‘People romanticise it,” says Cosmo Linzee Gordon, whose crenellated category A listed pile sits resplendent in 200 acres of lush parkland in the Scottish Highlands. “There’s nothing romantic about repairing collapsing buildings and fixing burst pipes or restoring forgotten habitats. But of course it’s worth it.”
The lives of Linzee Gordon, the 33-year-old Baron of Cluny, his wife, Bronya, 32, and their eight-month-old daughter, Idina, might sound like a millennial fairytale. And indeed, at a time when so many of their peers are struggling to afford the rent on homes a fraction of the size, he readily acknowledges they are hugely privileged.
Their home, Cluny Castle in Aberdeenshire, is one of Scotland’s best-preserved historic houses. Its majesty was seen the world over when it impersonated the Balmoral Estate in the 2006 movie The Queen starring Helen Mirren.
The baron and his wife, who have known each other since the age of three, featured on the front of Country Life magazine before their wedding, which took place at the castle in 2019 with guests including Victoria de Silva, Princess Katarina of Yugoslavia’s daughter, and Geordie Bowes-Lyon. A suitably lavish profile of their lives, with Bronya in numerous outfits, appeared in a 2023 edition of Tatler.
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Helen Mirren in The Queen
ALAMY
And yet, these days, owning a stately home is far from being all pheasant shooting and afternoon tea. Modern aristocratic owners such as Linzee Gordon — who took over the castle in his mid-twenties after the premature death of his parents — need to be shrewd businesspeople to keep their estates from going to rack and ruin amid high energy costs, soaring maintenance bills and post-Covid staff shortages.
“It’s an enormous building. And it’s very, very complicated,” Linzee Gordon says. “And there are issues we face every single winter. The roof alone is like the Forth Bridge. My grandfather wrote to me when I was engaged to Bronya [in 2018]. He said, ‘I hope Bronya is ready to live in the coldest house in Europe.’”
For many, it is all too much. An analysis for The Sunday Times by the campaigning conservation charity Save Britain’s Heritage to mark its 50th anniversary has revealed that 1,257 historic buildings of all types — a record — are now on its carefully curated “at risk” register, with 50 new ones added this week alone.
The charity, which was set up by the architectural historian Marcus Binney, 80, has dedicated itself to saving the country’s heritage, a task that Henrietta Billings, its director, describes — with true English understatement — as a “daunting yet exciting” task. The owners of two of our great estates use fruitier language.
A millennial with a castle: “Future generations depend on us”
The family with the castle’s suits of armour
LAURA TILIMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
As one of Britain’s youngest aristocratic inheritors, Linzee Gordon regards the preservation of Cluny as his duty for the next generation. “It is what I live and breathe. It’s my every waking thought,” he says.
On inheriting far earlier than he expected, dropping out of University of London to move back to the family seat, he describes how he took “the bull by the horns” to ensure its survival — although he came across plenty of obstacles.
“I mean, it’s a notoriously cold building but, to some extent, there’s only so much you can do with it. Because it’s listed it’s historically protected,” he says.
“You can’t double-glaze, you can’t use cement mortar, you can’t use plastic guttering, and so on. So there’s only so much one can do with it without crossing a line.”
The living space
JIM HULLY
The redecorated chapel
GLITTER & TWIGS
The key to keeping it going has been cultivating and maintaining a vibrant income stream. Aided by what he describes as a “very hard-working small team” of two dozen workers, he hosts a constant flow of weddings (with room for 30 guests to stay) and is fully booked until 2027. Packages cost well into five figures.
Plus, taking advantage of the huge publicity given to the estate by its role in The Queen, he advertises as a location for filming and commercials, and hosts an array of events. “I’m not going to comment on particular figures [how much income Cluny Castle got from The Queen],” he says, “but if you get it right it can go a long way.”
Film crews, the Gordon clan has found, can bring other nonfinancial benefits — they can also carry out handy repairs. “The production company for The Queen undertook a lot of tweaks within the castle. The big front gates were permanently stuck open, for example. And they dug them out and got them working again.”
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Further substantial income comes from the site’s 20 residential properties and three farms set in 2,500 more acres. Meanwhile, another project he is considering, which he wants to call the Wilds at Cluny, will allow for “immersive and off-grid stays”.
The millions of pounds raised from these ventures is being ploughed straight back into potentially estate-saving (and urgently needed) repairs. “We’ve redecorated the chapel. We’ve replaced whole ceilings above the main stairwell. We’ve redecorated turrets, we’ve installed new drainage systems and upgraded the old Victorian plumbing watercourses, of which there are miles and miles within the castle grounds,” he says.
Bronya is a “huge support”, he says — juggling her role at the castle with a fast-moving full-time job as partnership manager at a Formula E racing team. “She shares the same opinion as me. We’re both very lucky, but it’s hard graft. It’s not a straightforward place by any means.”
A Cotswold conservationist: “Our future looks grim”
Kemerton Court in Gloucestershire is home to Matthew Darby and his children, Nell and John
The Darbys are renowned conservationists in Gloucestershire. Matthew Darby’s father, Adrian, 87, is a former chairman of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB). Meanwhile, his mother, Lady Meriel Darby, 85, the daughter of the former prime minister Alec Douglas-Home, is one of Britain’s first acupuncturists.
And yet the illustrious family’s seat at Kemerton Court, their grade II* listed manor house on the edge of Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, is far from secure.
Despite developing what he regards as pioneering eco-farming methods on their 600 acres of arable ground and 350 acres of grassland, Matthew, 57, fears much of his life’s calling will ultimately be humbled by mundane modern politics.
