'We want everybody to use it' Plan to give mansion its sparkle back

Once considered a jewel in Bristol's crown the Ashton Court Mansion has long lost its lustre. Tristan Cork steps inside to meet those charged with making it sparkle again...

- Tristan Cork

OSH Nesfield looked down at the stacks of dusty wood panels and then up at the wall they might once have adorned, and sighed.

“They thought they were doing the right thing, stripping all this down, at the time;’ he said. “But they very much were not, unfortunately.”

Josh, the vice-chair of Bristol Historic Buildings Trust, was standing in a room which everyone in Bristol probably knows, but generally no one is ever allowed to go. The room is ‘Dame Emily's Boudoir’ one of a host of large but dilapidated rooms within Ashton Court Mansion.

Hundreds of thousands of people pass by the front of the mansion every year and gaze up at the windows, but few if any ever get to go inside.

And there’s good reason for that. Warning signs advising people to be wary of weak floorboards. A scaffolding staircase can only take two people's weight at a time. There are great cavities in the floor, rooms are burned out, ancient plasterwork, ornate ceilings are charred. To tour round it requires a precautionary hard hat.

In the boudoir, and in a couple of the other large rooms of what was once Bristol's finest stately home, the wood panels dating back centuries were lined up vertically, their carvings out of view.

“They took it all off because they thought they had to, because the walls needed to dry out, the damp was terrible. But we know now they didn’t need to have done that, it would have dried perfectly fine,” explained Simon Cook.

The culprits of this frustrating situation were what passed at the time for heritage experts at Bristol City Council in the 1970s.

Ashton Court Mansion’s story is one of long, slow decline, neglect, abuse and well-meaning inadvertent destruction. For centuries, members of the Smyth family added to it, demolished wings, built new parts and created what is almost certainly the biggest home in Bristol.