Be careful where these pages lead you. In 1999, Clifford Newbold and his family sat down for a Sunday roast and talked about a house they had seen in The Sunday Times. It was said to be one of the biggest private homes in Europe. Four weeks later, they bought it.
The advert did not exaggerate. The family, who had spent a decade looking for a restoration project, had finally found one: Wentworth Woodhouse, a forgotten palace in Yorkshire with so many rooms, they can’t tell you the exact number. Its Georgian facade is twice as wide as Buckingham Palace’s. Its history includes visits by kings and queens, as well as an affair with a member of the Kennedy clan. Yet the chances are you have never heard of it.
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Many think of Blenheim, Chatsworth or Castle Howard as Britain’s grandest country house, but Wentworth Woodhouse, six miles north of Sheffield, is also a contender for the title.
In recent years, few have crossed its threshold. Even locals in the nearby village knew next to nothing about its owner. “I’ve never seen him,” a former postmistress remarked, “and nobody I know has.” That is about to change — and not before time.
I first tried to meet the elusive Newbold five years ago, while researching a magazine feature. I approached the mansion on New Year’s Eve, offering a piece of coal (a northern and Scottish tradition that seemed appropriate for Wentworth Woodhouse, which is surrounded by coal mines).
I wanted to find out why an elderly man should have chosen such a vast residence: in 1999, Newbold, now 85, had paid £1.5m for the 250,000 sq ft pile, which works out at about £6 a sq ft, less than for a council house in nearby Rotherham.
As the clock struck midnight, only one lone light was visible. I left the coal with a caretaker, wrote to Newbold and received no reply. Now he has finally opened his door to me — and may soon do so for the public.
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Newbold turns out to be a warm and courteous retired architect — he designed Dungeness lighthouse and the modernist Millbank Tower, but has a passion for the Georgian period. He lives at Wentworth Woodhouse with his wife, Dorothy, who is in her seventies, and their three sons, Paul, in his forties, Marcus, 38, and Giles, 36, as well as Marcus’s wife, Henrietta.
In his tweed three-piece suit, he looks every inch the country gentleman, but in fact he is like any middle-class homeowner with a dinner-party tale to tell about his home renovation. The difference is of scale. The rewiring of the sprawling pile took 60 electricians. Redecoration caused a national shortage of gold leaf, and restoring the grand Long Gallery took two years alone.
Even without the renovations, there were simple problems to solve. When you have a room for every day of the year — there are about 365, with 1,000 windows — where do you sleep?
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“Just to get to know the place takes 10 years,” says Giles, a building surveyor, who says they all have flats in different parts of the house. “It’s like living in a village.”
Then, as with any house purchase, there were surprises. While they commissioned the usual surveys, nobody told them the true extent of old mine workings in the area. A local could have tipped them off, but they were in love with the house and relied on what they read in the reports.
Now their gargantuan home is falling prey to subsidence. There are cracks in the plaster, and in one room you feel as if you are walking rather tipsily downhill. In the state library, the doors are at odd angles. The room is like a design by Escher. This is a worry: to rebuild the main part of the house would cost half a billion pounds. Yet Newbold has lost no sleep.
“I’m pretty happy I bought the place,” he insists, though he admits he is “annoyed with the information we were given”. In fact, he is so upset, the family is suing the Coal Authority — the government body that owns almost all the coal in Britain — for £100m.
The dispute has not dimmed his affection for the place, which is breathtaking. Built in the 17th century and remodelled in 1725 by Thomas Watson-Wentworth, the first Marquess of Rockingham, the baroque palace was later extended by his son and heir, Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Whig prime minister, who, in the late 18th century, added a third floor to each wing. How many rooms did this add? “About 50 or 60,” Giles says.
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We enter the marble saloon, one of the largest rooms in the country — 60ft square, with a ceiling 40ft above the marble floor. In the next room, two marble griffins flank a fireplace. Next is the Van Dyck room, with spaces for portraits by England’s leading court painter of the 17th century — the art is missing thanks to death duties. Still, the architectural historian Matthew Beckett says Wentworth has 25 rooms of the highest quality, compared with 20 at Buckingham Palace, eight at Blenheim and three or four at Castle Howard.
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Round the corner is the Georgian stable block, with stalls for 100 horses, said to have been built with the gambling winnings of one of the Watson-Wentworths — tens of millions of pounds in today’s money. It is so magnificent, most first-time visitors assume they have found the main house.
After 12 years of work, and millions spent on restoring the house, the Newbolds plan to spend even more converting part of it into a museum that will be open to the public. “This home is something important,” Giles says. “It needed someone to stand up for it. And we were there at the right time, because we felt as a family that the nation should not let a house like this slip away.”
In addition to the museum, there will be a hotel with 70 rooms, and the stable block is to be converted into offices and a venue for weddings and exhibitions. The biggest draw, however, will surely be a gallery for some of Britain’s most priceless artworks, which hung inside the house until the late 18th century, when it passed into the hands of the fourth Earl Fitzwilliam. His family subsequently bequeathed the art and furniture to the nation in lieu of taxes. The Van Dycks, for example, are in the National Portrait Gallery.
The Newbolds want to bring the art back to its original Yorkshire home. “We have a list of all the items that were in each room,” Giles says, “and we know where most of those have gone. Why is art that was created for Yorkshire down in London? It makes more sense for it to be here. We are trying to do the right thing and bring the house back to life.”
First, they need £100m from the Coal Authority — in effect, the taxpayer. “We were ready to do this five years ago,” Giles says, “but we couldn’t after what our engineers discovered. There’s no point restoring the house back to its former glory if the ground then moves beneath it, and it will do until they stabilise it.”
If you know the history, it seems a fair request. Manny Shinwell, minister of fuel in the Attlee government following the second world war, ordered the removal of coal right up to the back door of the house. To his amazement, miners threatened a strike. “The miners in this area will go to almost any length rather than see Wentworth House destroyed,” Joe Hall, president of the Yorkshire branch of the National Union of Mineworkers, told the press in April 1946. “It is sacred ground.” To Shinwell, however, it was a nobleman’s palace, and the mining — for poor coal that could have been reached by less destructive means — went ahead. It continued until 1979.
They will tell the story in the museum, as well as tales of visiting monarchs, from Queen Victoria to George V, who visited in July 1912 and woke to news of a pit disaster nearby that killed 61. Then there is the JFK connection: the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam’s son, Peter, had a passionate affair with Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, sister of the future president of America. He died with her in a plane crash in France in 1948.
“It’s another place for people to go,” Newbold says of the palace that Britain forgot. “I think the Americans would love it.” Not to mention the people of Yorkshire, who have waited for generations to see inside the stately home that they regard as their Chatsworth. The first phase of the project is expected to take four years. Which means that on New Year’s Eve 2016, there may well be many lights burning in the windows of the widest facade in the country.