Clandon clanger

SIR – I greatly respect Neil Macgregor, but I believe he is wrong to echo the National Trust’s view that Clandon Park should not be restored (Comment, October 25).

He refers to the unsatisfactory re-creation of the exterior of the royal palace in Berlin – a very different case from the interior of Clandon. He should have considered Uppark, that other National Trust mansion that was gutted by fire but wonderfully restored: in the words of Simon Jenkins, a previous Trust chairman, it is “more than a house restored. It is an argument won.” Or at least it should have been.

True, in Uppark’s case, much of the contents were saved. However, in addition to a complete room, “a significant proportion” of the contents of Clandon were saved, including its chief glory, a Baroque state bed. Moreover, the main feature of the house was the entrance hall, which was “unquestionably among the grandest of all 18th-century interiors”, according to John Cornforth, the country house expert. Clandon’s marvellous plasterwork could be exactly replicated, just like at Uppark.

Mr Macgregor writes that leaving Clandon Park as a bleak ruin will be to “reanimate” it, but surely it will only tell a story of devastation. Edmund Gray

Former government inspector of historic buildings

Oxford

SIR – Neil Macgregor’s piece reminds me of a comparable example to the shell of Clandon Park: Witley Court in Worcestershire (cared for by English Heritage), which I became familiar with in the 1960s as an architectural student.

The massive Italianate mansion was gutted by fire in 1937 and left as a ruin. Since then, all stages of the building’s historic development have been on view, from the remaining fragment of the original house’s medieval undercroft, to the substantial core of the 17th-century house and all the later extensions, complete with fragments of 19th-century plasterwork. Paul Loxton Edwards

Canterbury, Kent