'Live or Let Die' - 2010 SAVE Buildings at Risk Register
For anyone interested in architectural conservation the annual SAVE Britain’s Heritage ‘Buildings at Risk Register‘ will always trigger ‘what if’ moments as you contemplate possibly taking on a forlorn building which catches your eye. Yet the Register should also inspire some concern and disappointment that once again so many wonderful buildings are at risk in the first place.
The 2010 report, entitled ‘Live or Let Die‘, again provides a fascinating snapshot of a broad collection of buildings which we are now at risk of losing. Some are merely unused and crying out for sympathetic conversion, others are more extreme and would require great quantities of time and money – but they would deliver the most incredible homes or workplaces once finished. And remember, estate agents almost always value good quality, well-restored period properties higher than a similar but modern property in the same area.
The report features over a hundred properties from the large country houses such as St Botolph’s mansion, in Herbrandston, which was built in the early 1800s, but is now empty and deteriorating. Other substantial houses include the house featured on the cover; Northwold Manor in Northwold, Norfolk. However, it’s not just houses, but mills, schools, libraries, town halls and many more.
SAVE Britain’s Heritage has been successfully campaigning for historic buildings since its formation in 1975 by a group of architects, journalists and planners. It is a strong, independent voice in conservation, free to respond rapidly to emergencies and to speak out loud for the historic built environment. It has published a Buildings at Risk Register for England and Wales since 1989 and has had many successes and is responsible for saving many buildings we love today. Even if you can’t take on a property, if you wish to support their work, please consider becoming a Friend of SAVE and you will not only receive discounts on publications, but newsletters and access to the online version of the Register featuring over a thousand properties in need of care.
The news that Robbie Williams is to sell his country house, Compton Bassett in Wiltshire, for a potential £1m loss shows that with the wrong property it is still possible to buck the generally rising trend in prices by overpaying in the first place.
The Basset family (after whom the village was named) had first built a timber-framed house in the 13th-century. By 1553, the new owner of the manor, Sir John Mervyn (d. 1566) rebuilt the house using a reported 260 oaks, which gives some indication of the size of the house. It was still standing in 1659 and was recorded as being on a U-shaped plan, open to the south east. In 1663, the house and estate were sold to Sir John Weld, of the ancient Dorset family. He made significant changes, spending the colossal sum of £10,000 between 1663-1672 to build the sides up to 130ft and 110ft to create a large rectangle and to then cover over the courtyard. Originally, the house was in a soft, white stone but this renewed in brick in 1814, with the rest of the house following in the late 19th-century, during which it also gained the battlements.
Sir John also added the distinctive corner turrets; a stylistic device which echoed the form of a castle which bears some similarity to the Weld family’s main country seat, Lulworth Castle in Dorset,. This was built as a hunting lodge in 1610 by Thomas Howard, 3rd Lord Bindon, and bought by Humphrey Weld (John’s elder brother) in 1641, but sadly gutted in a devastating fire in 1929. As Humphrey Weld died (in 1684) without a male heir, Lulworth Castle passed to John’s son William who seems to have chosen it as his family seat and sold Compton Bassett in 1700.
The house passed through various owners until it was inherited by George Walker Heneage (d. 1875) who, by 1828 had established an estate covering 1,813 acres in the area. It was Walker Heneage’s grandson, Godfrey, who eventually inherited the estate in 1901 but then sold it in 1918 to the Co-Operative Wholesale Society who sold it again in 1929. It was bought by one E.G. Harding who then parcelled up the estate and sold it off piecemeal.
That period was a dark time for the country house in the UK with many being demolished. The house was bought by Captain Sir Guy Benson who sadly decided that he would rather live in the stables and so this wonderful house was levelled in the early 1930s and the stables converted in 1935 into the new Compton Bassett House. Unlike other successful conversions of stables, this one was obviously designed as a functional building and lacked the grace of so many of the stable buildings we can still see today and so did not lend itself to being the main house. Not that it has stopped various owners over the years trying.
