tourism

Today the tables have been turned! Today’s stately home   has to earn its keep by opening its doors. The Heritage industry is now big business. Millions of us watch these tv period dramas stage-set in a stately home. At the week-end the public flock to these grand estates where they enjoy:

a theme park, containing packaged ‘pockets of heritage experience’ to be visited, along with the essential gift shop, cafe and car parks. All to create that stage-managed ‘visitor experience’ and to bring in the cash!   

Anna Pavord Landskipping

These grand estates raise the question, Who owns Britain? Since the Domesday, our country has always been in the hands of a few wealthy landowners and institutions. The resulting issues of the Right to Roam, homelessness, and lack of affordable houses are today’s unsolved problems.