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The National Trust has major holdings of domestic architecture. Perhaps best known are the country houses or stately homes, where architecture and the indigenous contents of the country house with gardens, park and estate are held as a whole. Over a hundred great houses with fine collections and decorative schemes, together with many more interesting smaller properties, are preserved.
The National Trust was first empowered to accept contents as well as historic houses for preservation in 1937, under the Country Houses scheme. Some ten years later the value of this approach was expressed in the Gower report: "the English country house is the greatest contribution made by England to the visual arts ... an association of beauty, of art and of nature – the achievement often of centuries of effort – which is irreplaceable, and has seldom, if ever, been equalled in the history of civilisation". The great treasure houses rescued by the Trust retain their fascination today, increasingly for their social as well as their artistic history – particularly the "below stairs" parts of houses.
There are examples of great houses of many periods and styles. Rufford Old Hall, Lancashire, dates from the later fifteenth century, a timber-framed building with a hall surmounted by massive decorated hammerbeam trusses, unrivalled elsewhere in England. A century later the aristocratic "new" Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire, was built by Bess of Hardwick from stone quarried on the estate, just next to but quite separate from the old hall on the same site, deliberately abandoning older traditions in a striking new style, "more glass than wall". From the end of the seventeenth century, Hanbury Hall, Worcestershire, is a country house in the classical English style, while from the eighteenth century there is the Baroque Beningborough Hall, North Yorkshire. Neo-classical style in the European tradition is exemplified at Osterley Park, London, built in the 1760s to designs by Robert Adam, and at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, there survives the most complete and unaltered suite of Adam interiors, the state rooms containing original collections of paintings and furniture.
Before the Country Houses scheme, however, and since, the National Trust has also acquired interesting examples of domestic architecture on a smaller scale, from its first acquisition of a building – the fourteenth century Alfriston Clergy House, Sussex, acquired in 1896 – to the Edwardian Mr Straw’s House, Nottinghamshire – a modest semi-detached suburban house with its contents unchanged since the 1930s. The former home of the architect Erno Goldfinger, at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead, London (built by Goldfinger in 1939) is an important example of Modernist architecture.
Other recent acquisitions reflect the historical importance of types of domestic architecture which were once common but are now becoming relatively rare. These include the Homewood, another Modernist house, and a group of Birmingham back-to-backs (currently the subject of a restoration plan). In the countryside the National Trust also owns more than fifty villages.
The many examples of domestic architecture preserved by the Trust include buildings in the following categories:
agricultural dwellings and cottages
smaller houses and bungalows
estate cottages and dower houses
chartist house
monastic and clergy houses
fortified and moated houses
country houses
apprentice and industrial houses
manor houses
row, terraced and back-to-back houses
timber framed houses
town houses
lock keepers cottages
treasurer’s houses
rock cut dwellings
workhouse
villages
Houses acquired because of their associations further extend the architectural range to modern times and council houses. Recent notable additions include the family homes of former Beatles, McCartney – 20 Forthlin Road, Liverpool - and Lennon - Mendips, Menlove Avenue, Liverpool - given by Yoko Ono in March 2002.
South front of Kingston Lacy in Dorset showing the lawn and drive. The house was built in 1663-5 for Sir Ralph Bankes by Sir Roger Pratt. It was remodelled in 1835-9 by Sir Charles Barry, designer of the Houses of Parliament.
A view from the South of Chartist Cottage. It was photographed before renovation in 1998. This is a rare example of a 19th century cottage erected by the Chartists.
Oak Cottages at Styal which were let to mill workers. Usually a cottage was let to a single family and rent was deducted from the weekly wages.
View of the Elizabethan cottages from the South, at Ightham Mote.
