Letter: Half and Half is the Solution for Clandon House

Published on: 23 Jan, 2025
Updated on: 23 Jan, 2025

By David Roberts

In response to: We Should Restore Clandon House

Restoration is expensive and can end up as a Disneyfied pastiche. I am not totally convinced about St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

Conservation, on the other hand, is often just a cheapskate cop-out. Apart from a few specialists, who wants to visit a burnt-out ruin?

There’s never going to be a single answer to this dilemma, so why not use Clandon to expose, explain and highlight it for the public? Restore half and conserve half of however much of the house is affordable, so they can see the contrast. The theatricality and symmetrical structure of the house is crying out for a half-half display.

In this way, Clandon could be nationally unique: the country’s most exciting embodiment of an issue facing all art. It would really get people thinking.