AS WE HAVE SEEN, THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGES of the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century imposed on the owners of large houses pressures that a considerable number were only able to address by selling their properties for demolition and not restoring those that were burnt down.

It should not be thought, however, that the twentieth century was the first one in which country houses were pulled down, although in the past the motivation for doing so had usually been different. Over the centuries the history of such houses has been the story of new houses replacing older ones. Many were built on or near the sites of and some incorporated parts of their predecessors. Medieval houses were replaced in Tudor and Stuart times, and these replacements themselves gave way to Georgian and Victorian mansions. It can be said that this sequence of building, often reflecting the aggrandisement of the owning families, their desire to display their wealth and architectural taste or, more mundanely, to live in a more commodious residence than their forbears, was undertaken with little or no concept of preserving old buildings if they had outlived their purpose. Life in the great hall with a small number of private chambers was superseded by a more genteel style of living, with servants well segregated from their masters and mistresses. Such social changes were reflected in the design and decoration of houses, and if that meant demolishing the buildings inherited from earlier generations they were swept away. In cases where parts of these houses were retained and incorporated in later buildings they often became the service quarters. In others the ‘old’ house totally disappeared with the site being re-used or the ‘new’ house being built at a completely different location on the owner's estate.

There is, therefore, a long history of houses being ‘lost’: houses demolished in Georgian and Victorian times are just as much lost as those demolished more recently. It was, however, the scale of the demolitions and the seemingly wanton destruction of part of the country's heritage in the twentieth century to which ‘The Destruction of the Country House’ exhibition in 1974 drew attention.