Adrian Tinniswood is an author and historian, well known for his popular books which combine anecdote and the sort of history writing that transports you through time. He talked to Sarah Greenwood about his career and his love of the British Country House.
I’ve seen you described as a chronicler of country houses and as a social historian. How do you describe yourself? I think of myself as a historian but I make a living as an author, although I also run the University of Buckingham’s postgraduate country house studies programme.
Where did you first fall in love with history? I graduated in English and Philosophy without much idea of what to do next, then I got a temporary job at the National Trust’s Sudbury Hall in Derbyshire. As a child, I was taken to Haddon and Hardwick and Chatsworth by my parents, but Sudbury was the first house where I could go through a door marked Private. It just clicked. From Sudbury, I went on to research country house guidebooks, then to Somerset in the early 1980s with John Hodgson, who was a pioneer of heritage education and the National Trust’s first Education Adviser. I started writing children’s guides to National Trust houses. We found out quite early on that if you are creative in your approach, the adults join in too.
Did you stay with heritage education?
THE CHRONICLER OF
COUNTRY HOUSES 12 visitheritage.co.uk
I was Heritage Education Editor with the National Trust right through until the late 1990s, but I’d read Pride and Prejudice and was intrigued at the way that Elizabeth Bennett’s aunt and uncle take her around Pemberley. The idea that Pemberley was open to the public in the early 19th century, when I thought it was new, swept me up. So, my first book was The Polite Tourist, looking at 500 years of country house visiting.
Why are you interested, not in architecture, but in people in country houses? One of the pivotal moments in the history of the country house in the 20th century was the publication of Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House in 1978. At Sudbury, people started asking “Where did the servants sleep?” when they were supposed to be interested in the pictures and the plasterwork, not in the people. Girouard encouraged us to think in a different way about the social structures in a country house,
and his book was a best-seller. Two years later, the Granada adaptation of Brideshead Revisited encouraged the cult of the country house. In Nottingham, I taught adult education classes and I found that if you put the phrase ‘Country Houses’ in the course title, you filled it. I remember talking in miners’ villages in North Nottinghamshire with 60 people in the room and having to run two courses back-to-back because there was such a waiting list. Everybody wanted to know about country houses then.
What happened to the “cult of the country house”? Do we still love them? It’s cyclical, I think. My sense is that the country house is in a very good place at the moment. Interest is returning, it dipped in the 2000s - maybe people got just a little bit bored. Now the emphasis on the social history of the country house is the norm and I find myself having to remind people that the reason we keep these places is that they are just so beautiful. They are not history lessons, they are not there to teach us anything, they are there to admire. Step into Mount Stewart or Castle Drogo or Petworth and your heart does a leap because it is still such a wonderful experience. visitheritage.co.uk 13