The villain of the piece is primarily Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, who last autumn announced that she would reduce the inheritance tax relief for owners of agricultural land, which comes into effect from April 6 next year. This means any “inherited agricultural asset” worth more than £1 million will now pay 20 per cent inheritance tax.
For Darby and other owners of estates, who are asset-rich, cash-poor and operating within the finest of margins, the ramifications could be devastating — particularly given the loss of agricultural subsidies since Brexit. “It creates an existential crisis for people in our situation,” he says. “Our farmland is worth so much but yields virtually nothing, so we’re going to be looking at a very large inheritance tax bill.”
Darby doesn’t want to say how much his bill would be, but says Kemerton is worth about £12 million on paper — suggesting a bill stretching well into seven figures. As a result he is convinced that, when his father dies, he and his wife, Christina, will have no choice but to offload some of the dozen cottages in which some longstanding tenants have lived for 25 years, who pay as much as 50 per cent below market rent. “I don’t know how much I kind of want to scare my tenants, but we will have to sell them,” he says.
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Darby says he has already cut “to the bone” the operation running Kemerton Court, with the octogenarian Meriel maintaining the walled garden with the help of a team of volunteers — and the financial outgoings frequent.
“Two large sections of our 300-year-old walled garden wall collapsed two years ago because of the very extreme weather. That was £70,000,” he says. “The roof [of the manor house] was £150,000 and we repaired it in 2018. And you obviously have the ongoing maintenance and heating and painting costs. The cyclical costs are quite considerable.”
They have considered turning the rental houses into holiday lets, but fear they’re in the wrong location and the local glamping market has been “saturated”.
Meanwhile, energy diversification ideas are deemed unsuitable because of the sloping uplands next to them. Other possibilities — such as vineyards, a café or woodland dog-walking trail — require up-front cash to get them started, and Matthew fears the inheritance tax bill will remove any chance of getting this.
Ultimately, he will not countenance selling. “It’s heartbreaking. You often hear the phrase custodian, but I think of myself as being a carer. I’m looking after an elderly, much loved relative,” he says. “And I’ve spent huge amounts of time, most of my money, looking after this wonderful, aged, beautiful relative. Would you sell your favourite grandmother? You do whatever you can not to.”
The Save Britain’s Heritage endangered list
Since being founded in 1975, the charity has made it its mission to rescue Britain’s endangered buildings. Its first significant victory was to save Barlaston Hall, an 18th-century manor in Staffordshire, which it bought for £1 when it was on the brink of collapse, and it also made crucial interventions to save buildings such as Wentworth Woodhouse, a grade I listed mansion in South Yorkshire, Smithfield Market in London, and the Egyptian Revival Temple Works in Leeds, along with 400 Victorian terraced homes in Liverpool, old cinemas, churches, railway stations and cotton mills around the UK.
However, its task is becoming ever harder, as rising costs make historic buildings of all sizes become harder to maintain, which means its Buildings at Risk register is now at its largest. Here, to mark its 50th anniversary, are ten of its recent additions:
1. Gwasg Gee, Denbigh, Wales
A grade II* listed building that housed the main publisher of Welsh language books for 200 years. It closed in 2001, and the buildings are in a “terrible and deteriorating” condition.
2. Tin Tabernacle, Romsey, Hampshire
An unlisted tin church was built to provide a place of worship for a late-Victorian nonconformist group. Only about eighty tin tabernacles remain, which represent an important period of history. This one is derelict and disappearing behind woodland.
3. Buffet building at Dreamland, Margate, Kent
This amusement park has been saved from redevelopment, and parts of it were redeveloped some years ago. However, the single-storey buffet building with a curved entrance, built in 1928 by the architect CFS Palmer and with a beautiful glass ceiling, is now disused and rapidly deteriorating.
4. Griffin hotel, Wigan, Lancashire
Built in 1905 in an Edwardian baroque style, this grade II listed hotel in the Standishgate thoroughfare has been abandoned since 2017.
5. Old Trafford bowling club pavilion, Manchester
A grade II listed building constructed in 1877, it has a half-timbered Tudor revival exterior, with verandas on two storeys. It is still in use, but is in need of extensive work. There are also structural issues caused by a disused railway tunnel under the bowling green.
6. Choo Choos, Plymouth, Devon
An unlisted building originally designed to be a showpiece of the Stonehouse district. Once known as the Legion Hall, later as the Choo Choos nightclub, but unused for a decade.
7. East Biggins Farmhouse, Bishop Auckland, Co Durham
A notable farmhouse and barns in Weardale that date from the early to mid-18th century and are grade II listed. The farmhouse is built in sandstone rubble with ashlar quoins, lintels and stone roof slates. Previous plans for the site to be used as accommodation for a gamekeeper have been abandoned.
8. Former Liverpool furnishing company, Liverpool
A grade II listed building designed by W Hesketh and Co, constructed in 1899, with a clock tower that was built as a showroom for handmade furniture. It was offices until 2013, and has since stood empty, although the charity believes it changed hands recently.
9. Duke of Bridgewater Inn, Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire
A pottery owner’s house that was built in 1841, later converted into a pub, which shut early in the 21st century. In 2016 planning permission was granted for this grade II listed building to be converted into flats but nothing has happened.
10. Oakes School, Huddersfield, West Yorkshire
A striking building with Arts and Crafts and gothic revival influences that served as a school until 1974, then as a nursing home until 2011. Now derelict, vandalised and partly damaged by fire.