Wentworth Woodhouse Sold to Conservation Group for £7m
5th February 2016
The Grade-1 listed Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham, has been sold to the Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust. The sale of the mansion and 82-acre estate was funded by grants, pledges and donations, including £3.5m from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. The trust said the house would remain open to the public and has announced plans for a 15-year repair project.
The model for ‘Pemberley’ in Pride and Prejudice, it was the seat of the Marquesses of Rotherham and their heirs the Earls Fitzwilliam.
It is also believed to be the largest private house in the UK, with 250,000 sq ft (23,000 sq m) of floor space.
The 300-room house was put up for sale in May following the death of owner Clifford Newbold.
The major problem is that it sits on top of the Wentworth coal seams, and was subject to some rather explicit class warfare on the part of a Labour government.
In April 1946, on the orders of Manny Shinwell (the then Labour Party’s Minister of Fuel and Power) a “column of lorries and heavy plant machinery” arrived at Wentworth. The objective was the mining of a large part of the estate close to the house for coal. This was an area where the prolific Barnsley seam was within 100 feet (30 m) of the surface and the area between the house and the Rockingham Mausoleum became the largest open cast mining site in Britain at that time: 132,000 tons of coal were removed solely from the gardens. Ostensibly the coal was desperately needed in Britain’s austere post-war economy to fuel the railways, but the decision has been, and is, widely seen as useful cover for an act of class-war spite against the coal-owning aristocracy. A survey by Sheffield University, commissioned by Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl, found the quality of the coal as “very poor stuff” and “not worth the getting”; this contrasted to Shinwell’s assertion that it was “exceptionally good-quality.”
Shinwell, intent on the destruction of the Fitzwilliams and “the privileged rich”, decreed that the mining would continue to the back door of Wentworth, the family’s East Front. What followed saw the mining of 99 acres (400,000 m2) of lawns and woods, the renowned formal gardens and the show-piece pink shale driveway (a by-product of the family’s collieries). Ancient trees were uprooted and the debris of earth and rubble was piled 50 ft (15 m) high in front of the family’s living quarters.
The opencast mining moved into the fields to the west of the house and continued into the early 1950s. The mined areas took many years to return to a natural state; much of the woodland and the formal gardens were not replaced. The current owners of the property allege that mining operations near the house caused substantial structural damage to the building due to subsidence, and lodged a claim in 2012 of £100 million for remedial works against the Coal Authority.