Through the mists of time

A history of the past 125 years can be read in COUNTRY LIFE’s thousands upon thousands of property advertisements. Annunciata Elwes dives in

- Annunciata Elwes

BROWSING the COUNTRY LIFE archive is a heady trip down the rabbit hole. Eventually, one gives up specific searches, the results are too numerous and the amusingly dated advertisements for nylon tights and lawnmowers too distracting. In fact, it’s harder to find country houses that haven’t been featured one, two or many more times. Over the past 125 years, our property pages have revealed a strange timeline of the ebbs and flows of Britain’s fortunes, not to mention journalistic style. We’ve leapt from ‘Within easy reach of the Belvoir... eighteen best bed and dressing rooms… twenty-six loose boxes’ (Gaddesby Hall, Leicestershire, 1897) to helipads, saunas, electric gates and ‘7 bedrooms (6 en suite)’.

Within that time, we’ve seen a flurry of family estates come to the market after the First World War, hunting boxes and castles to let for £100 a year and cottages for £5 after the Second World War; we can trace everything from financial crashes to the rise of neo-Georgian architecture and the Church selling off old vicarages (ramped up in the 1960s), followed in later decades by luxurious newbuilds, controversial conversions and the odd Paragraph 55-approved plot.