Tradition, family and Cher's knickers

Nationalisation has saved our country houses, says Simon Jenkins, but in some cases the price of survival has been loss of dignity Twenty years ago I visited the Harpur-Crewe house of CaIke Abbey, lost in the rolling Derbyshire hills. The place was

a dump. The last, eccentric Harpur-Crewe lived alone in a handful of rooms, contemplating 18 million in death duties unpaid and total ruin.

The baroque mansion, possibly by the Smith family of Warwick, was crumbling round him, damp and with rotting stonework. Rooms were piled with junk, with old trophies, birds' eggs, yellowing prints, bedsteads, soap-boxes and empty bottles. It seemed that no dustman had ever called. In a back room a box of Chinese silk bed-hangings had just been discovered, unopened since arriving in 1734, the original colours pristine and unique. Yet the estate made no money. Bankruptcy and demolition seemed unavoidable. I wanted to tiptoe away from the place, as from a tomb.

CaIke is now immaculate. Every item of junk has been catalogued, conserved and reinstated as a time warp'. Some £4 million has been spent on a no-expense-spared restoration. The CaIke Bed is on show. The National Trust is in charge and the house and its woodland are opened to the public.

The stately homes of England are in rude good health. It is now a quarter-century since Sir Roy Strong and the V&A cried doom with the Destruction of the Country House exhibition. It was heartrending, charting some 600 fine houses lost over the preceding century. Conservation campaigners went to war to save what was left. I have surveyed more than a thousand of the survivors — virtually the entire remaining stock — and conclude that the campaign was astonishingly successful.

I doubt if a single house of the first rank in England now faces demolition or ruination. The listing system has dug deep, accompanied by a panoply of grants, trusts, tax reliefs and exemptions. Since 1974 I cannot think of a single one that has been lost completely. When Uppark in Sussex was burnt out in 1989, there was little argument over what should happen. It was rebuilt facsimile.

As a vivid token of this, I cannot discover a duke, marquess or earl who has been forced to surrender his scat since the V&A show. While their Continental cousins are scattered to the winds, the grandees of England seem safe on their ancestral acres: Devonshires, Mar'boroughs, Bedfords, Wellingtons, Salisburys, Norfolks, Northumberlands, Richmonds and many others.

Berkeleys still reside at Berkeley, Comptons at Compton and Howards at Castle Howard. When researchers for the BBC 2 Restoration series last month scoured the land for stately horror stories, the aristocracy let them down. There were none. They had to make do with derelict baths and chapels.

Big houses have never been profitable. Architects have always been a greater threat to the aristocracy than war or gambling. The task of keeping these houses up. warm and dry is a constant struggle, and for some sheer hell. This has been made no easier by Gordon Brown's recent savage ending of tax

relief on cross-subsidies to houses from their estates. Given his indulgence of City tycoons, this is an act of feudal vendetta. According to the Historic Houses Association, it threatens the sale of up to 400 middle-rank houses newly hit by tax.

Yet the fact is that Britain has emerged from the 20th century with a stock of historic buildings without equal in Europe. Above all, these buildings retain most of the ancestral collections intact — houses such as Chatsworth, Petworth and Harewood are major art galleries — and are accessible to the public.

Tracking them down has for me been a labour of love that required much love of labour. I have been attacked by mastiffs, begged for money and been trapped for hours by those Ancient Mariners, lonely country-house custodians. I have been evicted by National Trust warders as a burglar (you may not take notes in a Trust house) and plied with wedding bookings. Houses will do anything for money. I have met Land-Rovers in Great Halls and transvestites cavorting through saloons. There are nightclubs in cellars and chicken factories in back yards.

One embattled owner met me in a halfrestored mansion, wailing that his wife had run off with his builder, the latter loss being the greater catastrophe. Another denied me access since 'her ladyship' was in a yoga position in the hall. A third warned me never to buy a historic house as it turned men into 'wife-killers' — as he leered at his own wife standing at the Aga making cakes.

Roughly a half of accessible houses are now in some form of public ownership through the National Trust, English Heritage or local councils. This 'stealth nationalisation' has been masterly. Its impresario before and after the second world war was James Lees-Milne, negotiator for the National Trust. His diaries record how he lifted some of the greatest properties in England from the hands of their owners: Knole from the Sackvilles, Petworth from the Egremonts, Lyme from the Leghs and Attingham from the Hills.

Lees-Milne's tactic was to reassure paranoid owners that they were not surrendering to the hated government, but to people rather like themselves, indeed to him. The last Hill of Attingham, Lord Berwick, was so devastated at losing his inheritance that he fell dumb during negotiations, leaving his wife to discuss 'our mild embarrassment'. It was a huge relief that Lees-Milne and every NT trustee at the time had been to Eton.

