Heritage
Brodsworth revisited
Ruth Guilding looks at the resurrection of a 19th-century beauty Brodsworth Hall in South Yorkshire- was given to English Heritage in 1989 and will open to the public on 6 July. Designed for Charles Savine Thellusson by the Ital- ian architect Chevalier Casentini in 1861, it is a middle-sized house in the Italianate classical style, of a satisfyingly imposing geometrical design. Brodsworth was built out of the proceeds of the sensational will left by the rich city banker, Peter Thellus- son, purportedly the inspiration for the novel Bleak House. In affluence the Thel- lussons passed their days in social and sporting pursuits, preserving their greatest enthusiasm for yachting and racing. After a brief Indian summer in the early 1900s, the number of resident staff was gradually reduced from 15 to one, rooms in the house were closed up, and subsidence and leaks took their toll upon the fabric.
The curator at Brodsworth is Caroline Whitworth, who has managed the interior works for the past four years with a discreet touch. Her self-avowed philosophy is that of an archaeologist, treating the house as a site in which each object is of equal interest. The development of a dis- play policy for the rooms is painstaking, layered and phased, with the fundamental tenet that most will be shown `as found', a happy solution which implies minimal intervention while permitting a whiff of romantic decay to prevail. But the reality is one of intensive industry and constant reconsideration. To counter the destructive powers of water penetration and insect infestation and to permit essential mainte- nance work inside the house, every object had to be removed, photographed, cata- logued, cleaned, conserved and numbered. Now that the rooms can be reassembled, the dilemma remains as to how they may be presented with fidelity.
In 1988, after the death of its last inhabi- tant, 87 year-old Sylvia Grant-Dalton, Brodsworth was turned over several times and items that had been hidden in cup- boards and store-rooms for over 40 years were put out for exhibit. For the display of certain rooms, last recorded in this state of picturesque disarray in 1990, there are no firm formal or historical precedents.
On the ground floor, the formal suite of rooms retain their 19th-century fittings and furnishings almost intact. The grand entrance hall and central spine corridor running along the main axis are decorated with trompe l'oeil marbling in rich, Soaneian crimson and egg-yolk yellow, and furnished with long mirrors which multiply the vistas, and reflect Italian marble statu- ary purchased from the Dublin Exhibition of 1865. Saloon, dining room, library and Brodsworth Hall, bedroom number eight billiard room offer an enigmatic mélange of high Victorian taste and 20th-century improvisation, with wallpaper patterns occasionally eclipsed by the map-like con- tours of damp stains, or stripped and replaced with a vibrant palette of 40-year old emulsion. Blistering paintwork on the back stairs has been painstakingly glued back and touched in, but tiny flakes contin- ue to peel from the walls and flutter floor- wards.
As well as preserving the indemnifying grime of Brodsworth's impoverishment, Caroline Whitworth aims to elucidate the lives and circumstances of the servants of the house, particularly during the period of its 20th-century decline. From July, six rooms in the servants' wing will be opened, shown initially in their unembellished guise of c.1990. During this period many of the bedrooms were redecorated, in styles rang- ing from an exquisite silvery-white Edwar- dian wallpaper patterned with mica, and now notionally reattached in places with drawing pins, to austerity period emulsions, swirling carpets, utility wash hand-basins and gloss paint, which, in the words of one distinguished connoisseur — 'some people will find hard to take'.
Brodsworth is indisputably an unusually beautiful house, but its other assets include the quarry garden, an arcadian feature originating from the quarrying of stone for the 18th-century house on the site, and re- embellished in the 1870s with artificial rockwork dells for flowers and ferns. It is a variant of the giant 'rockery' created by Paxton for the sixth Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth. When I walked along its length in 1990, overhanging and fallen trees and brambles closed out the light and clothed its features. Now its contours are brutally exposed, the choking foliage cleared back and fallen masonry reassem- bled, and the three delightful geyecatcher' buildings and serpentine paths are under- going restoration. It looks desolate, but things will doubtless come right in two or three years.
The initial cost of opening Brodsworth to the public is in the region of f8-10 million. Such houses have been dubbed 'stately fetish objects' by the historian David Cannadine, who argues that our veneration for these edifices has increased in due pro- portion to the decline in our national economy. But in its new guise Brodsworth Hall is almost completely divested of the noblesse which characterises so many of the National Trust's properties acquired during the stately era of James Lees-Milne and his fellows, nor will its new guardians use their public funding to restore its former splen- dour. Tacit choices underlie this latest, ostensibly simplistic methodology for coun- try house display, placing it firmly in the field of contemporary hermeneutics. Visit Brodsworth Hall soon.
Brodsworth Hall, near Doncaster, South Yorks, will open to the public on 6 July 1995.
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