Wentworth Woodhouse: South Yorkshire's treasure house of stories

All English country houses are treasure troves of fabulous stories, but few are as rich as Wentworth Woodhouse.

This jewel of South Yorkshire boasts superlatives in abundance: the longest façade of any private home in Europe, more than 300 rooms, one of the most expensive homes ever built, and the birthplace of the first prime minister from Yorkshire. Its walls once housed George Stubbs’ famous equine portrait of  Whistlejacket (now in the National Gallery, but a copy hangs here). It provides a cautionary tale on the dangers of chasing fashion in architecture. It was both the headquarters of the Intelligence Corps in World War II and the victim of an ugly campaign of class warfare in the 1940s. It seemed destined to collapse under the weight of its own history before an extraordinary community initiative brought it back to life.

Unusually for me, it was Wentworth’s 20th-century story that proved most compelling. The post-war Labour government was determined to build a new egalitarian society, and the aristocracy—with all the history and culture they embodied—were enemies to be swept away. Punitive death duties meant that around 1,000 country houses were lost to the wrecking ball in the decades after the war. Wentworth faced even more challenges, thanks to a seam of coal running through the estate.

Enter our villain: Manny Shinwell. A firebrand minister who dismissed the middle class as “not worth a tinker’s cuss” and actively sought to bring down the upper classes. He used his position as Minister of Fuel and Power to take aim at the Fitzwilliam family and their vast estate. After nationalising the coal industry, he ordered mining of a seam that ran through Wentworth Woodhouse's grounds. Historic gardens and ancient woodland were ripped out as the grounds became the largest open-cast coal mine in the country. Works extended to just 100 yards from the house, and massive slag heaps were piled … one presumes intentionally … in front of the family bedrooms. Debate continues about how much damage the blasting did to the structure, but the insult to the landscape was undeniable.

Ironically, local miners opposed the scheme. The Fitzwilliams had been fair employers, and few wanted their neighbourhood’s jewel destroyed. Their warnings proved accurate: the coal was poor quality, the mining futile, and Shinwell’s policies did nothing to avoid the energy crisis of the brutal winter of 1947. Shinwell was demoted but managed to stay in politics. In the biggest irony of all, this enemy of the upper classes had no issue accepting an honorary peerage as Baron Shinwell of Easington and sat in the House of Lords for around 15 years. Hypocrisy as choking as coal dust.

After the mine

By the late 1940s, Wentworth was a decaying white elephant with an exhausted mine for a front lawn. Too costly for the family to maintain, too vast for the National Trust to adopt, successive owners failed to restore it. Only in 2016 did the newly formed Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust finally turn the tide.

Their achievement is remarkable. The lawn is back, the scars of mining erased. Restoration continues room by room, often with holes discreetly netted or braced, but the spirit of the place is alive. The house now belongs as much to its community as to the nation. Dogs are welcome in the entrance hall and café, children have spaces to play, and locals use its grand rooms for everything from meetings to weddings. The combination of grandeur and community adoption is unlike anything I’ve seen in another stately home.

If you’re here to see the house, your £15.50 admission (free to Historic Houses Association members, discounts to National Trust and National Art Pass members) gets you into the enfilade of state rooms that fill the centre pavilion, the ceremonial stairs leading up to them and a couple of less grand rooms just below them. It’s a tiny fraction of the overall house but, again, in square footage equals what you would see in many of the grandest stately homes. 

The blockbuster here is that staircase, rising to a landing, dividing, and curving back together under the gaze of Roman statues, and the ludicrously large great hall it brings you into. 

It’s an enormous square of white marble and sand-coloured columns, with more noble Romans standing in alcoves between them. The room is double-height with a balcony around its mid-point. There’s a spectacular inlaid-marble floor swirling out from its centre, and an ornate plaster ceiling to echo the shapes in the floor; though that’s still under renovation. Windows on both levels in front and across the top level at the back flood the room with light. 

It is a magnificent space, on par with the great entrance hall at Holkham for creating a space that feels built for Roman emperors rather than English lords. 

A service passage the size of many other houses’ great halls takes you to the end of the enfilade of rooms; two on each side of the main hall. You start in the Whistlejacket Room, where the copy of the famous painting seems more impressive here than in his usually home at the National Gallery, because he is alone and in the space he was made for. The Trust has brought in modern artist Hugo Wilson to paint a matching canvas directly across from the familiar one. It’s in exactly the same style as Stubbs, so close you’d assume they came from the artist, but this time Whistlejacket is showing us his backside, bucking. In the artist’s description, he’s turning his back on his national significance. I prefer to think that he’s just driven his hooves into Manny Shinwell. 

This room, and the rest of the enfilade, are mostly towering white walls with accents of gilt plasterwork cascading down them, around fireplaces and massive family portraits. One is a deep blue showing off neoclassical plaster reliefs. The hard work of restoration is obvious here: the walls shine and the gilt glistens. At the other end of the enfilade Whistlejacket makes his return, but this time as a neon sculpture. I loved the playful extension of the house’s masterpiece into new interpretations. 

There are miles of gardens here to explore, dotted with significant garden follies. I, however, had aggravated my arthritic knees so badly at the Women’s Rugby World Cup launch two days before that I wasn’t up for the hike. I did, however, enjoy the exterior of the house enormously. And given the size of the place, there’s plenty of walking to be done in the admiration. 

The two-faced house

The west front of the house looks nothing like the east. They are, in fact, two entirely different houses; built back-to-back. Around 1724 Thomas Watson-Wentworth started building the first one in the trendy English Baroque style. Red brick, white stone facings, abundant decorative gewgaws, lots of curves. But that style went out of fashion quickly, especially with the Whig party … of which Thomas was a member. They stood firmly against the Jacobites, and Baroque had quickly become a style associated with that Catholic challenge to the Hanoverians. 

So Thomas shifted style. But he was too frugal to tear down a brand new house. Instead, he started an entirely new house to the east in the more sober Palladian taste. This became the new front; the smaller baroque house became the back, screened by trees and gardens and kept for family. The new Palladian front was so big its construction fell into the next generation, being completed by Thomas’ son, Charles. The end result was so enormous it became … and still is … the longest facade of any private home in Europe.

From that superlative I was expecting it to be ungainly, or even a bit ugly. But here’s where Palladianism proves its brilliance. The balance of the elements, and the rhythm of the various columns, windows and pediments is so pleasing that it just melds into a brilliant whole. It’s easy to forget just how big it is until you look carefully. Or try to get the whole thing in one photo without engaging panorama mode. (top photo)

Wentworth Woodhouse is a place where beauty, history, politics, and resilience collide. Once scarred almost beyond redemption, it now stands as proof that even the grandest white elephants can be reborn when communities rally to their cause. Come for the staircase, Whistlejacket, and the sweep of Palladian columns—but stay for the community triumph that lingers in every restored gilded wall. Wentworth is no longer just a symbol of aristocratic ambition; it’s a testament to survival, reinvention, and the power of people determined not to let their heritage slip away.