Castle Howard was devastated by fire. Against all the odds, its decades-long restoration has made it even greater today than it once was

In the early hours of the morning on Saturday, November 9, 1940, a fire took hold in the south-east wing of Castle Howard. According to the report published in the Yorkshire Post two days later, it began in an electric heating cupboard and was spotted as a glow in the sky at 5.30am by a boy working on a nearby dairy farm. This great house was then occupied by more than 100 girls from Queen Margaret’s School, Scarborough, which had been evacuated a few months earlier. Acting with ‘exemplary coolness’, the pupils were led to safety and the staff attempted to fight the flames with stirrup pumps before the arrival of the Norton and Malton fire brigade.

Christian Howard, the 24-year-old granddaughter of the 9th Earl of Carlisle, and her brother, Christopher, on leave from the RAF, were nearby on the estate and helped direct the firefighting.

Despite their efforts, the Post reported, the blaze was fanned by the wind and ‘very quickly, the centre of the building resembled a roaring furnace with the flames being drawn up to the dome… Molten lead cascaded from the roof into the centre hall, and then the dome crashed to the ground, leaving the interior an inferno of blazing timber and shattered stonework. The roof covering the large dining-room and the six state rooms, which have been used as classrooms, fell in’.

At the time of the fire, some parts of the art collection in the house had been moved into storage and remained safe. The Long Gallery and chapel in the west wing with their contents also largely escaped the blaze. With the help of many willing hands, however, including those of the sixth-form girls from the school, yet more was rescued from destruction. Even so, much was consumed by the flames and after eight hours, the heart of this great building — the first architectural commission of Sir John Vanbrugh in 1699 for Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle, and one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the English Baroque — was left devastated.

The fact that, despite this calamity, the 21st-century visitor can enjoy Castle Howard today is in large part a testimony to the determination of George Howard, a sibling of the fire-fighting Christian and Christopher. He unexpectedly inherited the house following the death of his elder brother in action during the war and was determined that it should be restored. With his wife, Lady Cecilia, he first opened the building to the public in 1952. It was their heroic achievement to restore several interiors and reinstate the central dome (Fig 1), an operation undertaken in 1960–61 with reference to Country Life photographs.

In the years following, there was steady progress to the repair of the fire-damaged building. The filming of Granada Television’s celebrated 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited made possible the restoration of the Garden Hall by architect Julian Bicknell and artist Felix Kelly. Bicknell also created the New Library soon afterwards. The central block of the house was re-roofed in 1994–95 and, a few years later, two first-floor bedrooms were restored within it (Fig 9). Meanwhile, other significant decorative changes took place, including the rehanging of the Reynolds Room with turquoise damask in 2002.

George’s son, Nicholas, and his wife, Victoria, assumed responsibility for Castle Howard in 2015 and set in train further important changes. These have combined practical programmes of re-roofing, stonework repair, the painting of window frames and rewiring, with ambitious plans to renew several interiors and re-present the rich collections of the house, including its pictures. The different projects — some delayed by the pandemic — came to a triumphant conclusion last year. Collectively, they constitute another landmark in the long recov-ery of the building from the 1940 fire. It’s one mark of their outstanding success that they have garnered prestigious res-toration awards, both from Historic Houses and the Georgian Group.

The team assembled to lead these changes has included the interior designers Alec Cobbe and Remy Renzullo, the architectural historian Simon Thurley and the architect Francis Terry. The work itself has demanded a wide variety of traditional craft skills and has been underpinned by the curatorial team, led by Christopher Ridgway. He became the curator of Castle Howard in 1984 and his unparalleled knowledge of the property and its history were last year distilled both in a new visitor guide and a major monograph Castle Howard: A grand tour of England’s finest country house.

One practical imperative for the work, beyond the considerable demands of simply caring for the fabric, was the need to create more bedrooms with modern facilities so that the house could operate more effectively as a commercial venue. No less important was the need to make sense of the interiors for visitors. These were not only looking increasingly tired, but, as a consequence of the fire, were awkwardly divided both physically and in character. The aim, therefore, was to unify them into a single and coherent tour. One theme that has been given particular interpretative emphasis is the importance of travel to Italy and the Grand Tour in the formation of the collection by the 4th and 5th Earls of Carlisle in the middle years of the 18th century.

The extent of the changes to the presentation of the house are apparent the moment the visitor walks through the door into the 1870s entrance hall and Grand Staircase in the west wing. This top-lit space was formerly hung with family portraits. These have now been replaced by a display of newly acquired plaster casts of well-known Classical sculptures, which introduces the theme of the Grand Tour (Fig 3). The new casts were all fresh white when they arrived, but have been distempered in different colours by Cliveden Conservation. Installed at the head of the stair in 1882 is a 12-bay cabinet. This presents a large collection of porcelain from factories across Europe including Sèvres, Meissen and Chelsea.

From the staircase landing, the visitor turns left through a sequence of renovated bedroom suites that can be used to accommodate guests when the house is not open to the public. All contain outstanding beds with canopies. Each now has an associated bathroom with fittings such as basins provided in period style. One of these is hung with hand-painted ‘Abbotsford’ Chinese wall-paper given by de Gournay (Fig 10), an evocation of similar decoration known to have been commissioned for the house by Isabella, 4th Countess of Carlisle, in the 1750s.

