‘ANOTHER BIG HOUSE DOOMED’ – thus, in March 1957, the Suffolk Chronicle & Mercury announced the prospective demolition of one of Suffolk's large country houses, Branches Park, in the west of the county. This was not the first such report that the newspapers had carried, nor was it to be the last. From the end of the Great War through until the last quarter of the twentieth century large houses continued to be demolished, and it was not until changes in planning law and the development of new uses for large properties stemmed the flow of destruction that the considerable damage which had been done to the county's historical, architectural and artistic heritage came to an end.

That damage, which occurred right across the country, was graphically portrayed in 1974 in an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum and in the accompanying book The Destruction of the Country House. The book listed some 700 houses in England which had been pulled down or destroyed by fire and contained illustrations of nearly two hundred of them. Through the exhibition and the book the extent of the catastrophe that had occurred was brought to public attention. Not all the houses were of great architectural merit nor were their contents of particular distinction. However, many of the houses were the work of great architects and were set in gardens and parks designed and improved by the best-known landscape gardeners of past centuries. The principal rooms contained plasterwork and fittings which were the work of the leading craftsmen of their day. Their furnishings had often been made for the houses, and the pictures that adorned the walls told the history and demonstrated the artistic taste of those who had owned the properties over the generations.

The loss of houses in Suffolk mirrored losses throughout the country. Medieval, Tudor, Jacobean, Georgian and Victorian houses disappeared, their contents dispersed and their fabric put ‘under the hammer’. The reasons for individual losses were many but the sociological and economic background in which they occurred was similar. The place of the country house and its owners in English society had changed. The abolition of the ‘rotten boroughs’ by the Reform Act of 1832 and the moves towards a universal male franchise as the nineteenth century progressed reduced the power of landowners in national government.