Simon davis country house rescue biography template
•
Help me save my manor! Living alone, with 17 bedrooms, a hall needing 86 rolls of wallpaper and no heating, penniless Jeannie needs Country House Rescue. . .
By JENNY JOHNSTON FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Published: | Updated:
Homeowners of Britain, do you sometimes feel overwhelmed by the effort involved in keeping that roof over your head? Do you regularly despair about the cost of the heating bill, try to ignore the state of the guttering, or curse the fact the windows don’t clean themselves?
When you’re next standing at the till in B&Q asking yourself, ‘How much?’, spare a thought for Jeannie Wilkins, whose experience of home maintenance is more hardcore than most.
The last time Jeannie papered her landing (indeed the only time she has papered her landing), she needed 86 rolls of wallpaper. As for keeping on top of the windows, well, her hysterical laugh says it all.
‘In its heyday this house had a laundry and 50 people to work in it,’ she says, putting her predicament in
•
Many have bought things on a whim; it’s quite something for that thing to be a huge country house which once played host to royalty and celebrity. When plans don’t work out and problems mount, it can be understandable for a family with generations of emotional attachment to a house to doggedly carry on, but the owner of Chapel Cleeve Manor in Somerset, who features in this weeks ‘Country House Rescue‘ (Thursday 21 June, 20:00, Channel 4), displays a rare level of stoicism.
Chapel Cleeve would be a fascinating house even if it wasn’t on television, but sadly its decline is all to familiar. The origins of the house lie as a medieval inn for pilgrims visiting the now lost St Mary’s Chapel and travelling to the Cistercian abbey at Cleeve, which owned much of the land in the area until it was surrendered to the Crown in 1536. The estates then passed to the Earls of Sussex in 1538 who held it until 1602, after which it passed through a number
•
Some houses seem to have it all, yet beneath the surface lie issues which, unless dealt with, grow and undermine all that the generations before have built. This week’s edition of Country House Rescue (Thursday 28 June, 20:00, kanal 4) gives a remarkable insight into just such a house and demonstrates exactly the situation so many families found themselves in at the vända of the 19th-century and which led, over the next half century, to the demolition of hundreds of houses across Britain. In a first for CHR, Simon Davis goes to Ireland, to Bantry House, County Cork, which, arguably, fryst vatten one of the finest and most important houses to feature in any of the series so far.
The history of the country house in Ireland was, for too long, wrongly regarded as something of a provincial avläggare of the wider trends of England. Yet with the period of peace between 1690-1798, rising rents, and combined with the coming of Palladianism, Ireland developed a remarkably sophisticated re