Scratch the stone, stucco, or brick of the walls of any of Britain's estimated two thousand country houses and you will find a multitude of survival stories. The owners and custodians of these houses have found unique and diverse ways for each of them to remain standing into the twenty-first century, when so many other houses have been lost. These owners and custodians have developed coping strategies that have enabled houses not only to weather storms – whether literal, or of fire, flood, war, or pandemic – but subsequently to enjoy renewed strength, vitality, and resilience.

The stories that are told about country houses often begin with the ambitions and achievements of the generations that first commissioned mansions to be built. Such foundational owners may have hoped and anticipated that their descendants would enjoy untroubled lives amid verdant and productive farmland and harmonious local community relations. This was rarely, if ever, the case. All too frequently, the early aggrandisement of landed families, as expressed through the building of country houses surrounded by substantial gardens and parks, would give way at some point to hubris, and occasionally a dramatic fall.1 By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sto-ries that were increasingly being told about the grandest country residences involved themes of decay and decline. Nevertheless, periods of demise might be followed by phases of revival, as owners found new purposes for the houses that they had inherited or acquired. This was certainly the case for some country houses in the 1950s and 1960s, when they opened for the first time to paying tourist visitors. Revival stories involved enterprise, initiative, clever financial management, and sheer hard graft, coupled with benign economic, political, and social circumstances as well as, sometimes, the good fortune of a successful marriage match.

This book attempts to tell some of these stories. In doing so, it shows how an important part of what used to be called ‘the national heritage’ – the British country house – has been saved in ways that involve far less reliance on direct state support than other categories of heritage.