“We don’t all live as is portrayed by Downton Abbey,” said Richard Compton from his home office at Newby Hall in North Yorkshire. (He would know: The real Lord Grantham and Lady Mary were his ancestors.) “In fact, I didn’t have anybody who lives like that. Now, it’s very much hands-on.”
Newby lost £300,000 worth of bookings on March 23, the day that Prime Minister Boris Johnson ordered the U.K. to lockdown. “It was our Armageddon,” Compton said. Forty out of the house’s 50 employees were furloughed with the help of government subsidies, and dust sheets now drape the furnishings of the house, built by Sir Christopher Wren in the 1690s. With the help of one gardener in lieu of seven, Compton’s wife, Lucinda, has been working 12 hours daily in the stunning 40-acre garden—which was even voted garden of the year last year in a Historic Houses poll. “Everything’s growing like mad. Plants don’t stop growing.” Compton himself does the mowing, which takes 13 hours through all the lawns.
“People are not living in these homes like kings and queens like they did a hundred years ago, with hundreds of staff members and butlers,” said Julie Montagu, Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, who runs the Mapperton House in Dorset. “We do it all ourselves.”
An Illinois native who married the heir to the Earl of Sandwich in 2005, Montagu has been livestreaming interactive tours, wedding promotional videos, and “meditation moments” around the 15-acre estate, in addition to running a yoga school. “I have literally never been busier in my life, ever,” she said over Zoom, still glowing fresh from a 12-hour yoga-teacher training session. “And then we’re doing about 12 people’s jobs and living in our house, which is a 500-year-old home.”
At their peak in the mid-19th century, not long after the Jane Austen era, there were around 5,000 of these country houses; today only about 3,000 remain. Hundreds were torn down in the three decades following World War II, and those spared opened their doors to the public for the first time in years to generate desperately needed income. Widespread demolition of the houses continued until the early 1970s, when tougher preservation laws were established, alongside a change in public opinion that deemed these properties to be part of a heritage worth saving.
The houses are now protected by law, but that won’t help families who might be forced to sell them to less-invested owners. “The jeopardy is perhaps not to the physical fabric so much as to the loss of heritage access and the diminishment of the role of these places in the cultural life of the nation,” Cowell said.