The latest project was started in 1998 by the then owner Paul Cripps and was to take six months and cost £500,000 but ended up taking three years and costing £3m. The house was then launched on the property market in 2007 at an eye-watering £8.5m (no doubt to try and recover some of the lavish overspending on the interior) for the house plus 71-acres. After languishing for many months Robbie finally bought it for £8.1m but never really settled here, preferring his life in the US. So now it is back on the market with Savills (but not listed on their website) for a reported asking price of £7.5m – but once you factor in all the costs involved from buying and selling, Robbie should be about a million down from when he bought it. This also assumes he’d get that price – losses could rise if, remarkably, there was someone else out there who liked the look of the house but decided that it was still too expensive and drove the price down further. To be honest, when compared with some of the other properties Savills have available in Wiltshire for around £6m (e.g. Langley House or Midway Manor) why anyone would chose this one is beyond me.
n.b. the interior and floor plans can be seen in this article in Variety magazine in 2013 when it was again on the market for £5.5m: In Case You Missed It: Robbie Williams
*Update* 2010
Savills have added Compton Bassett to their website so if you have £7.5m and really feel that this house is the best way to spend it, then have a look at the details: Savills: Compton Bassett
*Update* February 2021
So, it turns out that Mr Williams was not able to sell the house in 2010 or 2013 or 2016 when it was variously reporting as being relisted. Again, in 2021, there is renewed interest as he plans to move with his family to a new house in Switzerland and has no plans to stay in a house he (and his daughter) now feel is ‘creepy’.
The usual spring rush of country houses coming to market has been later this year – a combination of the hangover from the uncertainty in the market of the last couple of years along with that of the General Election. That traditional shop-window of the country house – the Home section of the Sunday Times – has this week (16 May 2010) heralded what it sees at the start of the rush by including three pages of those for sale.
For those who like their country houses to look traditional from the outside but prefer a more modern interior then the Grade-II listed, six-bedroom Sandley in Dorset, set in 178-acres, might be perfect – if you have the necessary £9m. The owners decided that the rather ‘quaint’ style of the house was not for them and so they spent ‘a couple of million pounds’ and over two years to strip it back and then make it look very ‘London’. Personal taste is the final arbiter for whether you think this is a good thing – but not all tastes are the same and it can mean that the appeal of the country house is taken to new markets.
Ebberly House, Devon (Image: Savills)
However, if your tastes are more usual and traditional then there are other options. Holt Manor in Wiltshire, set in 94-acres, mixes both old and new with a more traditional interior cleverly concealing the latest in sound, television and security systems. With parts dating back to the 12-th century, the Grade-II listed house has been thoroughly modernised whilst still being a recognisably English country house. £5.95m [Holt Manor: Knight Frank]
If, however, you are looking for a more architecturally impressive house, the Ebberly House, near Winkleigh in Devon, could well be the house for you. Designed by Thomas Lee, a student of Sir John Soane, Ebberly was described by Pevsner as an ‘unusual and attractive house’ and was the first to sell in Devon for over £1m when it sold in 1997. The Grade-II* listed house possibly benefited from Soane’s personal influence as he was working nearby at Castle Hill which may explain the elegant, and very Soanian, top-lit oval stair hall with its fine cantilevered wooden staircase and curved doors, or the drawing room divided using three shallow arches. Set in 250-acres it has a wonderful estate featuring 20-acres of woodland, estate cottages generating £20,000 p/a in rental income, and spectacular views across to Dartmoor. It was also given an excellent and detailed write-up in Country Life – always a good seal of approval. [Ebberly House: Savills]
Chapel Cleeve Manor, Somerset (Image: Webbers)
Perhaps one of the most interesting of the houses featured is unfortunately only given a photo and no details is Chapel Cleeve Manor in Minehead, Somerset. Perhaps now not strictly a country house as it only has 7-acres, at £1.695m for 17+ bedrooms, it may seem a bargain for someone who wants to live in a country house but doesn’t want the responsibility of an estate. Although such a situation a hundred years ago could have led to the demolition of the house as happened to so many others. Yet, with so much wealth now generated without the need for a large estate to support the house, it’s now entirely reasonable for someone to take on and enjoy such a pleasing Gothic-Revival house. The house has been used as a conference venue for a number of years but with careful restoration this could be rescued from commercial use and be a spectacular home for someone who requires a lot of space. [Chapel Cleeve Manor: Webbers]
So has the rush started? Nobody really knows and asking estate agents is never an exact science. Several house which have been launched recently are still waiting to find new owners but the right house launched at the right time for the right price usually does find the right buyer.
Overstone Hall, Northamptonshire (Image: Martin Sutton on flickr)
Although hated by Samuel Loyd who commissioned it, Overstone House is fondly remembered by the generations of girls who were taught there after it became a school. A vast, rambling property, it was sold to an obscure evangelical religious group who lived there until a devastating fire in April 2001 destroyed the main part of the house – although Loyd might have been quite relieved.
