AS WE HAVE SEEN, THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES of the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century imposed on the owners of large houses pressures that a considerable number were only able to address by selling their properties for demolition and not restoring those that were burnt down.

It should not be thought, however, that the twentieth century was the first one in which country houses were pulled down, although in the past the motivation for doing so had usually been different. Over the centuries the history of such houses has been the story of new houses replacing older ones. Many were built on or near the sites of and some incorporated parts of their predecessors. Medieval houses were replaced in Tudor and Stuart times, and these replacements themselves gave way to Georgian and Victorian mansions. It can be said that this sequence of building, often reflecting the aggrandisement of the owning families, their desire to display their wealth and architectural taste or, more mundanely, to live in a more commodious residence than their forbears, was undertaken with little or no concept of preserving old buildings if they had outlived their purpose. Life in the great hall with a small number of private chambers was superseded by a more genteel style of living, with servants well segregated from their masters and mistresses. Such social changes were reflected in the design and decoration of houses, and if that meant demolishing the buildings inherited from earlier generations they were swept away. In cases where parts of these houses were retained and incorporated in later buildings they often became the service quarters. In others the ‘old’ house totally disappeared with the site being re-used or the ‘new’ house being built at a completely different location on the owner's estate.

There is, therefore, a long history of houses being ‘lost’: houses demolished in Georgian and Victorian times are just as much lost as those demolished more recently. It was, however, the scale of the demolitions and the seemingly wanton destruction of part of the country's heritage in the twentieth century to which ‘The Destruction of the Country House’ exhibition in 1974 drew attention.

REDGRAVE HALLWAS SITUATED IN THE NORTHERN PART OF SUFFOLK NEAR THE NORFOLK BORDER, seven miles west of Diss. The first house on its site is thought to have been built early in the thirteenth century by the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds to whom the manor belonged. Following the Dissolution of the Monasteries Redgrave was granted by King Henry VIII to Sir Nicholas Bacon, who became Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth I and was the father of Sir Francis Bacon.

Redgrave remained in the Bacon family until 1702 when it was bought by Sir John Holt, Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench. On his death without children in 1709 the estate passed to his brother Rowland (1652–1719) and subsequently to his son Rowland II (1698–1739) and his grandson Rowland III (1723–86), whose mother was a cousin of George Washington, first President of the United States of America. On his death, unmarried, in 1786 the estate passed to his brother, Thomas, who bequeathed it to his sister Lucinda's son, Admiral George Wilson, in whose family (later Holt-Wilson) it remained until the house was demolished.

THE HOUSE that Bacon acquired was described in 1542 as ‘sore decayed’, but some part of it was incorporated in Sir Nicholas's new house. Parts of Bacon's building survived the rebuilding of the house in the eighteenth century, and the last part of Redgrave to remain standing was the crosswing of the house he built.

Lord Keeper Bacon's house was one of the earliest examples of the Uplan houses built in this part of England and was more sophisticated than both Hengrave and Little Saxham, further south in the county, which ‘were both firmly in the English late mediaeval tradition’. It was begun in 1545 and completed in its original form nine years later. It was a rigidly symmetrical house with crow-stepped gables and a central octagon turret. Its symmetry reflected the influence of Renaissance architectural ideas and extended not only to the front but also to the inner faces of the side wings. The hall of the house was to the left of the central block off a screens passage with private accommodation in the wing. The kitchens and service rooms were to the right of the passage, and in its planning therefore the house continued the medieval tradition.

CAVENHAM HALL, SEVEN MILES NORTH-EAST OF BURY ST EDMUNDS, was the mansion house of an estate renowned in the late nineteenth century for its shooting. The manor was held in medieval times by a number of noble families: Fitzgilbert; de Clare, the Earls of Hereford; de Stafford, the Earls of Stafford and the Dukes of Buckingham. In 1590 it was held by Thomas Bedingfield and later by Sir Edmund Lewknor. In the first half of the eighteenth century Cavenham belonged to Richard Long and then to Robert Johnson. After a short period of ownership by Joseph Watkin, the property was sold in 1767 to Thomas le Blanc. In 1794 it was bought by the first Marquess Cornwallis, and fifteen years later sold to Henry Spencer Waddington. The cost was £35,000.

