Project Overview
Stowe House was held to be in need of immediate attention a decade ago, since when The Stowe House Preservation Trust (SHPT) has had enormous success in repairing and conserving the façades and roofs, whilst the National Trust has a 20 year record of restoring the landscape gardens, its temples and follies. Part of the SHPT’s initial response to Stowe’s poor condition was its successful nomination to the 2002 WMF Watch, whereupon it received a $600,000 WMF Robert W. Wilson Challenge grant with matched funding for the restoration of the oval-domed Marble Saloon. This project, set at the heart of the mansion, was completed in 2005 and demonstrated the potential transformation of this magnificent building.
However, much still needs to be done to the mansion to secure its masonry, structural carpentry, plaster and painting and to create a major public interpretation facility. The decaying library roof will be entirely replaced in the summer, 2009, and the plaster of its fine ceiling restored. The crumbling masonry of the south front will be repaired by 2011, as will the roofs of the pavilions. The interiors will be repaired and cleaned and the whole house illuminated by a major new interpretive facility.
In December 2008 the scheme to complete the external repairs and internal refurbishment passed HLF Round I, and is awaiting a verdict on the Round II pass in July 2009 which, if successful, will secure a package of major funding. In view of the continued success at the site, WMF has joined forces with an anonymous major donor to offer a final challenge: completing the rescue and refurbishment of Stowe House. The aim of securing the last £2.5m of our own £10 million target represents WMF Britain’s major activity for 2009-10.
We have raised three quarters of our target and need help to raise the last £2.5m. Please help us if you can.
CASE STUDY 1: Stowe Under Threat: Decayed stonemasonry
After two hundred million or so years of maturing, the local Jurassic limestone happens to be an excellent ‘freestone’, fine-grained and capable of being sculpted in any direction to enable the precise mouldings and details which lend Stowe much of its character. It is also a glorious golden colour which magnifies the warmth of sunlight.
But no material survives the ravages of time unscathed, and after two centuries many areas of Stowe’s cornices and parapets are imperilled: some fragments have fallen and extensive scaffolding is in place for protection. Some of the ashlar (smooth-faced) wall masonry has also sheared and flaked off, and other stones are crumbling.
After painstaking surveying work to understand the causes and solutions, coupled with the experience learned in the last seven years of on-site work, precise replacements of original masonry will be pieced in to achieve a sound structure with minimal intervention to the original fabric.
CASE STUDY 2: Stowe Under Threat: The Library roof
The library began its life in the 1740s as the State Ballroom. The coffered cove of its noble plaster ceiling is of this period, complemented by the elegant later eighteenth-century central panel when it became the Large Library. Its original bookcases still serve this function two centuries on.
Above the room is the twentieth-century roof, an inauthentic and inadequate felted mono-pitch which rests upon the ceiling vault, causing compressive stress.
Today a safety net spans the library to enable its continuing function despite the ceiling’s unstable and falling plasterwork. Our work in later 2009 concentrates on returning the roof to its original hipped form and restoring the plasterwork and bookshelves.
CASE STUDY 3: Stowe Under Threat: Damaged decoration
Stowe has several exceptional examples of eighteenth-century interior painting: the ceiling in the North Hall by William Kent (1733), The Music Room by Vincenzo Valdre (c. 1781), the ceiling of the State Dining Room by Joshua Harris (1750) and the ceiling panel over the East Stairs by Francesco Sleter (c.1740). The latter two are degraded by time and at risk through cracked plaster.
Cracks have riddled many of the fine ceilings, some of the gilding has suffered from degradation, whilst paint has been darkened by varnish and clouded by blooming.
