Felling the Ancient Oaks How England Lost its Great Country Estates

by Martin Robinson, John

• ISBN13: 9781845136703
• ISBN10: 1845136705
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-02-01
• Publisher: Aurum Press

Summary

Today we find a motor-racing circuit in their place, or a power station, or a housing estate, or a reservoir, or a thunderous stretch of the M1. But once there was a grand country house, a superb parterre, a cottage garden, a sweeping deer park, a tree-lined avenue, lodges, stables, perhaps a cricket field - altogether a classic English country estate. But while we can mercifully still visit Chatsworth these days or Holkham, all too many - literally hundreds - across the country have been broken up, sold off, the buildings demolished, the land built on, leaving nothing but a collection of stirring, and now poignant, photographs, and sometimes not even many of them. John Robinson's book catalogues 20 of the most egregious losses around the country, from fabulous Trentham in Staffordshire to Shillinglee on the South Coast. Normanton is now under Rutland Water; Cassiobury has been swallowed into suburban Watford; Chicksands is covered with ugly military buildings. But here we can see these superb estates as they were in their pomp, and also in their decline. Robinson's authoritative, sometimes waspish text anatomises the various reasons for their dissolutions, from polluted water to in at least one case, the black sheep of the family blowing the fortune on horses and high living. England is Changing Handsis a fascinating chronicle of how power and money passed away from the aristocracy, but in the process utterly changed the English landscape, usually for the much worse.

Author Biography

John Martin Robinson is also the author of The Regency Country House.