Stansted Park, West Sussex, part II The property of the Stansted Park Foundation
In the second of two articles, John Goodall traces the 20th-century evolution of this outstanding house and its current revival in the care of an independent charitable trust
AT about 8.30pm on August 3, 1900, after the social exertions of the Goodwood races, Mr and Mrs George Wilder, the owners of Stansted Park, were roused from the dinner table by a fire alarm; a coachman and manservant had spotted f lames rising from one corner of the house. A hose was immediately connected to an emergency water supply, but the lead roof made it impossible to fight the blaze effectively and a fierce gale fanned the f lames. By the time the combined fire brigades of Emsworth and Havant had arrived at about 10pm, the conf lagration was beyond control and—in the words of a breathless report in The Bexhill Chronicle—it ‘became ev ident that the beautiful mansion was doomed’.
All efforts, therefore, turned to the rescue of the contents. ‘Firemen, police, servants of the house, workmen on the estate and scores of bystanders’—the report
continued—‘were quickly lending a hand in removing valuable furniture, rich carpets and miscellaneous effects from more accessible parts of the burning mansion… By 2 o’clock in the morning every f loor in the mansion had gone… And when the flames had died away by five or 6 o’clock on Saturday morning, nothing remained of its former glory but charred and blackened ruins.’ It amused the crowds who came to survey the smouldering remains that a family of sparrows nesting in the joint of a water pipe were undisturbed by the whole episode.
The fire—blamed by some accounts on a plumber working in the roof space with a candle—was reported nationally. Emphasis was given both to the antiquity of the property and the value of its lost contents. As we discovered last week, Stansted could trace its history back to the 12th century and the main block of the house had been created in the late 17th century. Its interiors, augmented over the course of two centuries, were totally destroyed. All that survives of the pre-fire house today is a fine vaulted basement of the 1680s and the stable wing attached to the north of the main block by Thomas Hopper in 1840. Most of the fixtures and some furnishings—including carving attributed to Grinling Gibbons and a bed reputedly used by Elizabeth I—were consumed.
The Wilders commissioned the architect Arthur Conran Blomfield—the son, brother and cousin of better-known architects with whom he is easily confused—to rebuild Stansted. They were probably introduced through the circle of Edward VII, but
