This year marks the 40th anniversary of our family living at Upton Cressett. When I took over the property in 2007, the house needed completely re-modernising, from new electrics to lime-plastering to new mullion windows, as well as installing central heating for the first time in 500 years. In my parents day, the main guest bathroom was almost fifty yards from some bedrooms.
On freezing winter mornings, I used to hear people literally running down the corridor in order to get to the bathroom; and then five minutes later they would run back (with a towel around their waist) as they discovered that the hot water – there was just enough for two baths a day for the entire household – had run out and they would either have to face a cold shower or use kettles.
But Upton Cressett is used to change. The house has had many facelifts, modernisations and incarnations. Simon Jenkins, in his book the Thousand Best Houses of Britain, describes his frustration at trying tounderstand the architecture of the house, saying: ‘It is not easy to read’. And I like that aspect of living here. You never quite know what rooms were originally used for what, or when new floors were put in- such as the floor of the library whose upper beamed roof is the original roof of the 14th century Great Hall – and this adds a living sense of fluid and living time to the house. It is not a house that feels preserved in Tudor aspic, its musty atmosphere weighed down by too much dark oak furniture, as I feel whenever I visit other local houses such as Boscabel or old Moseley Hall.
Originally built of timber in the 14th century, it was upgraded to brick in 1580 – as was the fashion – by Richard Cressett who was Sheriff of Shropshire and has his initials carved in the panelling above the bed in the master bedroom. In the 16th century, Upton Cressett had one of the largest medieval deer parks in the Midlands. A few days before the Battle of Bridgnorth in 1643, at which Edward Cressett was killed, the gatehouse played host to Prince Rupert who apparently brought a ‘troop of horse’. In the early 18th century the Cressetts became so wealthy that they built themselves a grander house at Cound, near Shrewsbury.
The last of the Cressetts, Elizabeth, died in the eighteenth century, but the property remained in another branch of the family until 1919. I have a wonderful old photograph of the gatehouse as it was then with the turrets entwined in ivy and almost hidden by overgrown trees, making it look like the haunting and romantic setting for a Daphne du Maurier novel.
Even in the modern age, the house has an interesting and colourfulfootnote. According to the historian Andrew Roberts, who has stayed here, when Hitler’s generals were eyeing up possible locations to act as a Midlands HQ for the Third Reich after invading Britain, Upton Cressett was circled because of its remote and safe location – at the end of a long and steep three mile cul-de-sac lane that has no neighbours or other roads. Andrew wrote an article about this a few years ago and it now hangs on the wall of the downstairs cloakroom.
Throughout the restoration process, I had to get to familiarize myself with terms like ‘double-beading’ on the new oak doors I had made by a craftsman in Leominster for the new dining room. I had to decipher the difference between medieval and modern methods of lime plastering. Instead of stocking up on wine, cheese or CDs, I used to be spend my time stockpiling tins of Lord Sheraton oak polish and also jars -bought by the car boot load – of special beeswax polish made at nearby Aldenham Park.
Whilst the prospect of renovating and managing the building works for such a mammoth and money pit of a project – especially doing it all on one’s own (I am divorced) – may fill many people with panic, fear and horror, to my surprise, I found the two year experience to have been cathartic. In Candia McWilliam’s moving and brilliant memoir of what it is like to find yourself going blind, What To Look For In Winter, A Memoir of Blindness, she writes that she has inherited from her father – anarchitectural historian who used to work preserving buildings for the National Trust in Scotland – the ‘capacity to be completely changed by a building, to be inhabited by it imaginatively and emotionally. Three times in my life I have been rescued by architecture’.
Certainly, I have in some way been ‘rescued’ by Upton Cressett. I never thought it was possible to have as close and intense a relationship with a house, albeit one that was in desperately in need of ‘work’, and whose own refurbishment and re-birth become inexorably linked with my own regeneration (I would like to say ‘restoration’ but I would be lying). I have recently submitted an entry for the HHA/Sotheby’sRestoration Award, detailing the last two year’s work on the house,and will know in April what the judges think of my efforts, helped by a brilliant designer called Nikki Atkinson and an amazing team of local builders, led by Dom Crowe from Much Wenlock as well as Martin Reidy, a skilled Irish joiner I found (he also worked at Acton Round Hall) who advertises his services on local village notice-boards.
