The Treasure Houses of England - Castle Howard Yorkshire

over the centuries the English countryside has provided the setting for many of the most magnificent stately homes to be found anywhere in Europe with time many have been destroyed torn down or abandoned some have managed to survive this is the story behind 10 of them 10 unique and splendid houses behind those doors stand many of the nation's artistic and cultural treasures most of them still homes to the families who built them all of them living monuments linked by a thousand years of English history in 1699 plans were submitted to Charles Howard the 3rd Earl of Carlyle for the building of a Grahams new house on the Howard family estate in Yorkshire much to everyone's astonishment the design Howard accepted came from one John Vanbrugh a rather bawdy young playwright who'd never designed a building in his life the choice was inspired when it was completed over 250 years ago this was one of the most grandiose and flamboyant private houses in Europe and it still is today with huge pillars and porticos adding to the baroque splendor Castle hard is spectacularly palatial its skyline dominated by an audacious dome that would have been the pride of an experienced architect let alone a complete novice the famous English man of letters Horace Walpole wrote shortly after his completion I have seen gigantic palaces before but never a sublime one BAM brassiere imagination had also made the best of the castles setting its place in the landscape of the hardian hills of North Yorkshire was as important to him as the building itself you dominating the park the Howard family mausoleum designed by the man who'd helped Van breh with the practicalities of his great enterprise Nicholas Hawksmoor and built in 1731 in the 17th century most large country houses were built on the traditional east-west axis but Vanbrugh shifted the axis here so it was north-south giving all the state rooms a southerly aspect and so flooding them with light in its day a revolutionary idea he even made a feature of the corridors which previously had been seen as merely utilitarian later the fourth and fifth Earl's filled them with treasures from Pompeii and Herculaneum it takes time to adjust to the sheer scale of Castle hard the long gallery stretches almost the entire length of the West Wing the grand staircase the last of several alterations undertaken in the 1870s flanking the stairs the first six Earl's of Carlyle who spanned the years 16:29 to 1848 amongst them Charles Howard the 3rd Earl who had the castle built and his creation now stands in the shadow of his huge robed figure a massive china cabinet specially adapted to fit its place here by the wife of the 9th Earl this is the centerpiece of the house the Great Hall built lest you forget by a man who had no architectural experience whatsoever and today it's still used by the hard family as the main reception room in winter despite the little problem of keeping the place warm like many of the treasure houses Castle Howard even has his own chapel and at Easter and Christmas the house continued the centuries-old tradition of sharing worship with their estate staff in 1940 two-thirds of the South front and the entire dome were destroyed by fire it was assumed the house would never be lived in again but after the war the Howard family surprised everyone by moving back into the house on the hill and setting about renovation with a vengeance over the years Castle heart has been restored to its place as one of the grandest and greatest houses in the north of England and the renovation work continues 2/3 of the South front and of course the rooms around the Great Hall were completely burnt out this room was complete shell along with the rest of the South front and it wasn't until the 1980s when we were able to restore this room obviously when we redecorated it we didn't try to copy the original that would have created a pastiche that wouldn't have been acceptable in our opinion and at the end of the day and my father and the Felix Kelly the artist who painted these pictures and Julian Bicknell the architect produced what you see today which is a tribute to Van burrows ideas and ideals the rooms that we still have to restore at least four of them of this size and the others are even bigger so it's quite a lot it goes on and on

Channel: CosmosEarthManAir

Views: 57,379

Rating: 4.9277978 out of 5

Keywords: The Treasure Houses of England, Castle Howard, Yorkshire

Id: 9zOpX9Ou7_A

Length: 8min 4sec (484 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2016