The Waddington family owned Cavenham for ninety years. On the death of Henry Spencer Waddington in 1864 it passed to his son of the same name, who was a Member of Parliament and was High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1876. Spencer, the son of his marriage to Caroline, a daughter of Vice-Admiral Sir William Proctor Beauchamp, third baronet, inherited the estate in 1895, and three years later sold it to Herbert Ernest Matthew Davies.

THE OLD HOUSE, a rectangular U-shaped house with its courtyard facing the road through the village and with outbuildings located between it and the road, did not long survive its acquisition by Herbert Davies. In 1898 it was replaced by a new house positioned further from the road than its predecessor and surrounded by parkland. The new stable buildings and coachman's cottage occupied ‘the position of an old range of stable buildings’ and were described as ‘charmingly situated between the present house and the garden’, with ‘only the gate piers retained from the previous building’. As frequently occurred when a new house was being built the old house served as lodgings for the builders. The architect of the new house was Andrew Noble Prentice and the contractors were Waring & Gillow Limited.

The house was designed in a late Renaissance style in ‘a strikingly free and opulent plan’, and was built of dark red narrow bricks (laid five courses to the foot) with Casterton stone facings.8 Some walls on the entrance front had figured plasterwork.

BREDFIELD HOUSE, OCCASIONALLY REFERRED TO AS BREDFIELD HALL AND AS BREDFIELD WHITE HOUSE, STOOD THREE MILES NORTHWEST OFWOODBRIDGE. It was built by Robert Marryott, a lawyer from Woodbridge, in about 1655 but was the reshaping of an earlier house. Forty years later it passed into the ownership of the Jenney family, two of whose forebears had been prominent lawyers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and who were lords of the manor. In 1765 it formed part of the marriage settlement of Edmund Jenney and Anne, daughter of Philip Broke of Nacton.

During the Jenneys’ ownership the house was tenanted by the Purcell family and Edward, the third son of Dr John Purcell, who changed his name to FitzGerald. This Edward was the translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (see page 27). He was born at Bredfield in 1809 before the family moved to Boulge Hall in the next village. In 1859 Stewart William and Arthur Henry Jenney sold the property to Joseph White, and it remained in the ownership of the White family until the middle of the twentieth century.

MARRYOTT's house was built of brick on an H-plan. It had a kitchen and dairy at the rear of the right-hand wing in what survived of the earlier timber-framed house dating from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. It had Dutch gables on the projecting wings of the entrance front and one at the rear of the left-hand wing. It was of two storeys with attics and two segmentally pedimented dormers at the front. Considerable changes, including a new staircase, were made to the house in the eighteenth century when an orangery was added to the rear of the lefthand wing and other works, including the creation of a canal in the garden, were undertaken. In the middle of the nineteenth century the space between the rear wings was partially infilled. An inventory of the house in 1852 refers to the old and new drawing rooms, the kitchen and the new kitchen, and the scullery and the new scullery, suggesting recent changes to the old house.

Substantial alterations to the appearance of the house were also made. These included the building of two-storey canted bays with balustrades on the entrance front, the erection of Tudor-style barley-twist chimneys, new windows and entrance doors and the overlaying of the original brick with stucco.

TENDRING HALL AT STOKE-BY-NAYLAND, EIGHT MILES NORTH OF COLCHESTER, stood on high ground overlooking the River Stour. William Tendring's house of the late thirteenth century had passed by the end of the fifteenth century to the Howards, Dukes of Norfolk. The medieval house of the Howards was rebuilt after the estate was acquired by Sir Thomas Rivett in 1563. A tower from this Tudor house survived when the rest was taken down in the eighteenth century. After the Rivetts Tendring was owned by the Windsor family for three generations.

In the first half of the eighteenth century Tendring was owned by Sir John Williams, an alderman of the City of London, a merchant ‘at the head of the Turkey trade’ and ‘one of the greatest exporters of cloth in England’. In 1748 he settled the estate on his son, Richard Williams, a ‘dealer and chapman’. Richard became bankrupt shortly thereafter and his financial affairs were the subject of an Act of Parliament. While the assets his wife had brought to their marriage were reserved for her and their children the estates which he enjoyed under his father's settlement were allocated to his creditors. Tendring was sold in March 1750 to Admiral Sir William Rowley, the first of a line of distinguished naval officers. In the years that followed the land holdings of the Rowleys were increased by the purchase of a number of neighbouring estates, including in 1785 the nearby Shardelowes estate from the trustees of Sir John Williams.

