Members will be interested to read the formal letter that The Georgian Group submitted last week to Guildford Borough Council in respect of the National Trust’s planning and listed building applications for Clandon Park. After considerable debate, we concluded that we could not support them and have, therefore, registered our objection. The letter can be read here.
Clandon is of course a major building of the Georgian period, designed by a very significant architect, and The Georgian Group’s Trustees, Casework Committee members, and staff have engaged very seriously with the case over a number of years. Several fact finding visits were made to the site and, between June 2022 and October 2024, we had the benefit of three successive presentations from the Trust’s project staff and architects, Allies and Morrison. We thank members for their patience while we engaged in this protracted pre-application consultation, which by its nature was necessarily confidential.
While we acknowledge that excellent conservation work will be done to the surviving fabric of the house through the proposed programme of Essential Works, we are not able to support key elements of the proposed Major Works. In designing these satisfactorily, we consider the principle of reversibility to be of great importance, so giving future generations an opportunity to make different decisions, as the history of building conservation and presentation demonstrates that they surely will. The reconstruction of one or more of Clandon’s extraordinary interiors, above and beyond the consolidation of the surviving fabric of Speakers’ Parlour, might be one such future development. If undertaken in front of the visiting public over an extended period of time, we believe that this would provide a wonderful means by which traditional craft skills could be demonstrated and aspects of the building’s pre-fire significance gradually recovered.
While it is clearly essential that Clandon should be roofed over in order to make the building wind and watertight, we consider the proposed, massively engineered, roof to be inappropriate, and further judge that the visibility from the gardens and park of new structures projecting above it – the housing of a stair head, a refreshment kiosk, and a lift overrun – to be unacceptable. Clandon had, and continues to have, post-fire, a very distinctive outline. Unlike many buildings of its date, it was very deliberately designed so that nothing, save the tops of its chimneys, would be seen above parapet level, i.e.. its outline was and remains strictly rectangular. Leoni achieved this by the ingenious use of a low ridge-and-furrow roof structure, as is recorded in aerial photographs and 20th century survey drawings. Importantly, this was his second experiment with this particular roof form. Engravings after Leoni’s lost design drawings for Carshalton House – a more richly ornamented house, started, but not completed, a few years before Clandon and on a site a few miles to the north east – show that he adopted the same approach there. This characteristic is a key element of Clandon’s architectural significance.
Long section of Carshalton House, Surrey, 1728, engr. by Bernard Picart after Giacomo Leoni
We do not accept that taking visitors on to the proposed new roof deck confers a heritage benefit, or that views of the parkland or indeed longer views to Surrey’s towns and suburbs will be of such interest and value as to warrant the scale of intervention proposed. The cluttered design of the roof deck, the disparate nature of the structures on it, and indeed its effectiveness as a place of assembly all came in for criticism by Trustees, Casework Committee members and staff. The decision to make this a commercial space appears to have driven much of the undesirable and overly-engineered elements of the proposals for Clandon. Nor were we convinced by the conceit of transposing to the roof, as glazed oculi, the central circles and ellipses of the lost ceilings of the principal ground floor rooms.
The absence of floors to some key ground floor rooms will likely hinder visitors’ understanding of how the volumes of the original house interconnected and how both circuit and cross routes worked. This is particularly problematic in the Palladio Room, which will be read as a vertical void from basement to roof level, and across which a walkway obtrudes. The argument that there is great Evidential Value in being able to look at the ‘hierarchy’ of spaces from ground floor to the underside of the new roof is not at all convincing. Certainly the significance of the Palladio Room in our view trumps this, particularly when such a view can be had from the basement café. Indeed it seems perverse to have reinstated nearly all the floor plate at the southern end of the ground floor, except in the Palladio Room, the principal space. Nor does the proposal for the Palladio Room take due account of its relationship with the door to and from the perron stair on the impressively articulated south façade.
It is proposed to introduce timber walkways to enable visitors to follow particular routes through the upper levels of the building. The width of the walkways, generated by their serving three purposes, communication, viewing and gallery space, makes them very dominant elements in the interior of the building. This is true too of the landings on the Oak Stair, adjacent to the lift.
Unfortunately, the cumulative effect of the proposals – the walkways, staircases, lift, timber soffit to the roof structure and oculi – will be that the 21st century interventions dominate the surviving carcass of the 18th century building, in other words visitors are likely to experience more of Allies and Morrison’s vision than of Leoni’s. Ultimately, we felt that the views that we consistently expressed during the pre-application consultation were not reflected in the final proposals submitted for planning and listed building consent.
‘The house laid bare’ idea also relies heavily on interpretation – we suggested the use of digital projection – but in the absence of information about how this might be achieved, we found it difficult to judge its validity. Visitors, having visited once, will certainly need a reason to return to Clandon, and we suggest that having a cup of coffee on the roof will be insufficient incentive.