An estate made public

Bowood, Wiltshire The seat of the Marquis of Lansdowne It is 70 years since Bowood assumed its modern form. John Goodall looks at the evolution of the house, the remarkable figures associated with it and its recent development

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IN 1955, George Petty-Fitzmaurice, 8th Marquis of Lansdowne, took the agonising decision to demolish the so-called Big House at Bowood. His intention was to reorganise an adjacent double courtyard of service buildings—the Little House, as it was known, and in which he already lived—as his future residence. A contemporary editorial in COUNTRY LIFE on July 7 described this ‘amputation’ of Bowood as ‘deplorable’, but agreed that circumstances left no alternative. The Big House, the magazine observed, was ‘never regarded as an architectural masterpiece’. It had, moreover, stood empty since the end of the Second World War and had no prospect of viable use.

The demolition and remodelling of Bowood was planned and executed with exceptional care. Initial designs had been drawn up as early as 1947 by Philip Tilden and were further developed by Frederick Sortain Samuels, who had worked in the office of Sir Alfred Richardson. With relatively little external adaptation and some careful landscaping, the double courtyard today forms such a convincing country house that a modern visitor might struggle to imagine that the Big House had ever existed. In historical terms, however, the stories of these two parts of Bowood—one lost and the other extant—are inextricably bound together.