Historic Houses – Contested Spaces?

Hillsborough Castle

There aren’t many country houses that have played host to the Queen, a clutch of US presidents, the Dalai Lama, Gerry Adams, Ian Paisley and the entire cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. But Hillsborough Castle is no ordinary historic mansion. This Georgian building, tucked away behind a town square in the small village of Hillsborough, near Lisburn, is a royal residence, a government office (home to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland) and from this month (July) a major new historic attraction which will entertain a hoped-for 200,000 visitors a year.

Historic Royal Palaces, the charitable organisation which now runs Hillsborough as part of a stable that includes Hampton Court, Kensington and Kew Palaces and the Banqueting Rooms in Whitehall, is spending £16 million on a dramatic and ambitious makeover.  An extensive internal refurbishment will provide 21st century facilities, a Clore learning centre, shop and cafe, car park and even a new slip road off the main arterial route from Dublin to Belfast. Another part of the project, due to complete in April 2019,  will see the restoration of the four-acre walled garden, overseen by awarding winning gardener Adam Ferguson.

The idea, according to Patricia Corbett, head of Hillsborough Castle, is to “open this asset to the people of Northern Ireland - to give it back if you like." Previously, only those members of the public invited to a Royal garden party would have been able to look inside the well guarded wrought iron gates.

No effort has been spared to make this "a jewel in the crown"  of tourist attractions, according to the local council, which also plans to invest in a £5m revamp of the surrounding village and its forest park. All this had to be done while the building, which in the words of one former Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Hain, has had to combine the functions of  “a family home, a negotiating space, a summit venue or a royal visit” continued to function in all these roles. But the difficulties are not only physical. Hillsborough also has to tackle the fact that in Northern Ireland, the country house,  let alone a ‘royal’ residence, can be deeply divisive. 

In Ireland, landowners, many of whom were domiciled in England, controlled vast tracts of land worked by the native Irish. The tensions between landlord and tenant spilled into British politics and resulted in a series of controversial Land Acts, transferring ownership to tenant farmers. Although land ownership in Northern Ireland was slightly different, animosity grew between the mainly landless Catholic Irish and small Protestant farmers.

Hillsborough Castle, like many of its counterparts was built in the latter half of the 18th century, (1771)  by Wills Hill, later ennobled as Marquess of Downshire, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies and rival to fellow Irishman and Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, who lived at nearby Mount Stewart.

“Its a modest house,” says Shan McAnena, creative programming and interpretation manager at Hillsborough Castle. “It doesn’t have a major collection and even when it was the seat of Northern Ireland’s governors (between 1924 and 1973) they had to bring in their own furniture.”

A disastrous fire in 1934 meant little of the original fixtures and fittings survived and over the years its been extensively patched up. “As a government building with only limited access to the public, make do and mend was the order of the day,” she says. The result has been what McAnena describes as “a cross between a slightly tired looking embassy and a country house hotel.”

The new decorative scheme is 21st century, she adds,  but is largely informed by the history of the house. For example, the walls of the large drawing room will be lined in handcrafted silk from Suffolk, in homage to the original wallpaper,  and as a Royal Palace, Hillsborough will have extensive access to the Royal Collection of paintings, but the windows will retain the bulletproof glass first introduced in the 1970s to deter terrorist attacks.  There will also be photos from the castle’s hosting of the talks which led to the Good Friday Agreement, including one of BBC reporters Jeremy Paxman and John Humphries bouncing delightedly on the Queen’s bed (she wasn’t in it at the time.). 

There will be no ropes or interpretation boards, instead ‘explainers’ will use the contents of house to tell the story and act as pointers to visitors.

“We don’t shy away from things like the role of landlordism in Ireland or the Famine,” says McEnena. But it’s the recent story of the castle that will provide much of the focus. “History hasn’t stopped happening here,” she says pointing out that Mo Mowlam, Northern Ireland Secertary during the Blair government, used it to host parties for the protagonists of the Troubles. “Hillsborough Castle was at the heart of attempts to resolve the conflict.” 

Historic Royal Palaces will spend more than £1.8 million of its £5m Heritage Lottery Fund grant on an ambitious engagement programme. There will be a major oral history project aimed at locating the personal stories of those involved in the big events at the house, as well as those who have worked there. A programme called ‘How Do We?” will discuss with more than forty different groups across Northern Ireland what stories they would like to see explored in the castle. Another, more intensive strand of the consultation, called Thresholds, will take the Hillsborough story to other ‘contested spaces’ including Orange Halls and mosques to debate what Hillsborough should mean to different communities. A ‘pop up castle’ involving actors and filmed sequences will take the Hillsborough story ‘on the road’ to arts festivals and Belfast’s annual Pride event, while community access schemes will see tours and talks for local groups and the village will work with artists and writers to create a permanent artwork in the grounds of the castle.