More recent has been a different sort of nationalisation. The rise in taxation and corresponding pressure for relief have meant ever more in quid pro quo. The most notable is the 28-60-day access requirement. Every one of my 'thousand best' is in some degree open to the public and the pressure for more opening is remorseless.

While high taxation was the undoing of many great estates before the 1970s, relief from it has been the salvation of most since then. At the same time as France was smashing any surviving landed gentry with the abandon of a Robespierre, the British Treasury agreed a series of not-for-profit trusts, exemptions and acceptances 'in lieu'. These have been supported by two decades of farm subsidy and often controversial sales of land and art. The trick has worked. Blenheim, Chatsworth, Hatfield and Castle Howard could not have survived without state aid. Ragley Hall, in which the Marquess of Hertford declared himself incarcerated 'for a life sentence', was saved almost entirely with public money.

This has been a genteel double bluff. The nationalisation of England's historic houses has been hugely expensive in tax relief over the years. Yet if more owners had been forced from their estates, pressure for state acquisition would in many cases have been overwhelming — and even more expensive. The task has therefore been to avoid giving special favours to landed owners, while shackling them and their remaining wealth to properties that the public can enjoy. It has been fiscal imprisonment.

A different burden now confronts historic house owners: how to keep them attractive to a paying public. Gone is the time at Wimpole Hall when its owner, Mrs Bambridge, could be outraged by picknickers in her park and order her chauffer to pack a hamper, follow them home and pitch camp on their front lawn. Such trespassers today are gold dust.

The trend to new forms of marketing began in 1949 when the then Marquess of Bath imported lions to Longleat and told his guides to stick to family anecdotes. They should lay off art, as 'I don't think Rembrandts and Van Dycks interest the public very much'. Woburn and Beaulieu followed suit. Legend holds that when the scions of Muncaster in Cumbria heard of the lions of Longleat, they immediately sent their butler up to Harrods to buy some. He returned with a miserable bear.

Over the next half-century, farm subsidies kept the zoo-keepers at bay and art historians in business. Those days are over. Last year Castle Howard rashly asked its visitors what it was they most enjoyed about Hawksmoor's mighty pile. Few mentioned the architecture or the art. They preferred wedding snaps and any snippet of gossip about the Howard family, past and present (especially present). Thc house now obliges.

The National Trust is following suit. Its mission is now to 'keep our stories alive'. At Belton in Lincolnshire I was warned that an icy chill grips your hand'. Hardwick in Derbyshire has become a tabloid headline, 'Poor Girl Marries Rich Man'. At Lyme Park in Cheshire, on the basis of no literary evidence, Jane Austen's Mr Darcy emerges from the lake with 'wet cloth clung to his manly form'.

This is tame stuff alongside Dennis Severs's 18th-century fantasy in Folgate Street in London's Spitalfields. Visitors are taken back three centuries to wander the house in absolute silence. Every dish, every sound, every speck of dust portrays a moment in 18th-century time. There is real apple peel on a plate, real rubbish in the grates, piss in the chamber pots, rags and cobwebs in the attic. This sort of re-creation may be deplored by traditional curators, but it carries to logical conclusion what every historic house attempts to do: evoke the past. Severs did it better.

Many of the houses I visited are still far from this state of grace. The price of survival has often been a half-death. There are fruit machines in Lord Chesterfield's saloon at Holme Lacy. Holidaymakers crash through the halls of Tudor Littlecote. There are scientologists in Saint Hill, Buddhists in Conishead, and students of the 'Brahma Kumaris World Spiritual University' in Palladian Nuneham Courtnay outside Oxford. A pair of Cher's knickers hangs in a glass case over the mantelpiece at Belmont in Cheshire, for reasons that completely escape me. The campaigners could not win them all.

But there are silver linings even in these clouds. Institutions and hotels have brought many country houses back to life. Billiard rooms are again in use and ballrooms throng with wedding dancers. Thoresby Hall in Nottinghamshire may have been desecrated by a Marbella-style estate, but cricket is again being played in the park. Weekends at Cliveden and Hartwell, both luxury hotels, may be more eclectic than in the days of Astors and Lees, but not so different. Ditchley is the new epitome, a conferencecentre-as-country-house weekend.

The saddest house in England is Pugin's Alton Towers. The palace built for the Earls of Shrewsbury stands ruined, black and spinsterly, looking out appalled over the surrounding theme park like a vintage Rolls in a breaker's yard. But it is still there. And I lay money it will be there when the hordes have passed away and peace returned to this magic corner of Staffordshire. We have yet to restore dignity and prosperity to England's great houses, but at least we have given them longevity.

Simon Jenkins's England's Thousand Best Houses is published this week by Penguin.