Britain’s stately homes are in a crisis

 By Joe Shute

Every week, Sir Richard FitzHerbert, the ninth baronet of Tissington Hall, sweeps out of the front doors of his ancestral home and heads to town to buy a lottery ticket. 

“I always make sure I get one,” says the 49-year-old owner of the beautiful house on the southern slopes of the Peak District, which has been occupied by his family since it was built in 1609. “I buy a ticket for the Euromillions as well. I’ve won £10 about five times. We have a pool as well with the staff. The biggest win we have had with that was about £75. It’s not for a yacht in Monte Carlo. It all goes on the house.” 

Sadly for Sir Richard, his repair bill is stretching to rather more than his occasional three-number jackpot can provide. At current estimates, he needs to spend £125,000 plus VAT on restoring the corroding iron plumbing installed in 1890 and £500,000 rebuilding the leaking billiard room roof. 

Elsewhere, most of the hall’s 48 Victorian chimneys need repairing, masonry is crumbling and walls need repointing. His oil heater, he says, is older than the 22-year-old cricketer Joe Root and guzzles £15,000 a year. His electricity bill comes in at a separate £10,000 a year. When his four children, aged between 13 and 18, are at boarding school, he and Lady FitzHerbert swaddle themselves in extra coats and jumpers, rather than turn the heating on. 

Overall, he estimates the house needs between £750,000 and £1 million spent on it. But it’s not just Tissington Hall that is suffering – there has been a dramatic increase in the volume of repairs needed at stately homes across the country. A new survey, published today by the Historic Houses Association (HHA), which represents 1,500 privately owned estates, castles and gardens throughout Britain, says the “urgent repairs” required by its members have nearly doubled since 2009. 

The current backlog now stands at £764 million, compared with £390 million four years ago and £260 million in 2003. At the same time, the findings reveal that the amount spent annually by its members on repairs has fallen to £102 million – a drop of £37 million on 2009. 

A combination of rising costs – particularly energy bills – and plummeting visitor numbers during the past few unseasonably wet summers is being blamed on squeezing maintenance revenues. 

The HHA is also fiercely opposing new restrictions on stately homeowners offsetting losses against other more profitable parts of the business, which were imposed by the Treasury in April. The cap limits the exceptional losses that owners can offset against other income at £50,000. The HHA says it is “threatening our ability” to safeguard centuries of heritage, and making an “already serious situation much worse”. 

Deep in the bowels of Tissington Hall, Sir Richard taps a decaying green-furred heating pipe situated near a collection of leather gun cases and furrows his brow. 

“The HHA survey suggests what I’ve been saying for a long time: we are privileged to live in these places, but if we, as a nation, want to continue to have them, we have got to be helped along the way somehow. 

“When you come here, everything looks fine and in good order. But the trouble is behind the scenes, where people don’t see. I always tell visitors I would swap my bank balance for theirs any day of the week. Some of them get it, some of them don’t.” 

The struggle of many stately home owners means increasingly that historic houses and their contents are ending up in private hands. Last October, Torosay Castle on the Isle of Mull was sold to a mystery Swiss buyer, leaving the hands of the family who owned it for 147 years. It is now closed to the public. 

Only last week, the entire contents of the 18th-century Trelissick House, in Cornwall, were auctioned off for £3.3 million, with much of the interest coming from abroad. The most expensive item in the sale was an 18th-century Quinlong vase, bought by a Chinese buyer for £337,250. A spokesman for the auction house Bonhams said that although the manor house is owned by the National Trust, the private collection was sold off because its occupants, William and Jennifer Copeland, had decided to move somewhere more modest – not, it is thought, for any financial reasons. 

In 2010, more than £50 million of art and antiques from British stately homes were sold in a week at auctions in London, going to buyers from as far afield as Albania and Kazakhstan. Sellers included the trustees of Althorp House, the childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Northamptonshire seat of her brother, Earl Spencer, to help pay for a new roof as part of a £10 million restoration. Among the items sold was the painting A Commander Being Armed for Battle by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, which had belonged to the family since 1802. It fetched £9 million. 

Talking about the backlog of repairs, Richard Compton, the current president of the HHA, says: “This is a problem across the board. When things get put off there comes a point when you delay them so far they become urgent.” Compton, who owns Newby Hall in North Yorkshire, designed by Sir Christopher Wren, estimates that his own repairs backlog is currently around £400,000. His estate last year recorded a loss of £120,000. 

Back at Tissington Hall, Sir Richard has also been forced to sell off items since he inherited the estate in 1989, at the age of 25. In 1990 he undertook £350,000 repairs on the roof, paid for in part by the sale of a painting by the 17th-century artist Diego Velázquez. In 2009, following the closure of a pre-prep school he had installed in a converted stable block, he auctioned off more than £1.4 million of property (before tax). 

“It’s pretty horrible when you have to sell something,” admits Sir Richard. “I know it’s not exactly a popular issue – more money to the toffs – but I do fear for the next generation.” 

Tissington Hall has 61 rooms, 48 chimneys, seven staircases, seven bathrooms, six dogs and two cats. Sir Richard reels this off with the weary air of a man who has to entertain 1,800 visitors a year. The 2,000-acre estate also hosts 21 weddings annually to supplement his rent from the 50 properties in the village that he owns. He estimates the annual income at around £500,000 a year. 

“But it goes pretty quickly,” Sir Richard says, citing bank repayments, staff (six full-time), maintenance of all the properties, and tax. “With the estate we are doing fine. With the hall we are making a loss.” 

Up on the lead roof, which is punctuated by gothic Victorian chimneys, towering high over the surrounding village of Tissington, Sir Richard inspects the rotting wooden skylight that is leaking alarming quantities of water into the billiard room, before switching attention to the view of his beautiful rose garden, resplendent in the sun. 

“One of the things about living here,” he says, “is that I’m an exhibit, too. I share my life with thousands of people every year. When you inherit something, you move your life and your family, but you just want to keep it going. 

“I’ve never qualified in anything, my job is running a stately home. Nobody can qualify you for that. It’s just part of life. And I love it. We’re not asking for any more money from the government or any more grants. We’re just asking them not to change the rules.” 

Sir Richard stops speaking abruptly, distracted by a pile of dead leaves in the gutter. In truth, he doesn’t much want or expect any public sympathy. He just needs those blasted numbers to come up.