Many of the stately homes we love to visit are in crisis as public tours are banned

Noel Coward may have sung ‘The stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand, to prove the upper classes have still the upper hand’ – but that was in 1938, and today they are yet another casualty of coronavirus. While the landed owners of such magnificent historic piles might not receive – nor expect – … Read more

Stately home in Buckinghamshire which features in The Crown is now available for private hire

Fans of The Crown can get a little taste of the on-screen grandeur by renting out one of the stunning stately homes that served as a filming location for the fourth series of the hit Netflix show.    Hedsor House, in Buckinghamshire, was used as a stand-in for Margaret Thatcher’s (Gillian Anderson) Downing Street and for … Read more

Tiny property measuring just 10ft by 8ft by entrance to a stately home is on sale for £250,000

A property believed to be the smallest detached house in Britain which measures just 10ft by 8ft has gone on sale for £250,000. The gatehouse, that stands at the entrance to a grand stately home near Tadcaster, North Yorkshire, has a tiny lounge, kitchen area and bathroom in the sunken basement below the surface that … Read more

How a new generation has taken on these stately homes and given them fresh life

The National Trust has been criticised for its country houses in recent days, but there are hundreds of others still in private ownership whose families are eager to welcome visitors in the wake of the pandemic. Photographer Dylan Thomas and I have visited a fine selection for our book Old Homes, New Life: The Resurgence … Read more

TOM UTLEY: My week in a stately home made me yearn for suburbia 

Over the past few days, I’ve thought often of the opening scene in an episode of Telegoons, the BBC‘s less than wholly successful 1960s TV adaptation of the young Prince Charles‘s favourite radio programme, The Goon Show. The scene in question begins as night falls with Henry Crun, a puppet voiced by Peter Sellers, lighting the … Read more

Restorers find historic family’s secret cache of Catholic documents in National Trust stately home

Hidden evidence of an English family’s hidden Catholic worship that could have condemned them to death has been discovered in a National Trust property. More than two thousand artefacts owned by the historic Bedingfeld family have been uncovered under the attic floorboards at Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk. Books, manuscripts and musical scores that appear to … Read more