The last interior in the sequence is the Castle Howard Bedroom (Fig 8). On the advice of Mr Renzullo, the walls have been hung with gold taffeta silk from Italy and the bed has been re-upholstered with red silk damask woven at the Lelièvre mill in France. The room includes a set of furniture commissioned by the 5th Earl from John Linnell in 1778–79 and is hung with newly purchased roundels hung on chains clothed in silk.

A corridor links the west wing and Grand Staircase landing (Fig 2) to the central block of the house. This is lined with sculpture, much of it collected by Henry, 4th Earl, in 1739–40 and still mounted on 18th-century pedestals. It leads to the domed entrance hall, which forms the central circulation space of the whole plan (Fig 7). From this, the visitor enters the Garden Hall, the central chamber on the ground floor of the south front. It is now dominated by a plaster cast of the Dying Gaul acquired by the 5th Earl in Rome in 1768. The figure is set on a mobile pedestal, which allows the room to be cleared completely when necessary.

Before the fire, a sequence of rooms with doors aligned to create enfilades or vistas opened both to the left and right of the Garden Hall. Since 1940, only the latter, to the west, has been fully re-created. Until last year, moreover, the first room in the sequence was a gutted shell, its bare walls veiled with fabric. Now, that empty space has been transformed into a magnificent modern evocation of a grand 17th-century interior. The Tapestry Drawing Room (Fig 4), as it is now called, was designed by the architect Francis Terry and it knits the enfilade back together visually. It is decorated with an intriguing combination of old and new elements.

The starting point for the new Tapestry Drawing Room was the survival in the house of four Vanderbank tapestries of The Four Seasons dating to 1706. These had been purchased from the Soho factory in London specifically for this interior, which was completed by 1715. There are no views that record the original decoration of the room, but Mr Terry designed a dado and deep cornice in period style to accommodate the tapestries. Dado and cornice are painted a deep blue/grey with their detailing picked out in gilding. The dark scheme helps lift the slightly faded colours of the tapestries, which were conserved by Alison Stanton.

A tall fireplace — inspired by that in the entrance hall — dominates the interior. It is made from a combination of moulded plaster and carved wood. Within the overmantel is The Judgement of Paris by Marco Ricci, an Italian painter who came to England and was patronised by the 3rd Earl of Carlisle. The painting has been returned to the house after its earlier sale from the collection in 1991. Set on niches within the overmantel are small pieces of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain, all recently acquired for the room. Specialist contractors for the work include Philip Gaches for plasterwork, Hesp Jones & Co for decoration, Houghtons of York for joinery and Clunie Fretton for carving.

The furniture in the room includes two suites of 18th-century chairs, both of which have been re-upholstered, and three newly made sofas by Jeremy Rothman. The two sofas to the sides copy the 18th-century detailing of one of the suites of chairs with masks carved on the legs. A 19th-century Bessarabian kilim covers the floor.

In the three interiors immediately beyond the Tapestry Drawing Room — the Music Room, the Crimson Dining Room and the Reynolds Room (Fig 5) — the changes have focused on refinements to the picture hang. The variety and quality of paintings in the house, some of them retained through the Acceptance in Lieu scheme, is outstanding.

At the termination of the enfilade is the Museum Room, which has undergone more significant changes. Its 1880s wallpaper has been preserved, but the ceiling has been repainted and the cornice gilded. At the same time, the columns in the windows have been coloured in imitation of lapis lazuli. On the walls are full-length portraits of the first four Earls of Carlisle, which were made into a set in the 1750s with delicately carved frames by William Linnell.

Beyond the Music Room is the Long Gallery, an extension to the house designed by Charles Heathcote Tatham and completed in 1811 (Fig 6). This spacious interior was intended for assemblies and balls and has been entirely redecorated during the course of the recent works, with specially mixed brick-orange walls, fresh gilding and a skirting board of porphyry.

New column pedestals in scagliola have also been introduced for busts. The dense new picture hang, devised by Mr Cobbe, combines English family portraits and Italian landscapes. It includes six architectural views by Panini that were commissioned in Rome in 1738–39 by the 4th Earl, as well as four landscapes of Castle Howard painted by William Marlow at the command of the 5th Earl in the 1770s.

House fires are terrible things and that suffered by Castle Howard in the depths of the Second World War might easily have condemned the house to abandonment and demolition. What is so remarkable in this case is the way in which the Howard family have, by degrees, not merely risen above the destruction, but turned it to creative account; today, we can admire the building as both a Baroque and a contemporary creation.

By happy coincidence, this most recent phase of restoration has come to fruition on the 10th anniversary of Mr and Mrs Howard’s arrival at Castle Howard and in time for the tercentenary celebrations of the death of Sir John Vanbrugh this year. What better time to revisit this magnificent and celebrated house?

See more about Castle Howard, and find out how to visit, at the Castle Howard website.

This feature originally appeared in the March 11, 2026 issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.