Surrey Homes | SH24 | October 2016 | Kitchen & Bathroom supplement inside

Previous page: The coffee table in the library was made from
an old leather gym vaulting horse. The painting above the
fireplace is by Paula MacArthur from a collection at McCully
& Crane Art in Rye Above: The drawing room walls are clad in
de Gournay silk. The painting over the mantlepiece is of Jane
Austen’s favourite niece Fanny Bridges. The sofas are from sofa.
com Below: The outer hall at the house entrance. The marble
fireplace was added in the Victorian era. The ginger jar was
found at Ardingly
Unlike our closest European neighbours, we’ve
never really been much good at chopping heads
off our aristocrats. We had a brief shot at it in
the mid-1600s and even bagged a king, but our heart
simply wasn’t in it. We only lasted a decade or so without a
monarch before inviting his son back from exile. Monarchy
and its supporting aristocracy were here to stay.
The real threat to our titled class would not come until three
hundred years later and not from the axeman but the taxman.
Before the 19th century, the British aristocracy enjoyed a life
relatively free from taxation. Staff were plentiful and cheap
and estates provided a good income. But during the 19th
century this began to change, the sums no longer added up
and throughout the country once great houses began to be
demolished by their increasingly impoverished owners.
The pace of destruction increased rapidly after the
war and by 1955 Britain was losing a major country
house every five days. It wasn’t until 1968 that legislation
requiring local authority permission to tear down
a historic building put a break on the carnage.
37 wealdentimes.co.uk