Overstone House replaced the earlier Overstone Hall and was built in 1862 for the banker Samuel Loyd, who became Lord Overstone for services to finance. His wife was keen to have a property commensurate with their status and so her husband decided to rebuild on a grand scale. However, he inexplicably picked the unknown architect William Milford Teulon (brother of the more famous Gothic revivalist Samuel Sanders Teulon) who was instructed to design with a mixture of Elizabethan and Renaissance features. This choice led to the creation of one of the most derided houses created in the Victorian era.
Both Girouard and Pevsner were uncomplimentary with the latter describing it as ‘drearily asymmetrical’. However, the most damning verdict came from Samuel Loyd himself, who, in what could be regarded as a wonderfully amusing piece of architectural criticism, said:
“The New House I regret to say, is the cause of unmitigated disappointment and vexation. It is an utter failure – We have fallen into the hands of an architect in whom incapacity is his smallest fault. The House tho’ very large and full of pretension – has neither taste, comfort nor convenience. I am utterly ashamed of it … the principal rooms are literally uninhabitable – I shall never fit them up … I grieve to think that I shall hand such an abortion to my successors.”
As if this wasn’t enough, Loyd’s wife died before the project was finished leaving him with this rather large problem – which he promptly ignored by going and living with his daughter at Lockinge house in Berkshire where she had become Lady Wantage. Loyd must have eventually finished it as, on his death in 1883, it passed to Lady Wantage who, along with her husband, used it regularly during the hunting season until 1901. After her death it was tenanted until sold to become a girls school in 1929.
It remained a girls school until 1979 when the pressures of looking after such a vast pile became too much and it was eventually sold to the New Testament Church of God for £100,000 in 1980 who are the current vendors. The devastating fire in 2001 destroyed approximately 60% of the building including all the principal rooms and the impressive carved staircase. Parts of the grade-II listed house remained in use as an old people’s home but the rest became a concern, leading to it being added to the ‘Buildings at Risk’ register.
However, the house is now for sale as a grand project with the opportunity to create a truly palatial home – the original house contained 119 rooms totalling around 20,000 sq ft. The local council’s preference is that it become a single house – but to do so would require someone with big ideas and very deep pockets, willing to spend at least £5-10m on restoration on top of the £1.5m to buy the house and 50-acres. However, as the main cause of Loyd’s distress has now been destroyed, this is great opportunity for someone to perhaps create a house which might meet with greater approval.
For anyone with the necessary funds and Kevin McCloud on speed-dial, please call Robert Godfrey of Bidwells (01604 605050).
Norfolk has suffered the loss of many of it’s larger country houses but the smaller houses often not only survived but were much cherished as manageable but beautiful examples of local architecture. Yet, even today it’s possible for one of these lovely red-brick homes to slip into dereliction, at risk from the weather and criminals; Bessingham Manor has become another of these sad examples.
Built in 1870 for the Spurrell family, who had farming connections in Suffolk going back over 500 years, the house originally had 52-acres but this has now been reduced to a more manageable five. The house remained in the Spurrell family until the last member died in 1952. It was then bought by Robert Gamble who eventually found maintenance a significant challenge which was compounded by a poor quality roof repair which failed leading to massive water damage to part of the house, including the collapse of sections of the second floor. The near derelict state of the interior is mirrored in the exterior which is partially supported by scaffolding or probably held together by the extensive ivy. Perhaps questions should be asked as to why this gradual decay was not spotted by the local conservation department who may have been able to force repairs before the damage became so extensive?
It was in this sorry state that the house was finally put up for auction in September 2009 with the agents, William H Brown, who optimistically thought it might go for around £900,000 – despite a likely £1m bill to fully restore the house. Unsurprisingly, it failed to reach even the reserve of £640,000 from a starting price of £400,000. To compound the problems, thieves also broke in and stole a fireplace from one of the ground floor rooms. Despite this the agents have continued to try to find a buyer but with only limited success.
By the beginning of 2010, there were three offers on the table. Two were from individuals looking to create family homes but worryingly, one of the offers still in the table was from a developer looking for a commercial project – which is probably an inappropriate enabling development. With all the wealth still available and our nation’s ostensible love of older buildings, it is sad and mystifying as to it’s been so difficult to find a sympathetic owner. Once restored the house would probably be worth several million – so if someone has approximately £1.5m needing a profitable use then this would be the ideal opportunity; just please do it sensitively.
Despite the initially pessimistic outlook and the subsequent challenges, Bessingham Manor has survived, and more than that, is nearing completion of the restoration – see this comment left on another Country Seat article by William Hickey. This shows that the analysis of developers should often be taken with a measure of scepticism, especially where heritage assets are involved. The rescue/restoration of Bessingham Manor is to welcomed and the owners congratulated for their success.
The Country Seat 