The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home PDF Download

Author: Peter Mandler
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300078695
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 540

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Book Description
Challenging the prevailing view of a modern English culture besotted with its history and aristocracy, Mandler portrays instead a continuously changing society where both intellectual and popular attitudes have only recently turned to admiration.

Author: Stephanie Barczewski
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 178914809X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
The story of how the country house, historically a site of violent disruption, came to symbolize English stability during the eighteenth century. Country houses are quintessentially English, not only architecturally but also in that they embody national values of continuity and insularity. The English country house, however, has more often been the site of violent disruption than continuous peace. So how is it that the country how came to represent an uncomplicated, nostalgic vision of English history? This book explores the evolution of the country house, beginning with the Reformation and Civil War, and shows how the political events of the eighteenth century, which culminated in the reaction against the French Revolution, led to country houses being recast as symbols of England’s political stability.

Author: Adrian Tinniswood
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541617991
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
A rollicking tour of the English country home after World War II, when swinging London collided with aristocratic values As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, its mansions fell and rose. Ancient families were reduced to demolishing the parts of their stately homes they could no longer afford, dukes and duchesses desperately clung to their ancestral seats, and a new class of homeowners bought their way into country life. A delicious romp, Noble Ambitions pulls us into these crumbling halls of power, leading us through the juiciest bits of postwar aristocratic history—from Mick Jagger dancing at deb balls to the scandals of Princess Margaret. Capturing the spirit of the age, historian Adrian Tinniswood proves that the country house is not only an iconic symbol, but a lens through which to understand the shifting fortunes of the British elite in an era of monumental social change.

Author: David Matless
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789146917
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
A cultural history of “Englishness” and the idea of England since 1960. Brexit thrust long fraught debates about “Englishness” and the idea of England into the spotlight. About England explores imaginings of English identity since the 1960s in politics, geography, art, architecture, film, and music. David Matless reveals how the national is entangled with the local, the regional, the European, the international, the imperial, the post-imperial, and the global. He also addresses physical landscapes, from the village and country house to urban, suburban, and industrial spaces, and he reflects on the nature of English modernity. In short, About England uncovers the genealogy of recent cultural and political debates in England, showing how many of today’s social anxieties developed throughout the last half-century.

Author: Pamela Horn
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445635380
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
Forget glossy period dramas, here is the real story of Britain's super-rich from the First World War to the end of the 'roaring' twenties.

Author: D. Cannadine
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230594263
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 403

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Book Description
Collects twelve previously unpublished essays by one of Britain's most eminent historians, David Cannadine, including his inaugural and valedictory lectures at the Institute of Historical Research. A unique volume discussing the study and nature of History itself and a range of key topics and periods in British and Imperial History.

Author: Margaret Ponsonby
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 0754684288
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book provides a fresh look at English domestic furnishings and decoration in the period 1750OCo1850, focusing on 'ordinary' and 'provincial' homes. Rejecting prevailing attitudes that often reduce interiors to generic descriptions based on high fashions of the decorative arts, it instead shows how numerous social and cultural factors combined to influence the manner in which homes were furnished and decorated. Issues such as the impact of availability of goods, gender, regional taste and print culture on domestic furnishing are thoroughly explored, expanding our understanding of English domestic life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries."

Author: Ben Cowell
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1837650586
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Fifty years ago, the future for country houses in Britain looked bleak. The Victoria & Albert Museum's exhibition The Destruction of the Country House, which opened in October 1974, charted the loss of over a thousand country houses in the preceding century. The makers of the exhibition warned that history could be "about to repeat itself" because of the threats besetting mansion properties, principally from higher taxation. Houses faced the prospect of having to be stripped of their collections and sold for use as offices, hotels, or hospitals, with their parks and gardens turned into golf clubs. Government might afford to save just a handful of the most significant of these places, working in tandem with charities such as the National Trust. The rest would be consigned to history. This book traces the history of country houses in Britain, from the Destruction exhibition to the present day. The wave of country house losses anticipated in 1974 never actually happened. Instead, over the next five decades Britain's country houses experienced a renaissance. Fiscal rules changed in the mid-1970s to make it easier for owners to hold on to their assets. Economic improvements in the 1980s and 1990s allowed many houses and estates to develop profitable commercial businesses. All of this was achieved only after dedicated campaigning from heritage organisations in support of the country house cause. The book argues that a new accord is needed today, to recognise and value the ongoing, if increasingly contested, contribution of country houses to British life and culture in the twenty-first century.

Author: Daniel R. Smith
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526157004
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
The fall and rise of the English upper class explores the role traditionalist worldviews, articulated by members of the historic upper-class, have played in British society in the shadow of her imperial and economic decline in the twentieth century. Situating these traditionalist visions alongside Britain’s post-Brexit fantasies of global economic resurgence and a socio-cultural return to a green and pleasant land, Smith examines Britain’s Establishment institutions, the estates of her landed gentry and aristocracy, through to an appetite for nostalgic products represented with pastoral or pre-modern symbolism. It is demonstrated that these institutions and pursuits play a central role in situating social, cultural and political belonging. Crucially these institutions and pursuits rely upon a form of membership which is grounded in a kinship idiom centred upon inheritance and descent: who inherits the houses of privilege, inherits England.

Author: Stephanie Barczewski
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526117533
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Country houses and the British empire, 1700–1930 assesses the economic and cultural links between country houses and the Empire between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Using sources from over fifty British and Irish archives, it enables readers to better understand the impact of the empire upon the British metropolis by showing both the geographical variations and its different cultural manifestations. Barczewski offers a rare scholarly analysis of the history of country houses that goes beyond an architectural or biographical study, and recognises their importance as the physical embodiments of imperial wealth and reflectors of imperial cultural influences. In so doing, she restores them to their true place of centrality in British culture over the last three centuries, and provides fresh insights into the role of the Empire in the British metropolis.