11 August 2016
Harley Sleek
by J R Thomas
The Marquess of Bath started it, opening Longleat House to the public to raise some cash after the Second World War, but it was the Duke of Bedford who really made country house visiting a mass market activity. The Duke was a natural showman and entrepreneur, and on inheriting both Woburn Abbey and a large tax bill in 1953 he not only opened his house to the gawping public, but soon introduced the drive-through wild life park at Woburn, the antiques centre in the unused ducal stables, cafés selling high quality food, and most famous of all, the best loos his plumber could devise – the Duke said that the public cared a great deal more about lavatories than Canalettos.
That started the style for opening the country seat and created a market that nobody had considered even existed; the Sunday drive out to some aristocratic home, a guided tour around it, a visit to the café and “exit through the gift shop”. Millions of people, newly equipped with the leisure of prosperity and also with a motor car, had their artistic horizons enlarged by their visits to houses that were still surprisingly well-filled with the glories of centuries of collecting. A bit of competition is always good for developing a market, so soon added to all this pleasure were adventure playgrounds, boating lakes, miniature railways, golf courses, and even, at Goodwood House, a motor racing circuit.
Over the last twenty years the country house day visit has rather gone into decline. There are many other attractions for the tripper pound (or dollar), and younger generations do not have the deferential appetite for seeing how the old rich live; nor, one might cynically suggest, the interest in art and architecture. At many houses the add-on attractions have become bigger money spinners than the house; and the owning family, their coffers replenished by kinder tax treatment, can close their doors and not worry about finishing the Sunday roast beef early, ready for the public invasion at 2pm sharp. The change to marriage location laws means that private houses can be licensed for weddings, and that has proved a much more profitable market than general public opening. A dozen weddings and attendant receptions and parties a year are often much more profitable than a hundred general opening days, and much less disruptive – though the Dowager Duchess in the east wing might not think that as the karaoke blasts out at 2am.
So is the traditional country house visit a decaying and increasingly rare beast? Perhaps not; what is now arising is a more sophisticated offering, master-minded by a new generation of owners who have often had extensive experience in business before going back to run the old homestead.
A leading exemplar of this is Welbeck Abbey, in Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire. It is fair to say that Welbeck is not the typical English stately home – it is the centrepiece of one of the largest landed estates in England, and it has an astonishing collection of art and antiques. The house was rebuilt very late by the standards of great houses, between 1880 and 1914, as a new young Duke (of Portland) took on a decayed house and huge but neglected collections, and was able to use immense coal wealth to give the Georgian mansion magnificent “arts and crafts” interiors and commission great art.
The family moved out after the Second World War, leasing the house to the army as Welbeck Army College, a sixth form college for aspiring soldiers. Giving up the big houses was a common event in the hard pressed years after the war, but unlike most families, the Portland’s did not sell the contents, storing most of them. And in 2005 the army lease expired and the family moved back into the house, and placed the contents back into the rooms they were always intended to grace.
The current family generation are both business-like and cultivated in their tastes. They are busy engaged in making Welbeck a Midlands centre for arts and crafts, and have leased much redundant space around the Abbey (there is a lot of redundant space) to artisans and creative types of every persuasion – and have also created a core where some of their output can be sold. This ranges from Stichelton cheese (the forerunner to Stilton) in a farm on the estate, to pork pies to glass blowing to ceramics to a brewery. The house is very occasionally open to those willing to pay a fairly stiff admission fee, but you get in return a long and detailed tour led by a knowledgeable guide. But for those whose interest is more casual, the estate has just enlarged its public centrepiece, the Harley Gallery, which displays varying parts of the family collections, but with special emphasis on the collections of family silver and portrait miniatures. For variety, part of the enormous Portland collection of equine paintings is shown in the approach gallery.
The new gallery extension is a worthy addition to the buildings around Welbeck Abbey – it is a cool, quiet space of unashamed modernity, bounded on one side by a great baroque wall and gate pillars, and on the other by the 5th Duke’s high Victorian former gasworks building– now the entrance to the gallery. Entry is currently free, as part of the incentive to get visitors onto the estate and to its other commercial activities – the intention is that the whole will become a sort of arts and craft shopping mall of excellence for central England, and a long-term view is being taken. There are both permanent and temporary exhibitions within the gallery – the current temporary is by Clare Tworney, an extraordinary display of 80 person-sized Chinese vases which wind like a stream through the first part of the gallery. That ends this Saturday though.
The new extension to the Gallery is worth a visit just for its architectural merit – like much at Welbeck, it is in great taste, though possibly not to everybody’s. It is designed by Hugh Broughton Architects and has just won a RIBA National Award and been awarded the RIBA accolade of “East Midlands Building of the Year”. But it is also a fascinating insight into the taste of a family who were able to both acquire and keep a most exquisite collection of art, and perhaps a precursor as to how some of the great private collections might be shown in the future.
With the restoration of the wealth of many landed families, both through an easier tax burden and the increasing commercial approach to running their wealth, the Harley Gallery may offer a modern alternative as to how to share treasures with the public, create an income flow, and not have to have the public tramping through your house, disrupting the Sunday sushi.
The owners of Welbeck – who keep a very low profile, preferring to emphasis the collections and the creativity- have the advantage of those wonderful collections and a robust chequebook to be able to have a long term vision and follow through. But what they have done is likely to be the pattern for other private collections too – a good art collection and some repaired outbuildings could take most rural estates into a new business. Maybe this August it is time to go back to the habits of yesteryear, a visit to your local stately, and see what is happening there.
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