Ciara Hickey, HRP learning partner for adults and communities, says. “Participation and engagement is the most important part of what Historic Royal Palaces is seeking to do in all its properties, but there hasn’t been the same raw tension and symbolism that you find here in Northern Ireland. Rather than pretending it’s not there – it’s important that we face it. Rather than whitewashing the history of Hillsborough, there is a need to go into it.”

She adds, “We want to tackle head on any perceptions,  say from the Catholic and Nationalist community,  about the exclusivity of Royal residence and its association with the Royal Family and instead emphasise its role in peace negotiations.”

Dr Hugh Maguire, a heritage consultant and former director of the Hunt Museum in Limerick is sceptical about the Hillsborough approach. “Its a country house. To suggest that its a Royal Palace is a fallacy. The seat of the monarchy in Ireland for 800 years was Dublin Castle.” Attempting to give the house a Royal patina by “digging out the dregs of furniture from the basement in Windsor Castle is simply myth-making,” he adds. He also points that there is no attempt to place the castle in its context, which is that the surrounding area has been home to a huge army barracks since 1940, what he describes as “the massive military infrastructure needed to keep the country quiet and subdued. He adds, “Where the issues are still live, then it seems they can’t be mentioned. I am not suggesting that you make visitors miserable with all this, but a few lines about the social upheaval that marked the erection of these houses would not go amiss.”

Another awkward bit of history surfaced when the National Trust embarked on a revamp of its flagship property in Northern Ireland, Mount Stewart. Owned by the Marquess of Londonderry until it was given to the Trust in 1977,  a ceramic figure of a Nazi storm trooper takes pride of place on a mantelpiece. Its a gift from Nazi chief Hermann Goring in recognition of the Marquess of Londonderry’s role in attempting to mediate personally with Hitler before the Second World War.

A major facelift in 2015 has not avoided the political controversy around Londonderry’s actions but the guiding light in that refurbishment, which has boosted visitors significantly (from 35,000 a year to 80,000),was the vision of Edith Londonderry who lived in the house from to 1921 until her death in 2009.

Senior curator Frances Bailey says that, ass well as being the wife of a major politician, (the Marquess was aviation minister in the National Government in the 1930s) she was a suffragist and noted orator in her own right.  Therefore one of the principles that informed the revamp at Mount Stewart was to make it once again a place of debate and discussion. “Charles and Edith Londonderry would invite all sorts of people to Mount Stewart and maintained an extensive social and political life here and at their London home in Londonderry House,” she says.

The National Trust celebrates this aspect of the house’s history with a programme called Mount Stewart Conversations, where eminent speakers discuss important topics of interest. The 2018 edition is devoted to ‘Women and Power’ and will coincide with an exhibition, in collaboration with the National Portrait Gallery,  of women associated with the suffrage movement. 

But any reference to the Marquess’s political role in the Northern Ireland state in the 1920s (he was education minister and a notable moderate in the conflict between Unionism and Nationalism) is absent.  As is any discussion of the tensions between landlord and tenant that marked the Victorian era in Ireland.  

“There’ s not so much about the 19th century,” admits Bailey, “because there are so many other stories to tell.”

The Trust has to do much more to look at barriers to access caused by some perceptions of country houses, says Bailey, but suggests the old idea of the National Trust as “all about green wellies and upper class snobbery” is vanishing. 

Professor Terence Dooley is Director of the Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates at Maynooth university.  There’s been a transformation in attitudes in Ireland, he says, since the days when the ‘Big House’ was a target for Republicans – hundreds of country houses were attacked during the fight for Irish independence between 1919 and 1921, and they subsequently suffered from decades of neglect and decline.

A ‘sea change’ in education meant that history in Irish schools and third level institutions challenged the old orthodoxies about the Irish country house and what they mean to local communities. “Now most universities in Ireland have a course devoted to the Irish country house in some shape or form,” he says. A new generation of owners have opened up archives and pioneered new approaches to interpretation says Dr Dooley. The situation in the North is different, he says, because the violence of the Troubles is not a distant memory but a recent political fact and there is still some fear about dealing with difficult issues.

Hillsborough Castle’s investment in those ‘difficult issues’ may help to dispel that fear. So far, they are only at the beginning of their consultation programme. It will be interesting to see what difference it makes.

ENDS