Shugborough

Sunday June 16th

For years we’ve been driving up the M6 to visit our son and family, first to Manchester and then to Cheshire, and we’ve passed the brown signs pointing to Shugborough. And for all those years we've been saying, ‘one day we must go there.’ So this Sunday was the day! 

We left our overnight hotel after a late breakfast and drove the rest of the way up the M40, round Birmingham, and onto the M6 Toll as usual, and this time we turned off for Shugborough.

In 1720, a wealthy man called Thomas Anson inherited the Shugborough estate, a Manor House and about 80 acres of land that had been more or less left as it was since it had originally been bought by an ancestor in 1624. The original house had been demolished and rebuilt in a fairly modest manner by Thomas’ father, but Thomas wanted to build a paradise to mirror the beauty of places he had seen in his many travels to Europe. He acquired more land, developed the house and set about erecting a series of monuments to enhance the estate. Unfortunately, because my back was so painful after I spent so much time on my feet at Blenheim on the previous day, we weren’t able to walk around to see many of these monuments, and we need to go back on another occasion when I don’t have back problems!

Shugborough was handed to the National Trust in 1966, and immediately let to Staffordshire County Council on a 99 year lease. The Council ran it successfully for 40 years, but by 2014 it was facing a cash crisis and needed to discuss handing it back to the National Trust. The handover took place on 2016, and now the Trust is concerned with restoring and conserving the mansion and the other buildings. From the car park you can see the first monument, Hadrian’s Arch. Unfortunately, this is one of the buildings needing serious restoration, and is covered in scaffolding, so there are no photos of it here!

The house is quite a long way from the car park, though there is a buggy for those who don’t  feel able to do the 15 minute walk to the house. We walked, because the first place you come to is Park Farm, which is interesting. A later Thomas Anson, great-nephew of the first Thomas Anson, met the politician and agricultural reformer Thomas Coke and subsequently married one of his daughters. Under the influence of his father-in-law, Thomas Anson remodelled the house and Estate, and has Park Farm built in 1805, with the aim of harnessing modern machinery and methods to ensure long-term sustainability. The centre of the farm was a quadrangle of buildings with a well. 

There were pig sties, stalls for feeding cattle stables and store rooms. A mill for grinding flour and processing animal feed was powered by water from the mill pond. The mill wheel is still in situ and there are now interesting displays of tools and methods upstairs in the mill. There was also a dairy nearby, and a brew-house, and Thomas Anson introduced new breeds of animal, longhorn cattle, Southdown sheep and poultry.

These are the longhorn cattle. It’s quite surprising to see cattle with horns in England - I don’t think I’ve ever seen them here before.

Facing the entrance to the quadrangle was the farmhouse, which housed the bailiff and his wife and family. The farm labourers would also have eaten their meals in the farmhouse, so feeding them was an enormous task and there was a main kitchen with a long table and benches, as well as a smaller back kitchen which was mainly used for baking bread - 30 loaves at a time, apparently!

This is the back kitchen. 

Once we had seen round the farm and had a quick lunch, we set off on the 15 minute walk to the house, passing one of the original Thomas Anson’s monuments.

This is the Tower of the Winds, built in 1765. It was a copy of an Athenian building, and was originally built to stand at the end of a lake facing a Palladian bridge and a wooden pagoda, both of which have now gone. When Park Farm was built close to the tower in 1805, a working dairy was added to the tower, giving it a practical purpose.

The original Thomas Anson updated the mansion built by his father, adding two new wings and giving a bow window to the drawing room, and commissioning wall paintings and stucco work on the ceilings. Some of the house is under restoration and does not photograph well, but I was able to visit some magnificent rooms

This is the drawing room, and below is the beautiful library, with a fabulous ceiling.


We felt this house was far more homely and comfortable than Blenheim Palace!

We were very interested in the servants quarters, which we visited next. They are adjacent to the mansion, and the kitchen, scullery, laundries, stables, brew-house, coach-house, store rooms and servants hall all opened onto the stable yard. This was the servants hall.

The staff were managed in a strict hierarchy, with the Butler and Housekeeper at the top. This was demonstrated in the layout on display here, with each staff member having their place at the table in a strict arrangement.

I’d love to post photos of some of the equipment from the laundries here, but I have far too many photos already, so I’ll just include this beautiful kitchen.



I didn’t manage to include the wonderful range, but I just love all the kitchen equipment here. If you look at the left side of the dresser on the right, you can just see a cone of sugar, more properly called a sugar loaf. This was the usual form in which refined sugar was produced until the late 1800s, when granulated and cube sugar were introduced. 

The Thomas Anson who modernised the Estate became Vicount Anson, and his son, Thomas William Anson, was created 1st Earl of Litchfield. Unfortunately, he was extravagant  as well as being a gambler, and the estate fell into decline. By 1842, the town house and most of the contents of Shugborough had to be sold to cover the Earl’s debts. The 2nd Earl was more restrained, and his son, the 3rd Earl managed to eradicate the mortgage on the estate. The two World Wars brought great changes to the estate, and when the 5th Earl, the celebrity photographer Patrick Litchfield, inherited, huge death duties meant he was obliged to hand the estate and most of its contents to the National Trust. He leased an annexed apartment from the Trust which he lived in when he wasn’t travelling, and it was to these Litchfield rooms that we made our last visit.

The visit is by timed ticket and no photographs are allowed, as the rooms contain many family mementos. I was really sorry not to be able to photograph the huge tin container in which the Earl, who was in the Grenadier Guards, kept his bearskin. I had no idea you kept your bearskin in a tin!

On the walls you can see many photographs of the celebrities of the ‘Swinging 60s’, as many famous people stayed or attended parties at Shugborough. 

My back was very painful by the time we had seen everything, so we walked back to the car and made our way to visit my cousin, where we spent the night.