A Parade of Characters and Art: the Glittering Story of Stansted Park, Sussex

Send us Fan MailClive and John have both been to Stansted Park, outside Chichester, though at different times.  Clive remembers it from the time he helped the owner Eric Bessborough revise a book in the 1980s, whereas John’s connection is more recent.  They both find it an astonishing example of an economic revival, apparently inspired by the Covid years when the public was desperate for open space.  As a result, the house and park are beautifully maintained, while estate buildings have been well developed as a retail experience.  Stansted has a long and colourful history, which ushers a glittering array of characters onto the stage.  Owners have ranged from kings to wine merchants, Dukes to the remarkable Lewis Way, who made it a seminary for converted Jews who were supposed to go out to the Holy Land and spread Christianity.  This enterprise was not successful but the poet John Keats attended the dedication of the chapel, made from a fragment of a Tudor building.   The main house was destroyed by fire in 1900 and rebuilt by a member of the Blomfield dynasty. In the 1920s it was bought by the 9th Earl of Bessborough, a Governor General of Canada, who furnished it with the contents of the family’s Irish country house, Bessborough House, in County Kilkenny, which had been removed before Bessborough was burnt during the Troubles.  Today, Stansted still looks out over a well-treed landscape with avenues created during the Baroque period.Few country houses have such a varied history or have been so happily revived.  Clive and John are enchanted.