Lost Houses Of The West Riding

From the mid-seventeenth century to the 1830s, successful gentry capitalists created an extensive business empire centered on slavery in the West Indies, but inter-linked with North America, Africa, and Europe. S. D. Smith examines the formation of this British Atlantic World from the perspective of Yorkshire aristocratic families who invested in the West Indies. At the heart of the book lies a case study of the plantation-owning Lascelles and the commercial and cultural network they created with their associates. The Lascelles exhibited high levels of business innovation and were accomplished risk-takers, overcoming daunting obstacles to make fortunes out of the New World. Dr Smith shows how the family raised themselves first to super-merchant status and then to aristocratic pre-eminence. He also explores the tragic consequences for enslaved Africans with chapters devoted to the slave populations and interracial relations. This widely researched book sheds new light on the networks and the culture of imperialism.

Looking at the building of country houses as a whole, this book investigates why owners embarked on extensive building programmes, often following a grand tour. It explores the cost of building and the cost of furnishing and decoration.

This provocative volume stimulates debate about lost 'heritage' by examining the history of the hundreds of great houses demolished in Britain and Ireland in the twentieth century. Seven lively essays debate our understanding of what is meant by loss and how it relates to popular conceptions of the great house.

It is a wonderfully wide and multifarious pageant of West Riding life that Phyllis Bentley has spread before us down the years: and now, in Tales of the West Riding (six stories, one of them almost a novel in itself), she enriches it with a number of episodes as vivid as any that have come from her pen. They are dated 1434, 1641, 1845, 1870, 1930 and 1962, and their temporal span is matched by the variety of the emotions they embody. There is, for instance, the quiet but poignant story of a woman's lifelong silence for the sake of an unrequited love: and there is that other story of jealousy in a woman's heart as cruel as the grave. At the beginning of the series, in 1434, Richard Askrode must seek permission from Rome to marry the girl he loves: at the end of it, in 1962 we see in The Hardaker Affair the other side of Room at the Top. In this exciting novella, with its terrible ending, Phyllis Bentley's power of characterisation is seen at its very highest.

Originally published in 1982, and based on extensive research in estates’ archives, this book outlines the changing fate of the 500 largest estates in England over the centuries. It examines estates in their heyday and looks at their changing role as they declined in the twentieth century, showing how some estates have survived and describing the differing uses to which country houses have been put.