On his death in 1768 Sir William was succeeded by his son, Joshua, Rear Admiral of the White, who was created a baronet in 1786. Sir Joshua's wife, Sarah, was the daughter and heiress of Bartholomew Burton, Governor of the Bank of England, a painting of whom by George Dance which hung at Tendring was sold to the Bank in 1933. Sir Joshua was responsible for the rebuilding of Tendring Hall, his new house dating from 1784–6 being designed by Sir John Soane.

HOLTON HALL WAS SITUATED SOME DISTANCE NORTH OF THE PARISH CHURCH IN THE VILLAGE OF HOLTON ST PETER, east of Halesworth. It stood in parkland of nearly ninety acres, the whole estate extending in the late nineteenth century to over 450 acres.

Holton's medieval manor house is thought to have been at a different site from that on which Holton Hall was built in the eighteenth century. The date when the house was built is not known, but it has been suggested that the survival of woodland with intersecting ‘rides’ indicates that it was erected in the early part of the century when this was a fashionable mode of landscaping. No picture of this house appears to have survived nor has any record been located giving the names of those who owned it in the first century of its existence. By 1832 the estate had come into the possession of the Reverend John Brewster Wilkinson, a parson with substantial property interests. The house was not his principal residence, and in 1841 was occupied by Mrs Harriett Lloyd, the rest of the estate being let separately. By 1844 the house was let to the Reverend Richard Day, Vicar of Wenhaston.

Nine years later the property was sold to Andrew Johnson, who was Agent for the Halesworth Bank (which later became part of Barclays Bank). On his death in 1862 Holton passed to his son of the same name and became a tenanted property again. By 1874 Charles Easton was living in the house, which in that year was ‘being enlarged and improved’. Easton is stated to have bought Holton in 1871. However, the nature of his initial interest in the property is unclear as the estate was put on the market in 1886 by order of the mortgagee and the house was not conveyed to Charles Easton until 1887. His family was to live there until the late 1930s.

IN 1882 the original Georgian house was badly damaged by fire. Easton employed the architect Charles Smith of Reading to rebuild the house. The new house was built on the foundations of its predecessor, but how much of the old house survived the fire and was retained is not known. The new building has been described as a Georgian house dressed up and made to look slightly ridiculous with a Frenchified roof and oddly placed balconies.

BRANCHES PARK MANSION STOOD A MILE WEST OF THE CHURCH OF ST MARGARET OF ANTIOCH IN COWLINGE in the west of the county. Its estate lay in both the parishes of Cowlinge and Little Bradley. The original manor house of Cowlinge, a manor in which the Drury family of Rougham, east of Bury St Edmunds, had an interest, stood on a different site from the later Georgian house. The lordship passed through various families until, on the death in 1709 of Sir Stephen Soame, whose father had been Lord Mayor of London, it was sold to Francis Dickins, a bencher of the Middle Temple. At the time he made his will Dickins lived in Hampshire, but there is a memorial to him in Cowlinge Church where in 1733 he rebuilt the tower and provided two bells.

Dickins had been assembling land holdings in Cowlinge and Lidgate since 1705 when he purchased Hardhouse Field, an acquisition which was followed by others until his death in 1747. Around 1730 he built a new house on the estate he had assembled. He was succeeded by his nephew, Ambrose, who employed Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to landscape the 190-acre park. On Ambrose's death the property passed to Francis and Diana Dickins of Wollaston, Northamptonshire who sold the mansion house and the bulk of the estate in 1806/7 to John Kemp, a maltster from Sible Hedingham in Essex, for £28,000. It is clear that Kemp financed his acquisition of the estate by mortgaging it, and his ownership ended with his bankruptcy and the sale of the property by his assignees in 1817. By this time the estate consisted of 942 acres together with the great and small tithes extending over 3,000 acres. Kemp had also acquired from Dickins the lease of the rectory of Cowlinge owned by Trinity Hall, Cambridge.

The estate was acquired by Henry Usborne of Manchester Square, London, being financed through his marriage settlement. He was High Sheriff of Suffolk in 1823 and died in 1840. In that year the estate extended to 1,602 acres and was valued at £63,920. Following Usborne’s death the estate was put up for sale but it remained unsold. In 1844 the house alone was let for three years to the rector of nearby Depden.