After buying a pair of enormous Portland stone sphere finials from an estate in Scotland to place on the gatehouse entrance’s new fifteen foot high brick piers, made from 17th century handmade bricks, a crane was required to hoist them into place after the engraved capitals were carved by local stone mason Dave Andrews from Craven Arms.The specialist brick-worker who cut the intricate brickwork into a diaper pattern which exactly copied the original diaper pattern on the gatehouse – almost identical to that at Sissinghurst – was called Gary Higgins. When I showed him a dated and curling Edwardian illustration of the cut brick-work I wanted – a photograph taken of the entrance to West Stow Hall in Suffolk taken from Nathaniel Lloyd’s History of English Brickwork – I was impressed that he went out the next day and bought himself his own copy of this classic (and very rare) architectural tome, first published in 1925, on Ebay.
How I ended up choosing my team of local craftsmen and builders was mostly luck. Tom Wolfe once said that the surfaces (and detail) of life are the window into the soul. One potential builder I interviewed actually fled in his van half way along being shown around the property when it resembled a bombed Dresden in 1945. He didn’t even turn to say goodbye, he just shouted up the stairs: ‘This is way, way too big a project for me – it’s a crazy amount of work’. One reason that I chose the almost unflappable Dom Crowe – whom I found after I saw a sign outside his house in Much Wenlock selling a mountain of local quarry stone – is that when he first arrived for our interview, I noticed he had a current National Trust member’s car badge stuck on the inside of his window screen. A small detail but one that I certainly noticed.
Likewise, Martin Reidy is very much a Radio Four man. For over a year, he would show up at 8am and tune into Radio 4 all day as he went about his work; again a small detail, but I can’t imagine what it would have been like, having to put up with Radio 1 or Wolverhampton’s Beacon Radio, blasting around the house all day for months on end.
People deal with unexpected change in various ways, whether it is losing a job, wife, husband, business, relationship, money, or just having a simple old-fashioned break-down. Some throw themselves into work; some buy new pets or horses; others flee the country and try to find themselves by joining an Ashram retreat in California or trekking in Tibet; others try to find happiness in sexual adventurism, partying, compulsive decorating disorder, taking an extended sabbatical, gardening, or maybe just growing a beard; or else – like I did back in 2007, a week before my 41st birthday when I had a mid-life crisis following my first divorce – they do something completely out of character and take off to the 50,000 strong Burning Man Festival in the Nevada desert.
When Graham Greene was once interviewed over lunch aged 71, at his favourite restaurant Chez Felix, just inside the old harbour of Antibes, where he lived as a literary exile, he modestly said: ‘I have accomplished a little but failed a good deal. Failed in human relations, which is more important than writing’. I cannot even pretend to have accomplished even a ‘little’ on the book front in the last few years – a desert of a decade leers behind me without publishing a book. If I have achieved anything at all, of any use or purpose, it is having returned an Elizabethan house to something of its former self, in particular with the help of artist Adam Dant who has done such remarkable and innovative work in bringing the walls and ceilings of Upton Cressett back to life with his cartouches and hand-painted ceilings inspired by the staircase at Knole and the 16th century Dutch artist Hans Vredman de Vries.
The last two years have not been the easiest for me on the personal front and I’ve found the house and garden a welcome means of both retreat and escape. Amidst personal chaos and uncertainty, I have found salvation in the calm sanctuary of restoring a small but beautiful corner of 16th century England. Restoring Upton Cressett has been a form of personal rehab; it’s not just about restoring the house back to health, it has been about restoring myself. In an era when houses have become commodities; as much a means to making a quick financial profit as actually a place to live, the refurbishment project has reminded me of how houses are not just places to live and trade as investments or ‘asset classes’. Their very living fabric– Tudor red brick, horsehair lime plaster and wattle and daub in Upton Cressett’s case – can also be windows into ourselves. I will hopefully never move again.
I suppose if I were to call Dr Freud’s nightline, the voice down the phone would say that in a time of personal uncertainty, I am seeking refuge in something that I have known all my life. The house – with its solid, 14th century aisled Great Hall (now the library in which I am writing this) and its towering oak ‘spere-truss’ beams – represents, after the chaotic roller coaster of my last twenty five years (with nine years spent in LA, the patron City of the rootless and superficial) the closest thing I have to something that I can always rely on to be there.
I don’t expect to win the Historic Houses Association/Sotheby’s Restoration Award as I doubt whether Upton Cressett is grand enough (last year’s winner was Wilton House). But if there is an award for the most painful and longest restoration project, then I must be in the running.