British Country Houses

When it appeared for sale on the open market in 2015 for £8 million, Wentworth Woodhouse must have been the largest house for sale anywhere in the world. It is reputed to have five miles of galleries and passages and as many rooms as there are days in a year! These are perhaps exaggerations , but i n the sales brochure, the agent Savills marketed the house as ‘one of the great Georgian houses of England . ’ Imagine if Chatsworth came up for sale with a leaky roof and a handful of acres. It is not likely a similar house will be offered for sale in England ever again.   I ts extraordinary size (over 124,500 square feet plus cellars, according to Savills) is in part due to t he politically charged taste for architecture in the eighteenth century , and a family feud. Thomas Watson-Wentworth, first Marquess of Rockingham and a Whig politician , remodelled a Jacobean house on the site in English Baroque style from 1724-28 . Lord Rockingham’s liberal politics were be...