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Clandon should remain a cry of devastation

07/04/25
Sir Simon Jenkins, Chairman of the National Trust from 2008 to 2014, on Clandon: Then and now
Sir Simon Jenkins dislikes the National Trust’s proposal to put walkways and skylights in Clandon Huse as much as we do. However, he wants to see the house left as a ruin, with no regard for the future of heritage crafts or the benefit of a revitalsed house to the community and the nation. He says, ‘This is England’s greatest ruin. Its cry should still be that of devastation’, which makes one wonder whether he has even been to one of our great ruined abbeys, and what is so good about devastation.
What a change from 2017, when Sir Simon wrote in Country Life, ‘To me, not restoring Giacomo Leoni’s Palladian masterpiece is unthinkable’.
From Country Life, 10 June 2017

What next for Clandon Park? Time to breathe life back into this great house
Simon Jenkins, former chairman of the National Trust, considers the next steps for Clandon Park in Surrey, two years after the fire that reduced it to a ruin.
What should be done with Clandon? Two years have now passed since fire destroyed most of the interior of this superlative Georgian mansion. Two weeks ago, a shortlist of six architects was announced for its restoration. However, as this magazine’s Architectural Editor, John Goodall, indicated in Country Life last month, choosing an architect is one thing, deciding what they do next is another.
As all buildings grow old, and some come close to death, these choices are never easy. Most great houses, like great churches, reflect many periods in their history and are the more intriguing for it. Where would the Norman cathedrals of Gloucester or Exeter be without the Goths?
However, every restoration requires a decision. The National Trust, new owner of Clandon, inherited Seaton Delaval in Northumberland in 2009 and left it a fire-gutted ruin. It did likewise to Nymans in West Sussex. On the other hand, it restored the fire-ravaged Uppark in West Sussex in 1989.
To me, not restoring Giacomo Leoni’s Palladian masterpiece is unthinkable, but how extensive restoration should be is another question. The world of conservation argues endlessly over significance, authenticity and patina. Such airy concepts are already plaguing the issue of maintaining post-1945 Palmyra. There is no truth in this, only fashion — and fashions change. The Victorians rebuilt with gusto. The 20th century preferred forensics over function. In a notable U-turn in 2012, the Landmark Trust broke ranks and returned derelict Astley Castle to useful occupation with a Modernist makeover.
During my time at the National Trust, I was eager to ‘bring buildings back to life’, in some sense of that easily clichéd phrase. Most English houses, great and small, were designed to be a mix of habitation, display and entertainment. I felt how this was done should be a matter for the creative imagination of curators, custodians and visitors.
Art history is a dominating discipline, for the sound reason that all restoration destroys something, even if it is just the veneer of time. At Clandon, 98% of the interior is gone, although the walls stand. But a third of the qualities that imbued this property with significance have been almost entirely lost. If loss of significance is so critical, why indeed build a Sainsbury’s?
The answer is that the reinstated ground floors at Clandon would be utterly beautiful, a word far too often absent in the ‘significance’ argument. Clandon’s interior would still be Leoni, even if executed in 2017 rather than the 1720s. It would include one of the finest baroque marble halls in England, containing Adam’s sensational ceiling and Rysbrack’s fireplaces, once ranked among the best in the land. There should be no argument.
More problematic is the handling of the upper floors and service quarters. Ever since the re-presentation of Calke’s Wunderkammer rooms in 1970s Disraeli Downstairs mode, wider interest in houses has moved from the display rooms to their inner workings, to the kitchens and servants’ quarters.
The National Trust has a vast number of empty rooms in its properties, many handpicked as appropriate to their original embodiment. If too lush these voids should be a matter for the Trust’s interpretation.
I see no reason why areas of Clandon could not be lived in. Occupation breathes life into a place, as do events, exhibitions and auction. In a crowded landscape, these houses are natural magnets for living and leisure alike. The one sign of failure in a great house is gaunt emptiness.
What Clandon needs is swift decision, not just a request for ‘ideas and suggestions’. The Trust’s Barrington Court in Somerset has been trapped by such indecision for a decade, left to boast only its empty ‘atmosphere’, whatever that is.
The contrast is glaring with the buzz of places such as Allan Bank or Wray in the Lake District or Vaughan Williams’s Leith Hill Place in Surrey. Here, visitors are free to take over rooms, picnic, read, paint and make music. There is a flexibility and delight to be found in the parts of houses that may ‘lack significance’. People can make of them what they will.
The character of most historic buildings lies in their evolution, mishaps and all, and in the decisions taken on their regular renewal. All houses were once modern, just as all houses one day grow old. Dr Goodall forecasts that the Trust’s decision on Clandon ‘has to upset someone’ and may ‘simply end up annoying everyone’.
Perhaps so, for the moment. However, the new Clandon cannot be the old Clandon. It will be typical of most great houses, facing a new chapter in what we hope is an eternal history.
The Times, 7 April 2025
Clandon should remain a cry of devastation

