A visit to Ashton Court Mansion

In a recent blog, I recounted a visit to Ashton Court and remarked that despite being a local, I'd never been inside the mansion belonging to the estate. And because this was a situation that clearly needed remedying, I looked up the Friends of Ashton Court Facebook page and discovered there was to be a tour just three weeks later, so I booked myself on it.

There's been a dwelling on the site of the mansion since Saxon times. (We know this because one's mentioned in the Domesday book.) 

The current building boasts features in a hodge-podge of architectural styles, including Gothic, Tudor, Italian Renaissance, English Renaissance, Strawberry Hill Gothic Revival, Victorian, mock Mediaeval, etc. 

The current facade has a good stab at Classicism.  

Fireplace in the Great Hall

Although it's actually in North Somerset, Bristol City Council bought the estate in 1959, when the house had already been unoccupied for some time and was starting to decay. There's never been enough money to make the necessary repairs, with the result that it's now one of very few properties in the country that are Grade I listed and also on Historic England's 'Heritage at Risk' register. (The repair bill would probably come to about £80m.)

The former Winter Gardens, now a spectacularly gloomy bar

The Music Room ... 

... with its beautiful fireplaces

Visitors are no longer permitted to go on a full, free-ranging tour of the upper floor because the ceiling is falling down in places, but if you don a hard hat, you're allowed to go up the grand Victorian staircase and have a peek.

To one side of the staircase, you can just glimpse the original stone stairs underneath.

A Tudor door

The service corridor

Another Tudor door leading into the Tudor Room

Workmen in the 1960s were instructed to remove the panelling. It was stacked against the walls and now it would be too warped to reinstate, even if the walls were in a fit state.

It's a shame to see the house in such a state. It belongs to the citizens of Bristol, and would make be a fantastic community space for the arts, something for which part of the ground floor is already being used. And since, like all the big houses around Bristol, it benefitted, at least indirectly, from an influx of tainted money, it would be a good location for a much-needed Museum of Slavery too. 

Wandering back to the top car park, I was stunned by celandines. Field of the Cloth of Gold. 

A pear tree

Sweet chestnuts