Back from the dead – the English country house – Telegraph Blogs

Back from the dead – the English country house – Telegraph Blogs

Even with an asking price of £35 million, there will be no shortage of buyers for Cliveden, the Buckinghamshire palazzo that went on the market last week. The hotel is up for sale after its owner went into administration – but even if another hotel group doesn’t go for it, there are plenty of billionaires, even in these straitened times, who’d be delighted to snap up one of the great stately homes of England.

How things have changed for the country house. Half a century ago, the institution looked in terminal decline: between 1945 and 1974, 250 were demolished. As Evelyn Waugh said later of Brideshead Revisited, written in 1945, “it seemed then that the ancestral seats which were our chief national artistic achievement were doomed to decay and spoliation like the monasteries in the 16th century.”