Chatsworth back to its original glory

The results of a multi-million pound master plan for Chatsworth House will be evident when it re-opens to the public next month. Stephen McClarence talks to the man behind it.

Down dark back corridors, upstairs, downstairs, left and right and left again, cold one minute, warm the next, further and further down the Chatsworth rabbit hole, past stacked chairs and old signs advertising “ice cream, lollies, sausage rolls” and all the accumulated workaday backstage stuff that most stately-home visitors never see...

And finally, next to a portly portrait of Henry VIII staring full-faced forward, into a library where the Duke of Devonshire arrives in a few minutes.

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It’s a plush room, with floor-to-ceiling shelves housing biographies of kings and queens and statesmen by the dozen. But the most striking thing, on a bright, frosty winter morning, is that the window shutters are firmly closed and the curtains are drawn. The room is lit only by reading lamps, the light reflecting on gold-toothed spines.

Are the shutters closed to keep out the chill, I ask the Duke (he doesn’t like being called “Your Grace”). No, no, he says, his dark suit offset by sky-blue socks, it’s because of the renovation work outside.

“We’ve had no daylight in here for over a year,” he says. “It’s the same with our bedroom. In a morning I have to go three rooms down to see what the weather’s like.”

Not for much longer. By the time Chatsworth reopens to the paying public on March 11, the scaffolding should have come down after a restoration project to reveal the house “in its original glory”.

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More than 40 windows have been re-gilded with 24-carat gold leaf to reflect the sun even more blazingly across the park than before.

And the two most visible frontages, facing south and west, have been cleaned, repaired and re-carved (try to spot the new stag’s leg) wherever, as the Duke says, “coronets, faces and decoration have become too weathered to be read”.

The new stone – buff-coloured sandstone – has come from the same quarry used back in the 1820s; you can’t see the joins.

The west front bears the brunt of the prevailing wind and suffered badly from pollution in Derbyshire’s industrial days. “You have to remember it was all coal mines between Chesterfield and Hardwick,” says the Duke. “I couldn’t believe that the sheep were white.”

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Then, musingly: “Young people won’t know what coal mines were.”

This outdoor restoration is bringing to a close a £14m Masterplan that included the indoor work that was still very much on the go when I visited Chatsworth two years ago.

A pre-season tour was an obstacle course – here’s your hard hat, don’t trip over those wires, mind the rolled-up carpet – as I was led through dim rooms with blank walls soon to be hung with green silk, past statues shrouded in ghostly covers and Greek gods swooning in niches and strumming the odd lyre.

The Duke, then as now in sky-blue socks, was pondering a survey asking visitors why they came. It offered some unexpected conclusions.

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Many at Chatsworth believed the pulling-points were the art, the garden, the cascade, the sculpture gallery or the state rooms. But the house itself wasn’t even in the top five reasons.

Most people, it transpired, were attracted by the landscape, which the Duke reckoned “a major surprise to me because we take it for granted”.

Even visitors indifferent to great art, grand architecture, extravagant decor and elaborate furniture are clearly captivated by the distant vista of the house, with its 297 rooms, basking in its 35,000 acres of landscaped grounds.

It’s a tribute to the taming of Nature which Chatsworth so resoundingly represents. Buildings, lawns, trees and fountains are in perfect harmony: an idyllic vision – “the beauty of it, the calm of it”, as the Duke says – which is exactly what his ancestors intended 300 years ago.

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“It’s important to remember that Chatsworth was built to show off; you don’t need a house this big for one family,” he says. “It was designed to give the strong feeling that you were in the presence of a very important man and family. The First Duke wanted people to know that the King could come to stay and could easily be entertained in the style to which he was accustomed. The fact that he didn’t come was neither here nor there. It was a political statement.”

It was political even to the extent of having the newly re-gilded family motto, Cavendo Tutus (“Look before you leap,” the Duke translates) across the top. “Donald Trump has his name on top of his buildings, so there’s nothing new about it.”

It was all pure theatre. Early visitors’ arrivals were stage-managed, with views opening out in front of them and impressive buildings enveloping them as they stepped from carriage to courtyard.

In the same way, I suggest, Chatsworth now channels its visitors around a roped-off route of house highlights. “If we have guests staying here, I take them on exactly the same route as our visitors take,” says the Duke.

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“And if you had people going in all directions, the story would be hard to tell.” That story – the pageant of Chatsworth – seems a preoccupation.

“We are celebrating the longevity of Chatsworth House. It’s all about the house now; it used to be about the people.” What does he mean?

“The reason people come here now is not the same reason people came when it was first built. In those days they came to be impressed. Now they come to be entertained and, some of them, to be educated.”

They may also be lured by “the Downton effect”, after the astonishingly popular TV series. The Duke says he has never seen the programme (neither have I, so that sorts that one out) but isn’t surprised by its success.

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Look at the popularity of the National Trust and English Heritage, he says; look at programmes about property and antiques.

He mentions a forthcoming three-part TV documentary about behind-the-scenes Chatsworth. Mentions it and then adds, unDowntonesquely: “It’s not about our private lives at all.”

He has diversified Chatsworth’s visitor appeal. Opening on March 19 is an exciting exhibition of 20th century British art. It includes works by Lowry, Stanley Spencer, Leon Kossoff, William Roberts and the iconoclastic Edward Burra, whose wild visions of seedy downtown America should provide a talking point in this hallowed context.

Then, from March 28, there will be a celebration of the work of sculptor Anthony Caro, and, from June, a display cabinet of Old Masters from Chatsworth’s own collection.

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“By people like Rembrandt, Raphael and Leonardo. They’ve been on show before, but always away from Chatsworth, mainly in America. I don’t think many people within 100 miles of here will have seen them before.”

We return to his ancestors’ vision of the house posing idyllically in its landscape – an effect created partly by demolishing a less-than-picturesque village and rebuilding it elsewhere.

“The house sits the right distance from the river, the right distance up the hill, with even the farm animals adding an Arcadian touch.” Are the sheep aware of their scenic role, I wonder. “I’m sure,” says the Duke, “that they’re aware that they’re part of the tourism offer of North-East Derbyshire.”

www.chatsworth.org