Fire-ravaged house would be better left as England’s greatest ruin rather than a modern mess

Simon Jenkins
Monday April 07 2025, 12.01am, The Times
The fire that destroyed Clandon Park House in April 2015 did two things. It wiped out a minor masterpiece of English architecture and it asked a tough question: what next?
When I heard the news, I went to Surrey to see the damage. I knew these things happen, such as the fire at Uppark in Sussex in 1989 and at Windsor Castle in 1992. Having seen the aftermath of both, I wondered how the building’s owner, the National Trust — of which I had just stepped down as chairman — would set about restoration, which I assumed would follow.
The question was academic. Arriving at Clandon, I was aghast. The destruction of the interior was all but total, leaving an empty and roofless brick shell alone in a deserted meadow. Cliffs of scalded bricks entirely stripped of paint and plaster reached to an open sky. Floors, stairs, panelling had gone. Scraps of fabric fluttered from window frames. Of all ruins, Clandon seemed the most ruined.
My faith in restoration weakened. There was no more house.
This was no longer a building designed in 1731 by an Italian, Giacomo Leoni. It no longer evoked a celebrated legal family, the Onslows. The Marble Hall by Leoni’s craftsmen, Giuseppe Artari and Giovanni Bagutti, had been a masterpiece, an encyclopaedia of baroque motifs and characters. Being made of plaster, not of stone, it was reduced to dust, as though victim of a blowtorch rather than just a fire.
The Clandon conflagration was nothing like those of Uppark or Windsor, which were partial and repairable, nor with such other fires as at Seaton Delaval in Northumberland or Yorkshire’s Castle Howard. Only one sad room survived at Clandon, the so-called Speaker’s Parlour, with its ceiling intact. The building was skinned to a skeleton. There was nothing but outer walls to “repair.” The rest would require recreation.
I am a fanatical restorer. I admire Lord Curzon’s rebuilding of Bodiam in Sussex, a castle no less real for being mostly 20th century. Wren’s City churches are no less Wren’s for many being substantially rebuilt after the Blitz. I am proud of the National Trust’s rejuvenated Uppark.
That is why I respect the eagerness of conservationists and of the Georgian Group to see Clandon restored. But we are not talking restoration. A new Clandon would be an entirely modern mansion inside the shell of the old. The few Leoni rooms worth reproducing would cost far in excess of the £80 million of insurance already devoted to stabilising and conserving the present remains. It would take tens of millions of pounds to assemble the craftsmen needed to train and reinstate replicas of Artari’s work. And then there would be the rest of the great house to restore.
A new Clandon would be a repurposed mansion — a hotel or flats — one wing of which would be a museum of Artari facsimiles. This might be splendid but of interest chiefly to specialists. Artari’s work can be seen in many other houses, such as Houghton, Wentworth Woodhouse and Moor Park. At present, such a reproduction of Clandon cannot be a sensible use of the trust’s conservation resources. Not to proceed must be wise.
So what becomes of Clandon? I am no great fan of ruins, of Francis Bacon’s “remnants of history which have casually escaped the shipwreck of time.” But they still have their message to impart. In her book The World My Wilderness, the novelist Rose Macaulay wrote of ruins as “your own roots … the cellars of consciousness in the mysterious arcades and corridors of dreams; the wilderness that stretches not without but within.”
That might be Clandon today. It reminds us of the ruin of Sutton Scarsdale, a Georgian house on a bluff in Derbyshire, its plasterwork also by Argyt but decaying since the 1950s. That is now Clandon’s fate. It was never the most enthroning of great houses but its ruins appear energised by disaster. Its drooping beams and raw brickwork are almost breathing. Where once couples danced and glasses clinked, birds swoop through gaping windows and wind swirls pools of dust. As the most eloquent of rain-lovers, the art historian Christopher Woodward wrote, such a place can be “more vivid than if it had survived intact….it can still be ecstatically alive”.
If we are to revert not to 1731 but to the Clandon of 2015, we need to know what that means. Conservators nowadays demand the right to show us the past as they want it to be seen. That applies to ruins as much as to finished buildings. That is why I worry that the trust appears to be considering a tidying of the site and the insertion of a clutter of modern facilities. These might include a new roof and new floors, effectively “de-ageing” what was left by the fire. This would surely be wrong.
I would rather Clandon was preserved as I first saw in the aftermath of the fire, a building in all its agony and humiliation. Facilities should be off-site. The structure needs no modern intrusions other than to keep it standing. This is England’s greatest ruin. Its cry should still be that of devastation. Clandon was stripped naked by fire. Naked is how it should be left, alone, side by side with nature in a Surrey field.
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