To restore or not
Clandon Park, the great 18th-century house built by TERESA WAUGH’S ancestors and now owned by the National Trust, burned down last April. She ponders its future
THE MOST remarkable example of rebuilding must be the reconstruction of Old Warsaw after the Second World War. What the Germans left behind could never be restored since Hitler had ordered the destruction of the entire city which he wished to have annihilated – removed from the face of the earth. To see the pictures of that city reduced to rubble as it was by fire in 1944 is to bring a chill to the heart and tears to the eyes. The spirit, the skill and the determination which caused Warsaw to be rebuilt – a facsimile of its former self – are to be marvelled at.
When in Warsaw I stayed in a hotel on the edge of the old town and wandering alone through the streets towards the city centre and the King’s Palace, it took me some time to realise that everything I was looking at was new – the churches, the houses and eventually the palace itself. Perhaps a certain patina is missing but the miracle of this reconstruction speaks for itself and is profoundly moving.
Then there are the cities of Antiquity – Ephesus, Pompeii, Herculaneum – much of which has been restored in such a way that we lay folk are unable to tell what is new and what is old, yet we gaze in admiration and imagine we see chariots, men in togas and vestal virgins so that the past seems to come to life.
Not infrequently the more learned among us are heard to cry, ‘Overrestored!’ as indeed they do at Hampi, the 16th-century city of the Vijayanagar kings in India, once a romantic unkempt ruin, now a World Heritage Site.
Then, on a very different scale, there is poor Clandon, the great house built by my ancestors in the 18th century and now a burned-out shell; its marble hall, once a magnificent 40ft cube, no more than a vast pile of debris, of crumbled plaster, burned and broken beams, blistered bricks and charred remains of what were once the bedrooms and the upstairs corridors and indeed the roof. The house – or what is left of it – lies open to the skies, although no doubt the National Trust will have covered it with some giant tarpaulin to protect what laughingly remains.
In the week after the fire it was heartwarming for those of us who knew and loved the house to read Simon Jenkins in the Sunday Times. ‘Clandon,’ he declared, ‘must and will rise again.’ The glorious plasterwork – among the finest in the country – was, he claimed, well-recorded and there are British craftsmen perfectly able to reproduce what the Italian plasterers created nearly 300 years ago.
Inevitably he mentions the wellknown restoration of Uppark and interestingly points out that the National Trust debated at the time as to whether the house should be restored to how it was when new, or to how it was immediately before the fire. They decided on the former, which I imagine is what they would do if Clandon were to be rebuilt.
When I last went to Clandon, I did so with some trepidation, so painful was the idea of seeing the house in ruins, and while there I did my best to avoid looking at it. I had already seen enough pictures of flames leaping out of the roof and others taken from the sky looking down into the hollowed-out husk where I could faintly discern a blackened remnant of one wall of my childhood bedroom on the top floor. It seemed that whatever happened Clandon had gone for ever and could not rise from the ashes as Simon Jenkins wished.
Of course my judgement is coloured by emotion, which makes it difficult to be objective about what should happen to the house now. In any case it is in the hands of the National Trust who will ultimately do as they see fit.
Yet the question arises: what would they hope to achieve by a rebuild? Clandon is hardly the capital city of a proud and resilient people and what it can teach us of history is limited. Would the funds spent on such an enterprise be better employed elsewhere – as my nephew, the present Lord Onslow, suggests?
Would the new Clandon be a pastiche of the old, and who would visit it when the first rush of curious enthusiasts had gasped at the ingenuity of the restorers? It was not, even in its former glory, one of the most visited Trust properties.
Every corner, every room, every back staircase of that house is imprinted indelibly on my mind and for that reason I find it impossible to imagine what exactly a rebuild would involve. Clearly the cognoscenti are most concerned with the plasterwork and the marble hall rising as it did through the first floor, but what, I ask myself, would happen outside the hall? Would there be an empty shell around a gem? Would the top, rambling floor be rebuilt with the old spiral staircase to the roof and the lavatories hidden behind bookcases – and what about the lift shaft that rose from what we called the Black Hole of Calcutta, through which on that fateful day the flames, hellbent on destruction, swept onwards and upwards?
As the Italian writer Giorgio Bassani wrote, ‘Things too must die.’ And perhaps we should allow them to do so rather than attempt to turn them into something that they were never meant to be.