You hear the 11th Viscount Ashbrook before you see him. Instead of speaking, he booms, good-naturedly, and sinks into a chair in the library at Arley Hall, his Victorian country house near Northwich, Cheshire.
Outside, a Twenties touring car is being photographed for a promotional video about Peaky Blinders, the BBC series, which resumes tonight on BBC One.
Much of this series was filmed at Arley Hall, which fills in for Tommy Shelby’s Arrow House. The library doubled up as Tommy’s study, and the gallery was used to film the Shelbys’ dining hall.
During filming, the walls of the hall were painted dark green, and paintings and Twenties furniture were brought in. When filming was over, everything was returned to its original state.
The house had a long history before it found stardom on the small screen. Lord Ashbrook was born in 1935, the son of Desmond Flower, 10th Viscount Ashbrook and his wife Elizabeth Egerton-Warburton, a Cheshire heiress. Arley had been in the Warburton family since the end of the 12th century. In 1470, Piers Warburton built the first house on the site, a timber-framed moated property.
The family lived there until the early 19th century, when Lord Ashbrook’s great-great-grandfather Rowland Egerton-Warburton “decided they needed somewhere more prestigious,” says Lord Ashbrook. Egerton-Warburton began building the new Arley Hall in 1832, a Victorian building with Elizabethan features – at an eventual cost of almost £30,000, equal to £2.9million now.
The late Lord Ashbrook was a chartered accountant, whose family seat, Castle Durrow in County Laois in Ireland, was sold in 1922 when the Flower family were forced to move to England. When he met Elizabeth Egerton-Warburton, he wasn’t certain about taking on an heiress.
Then, the Arley estate had more to it than its 2,000 acres today. “During my childhood there was 6,500 acres, and in the mid-Thirties a lot more,” says Lord Ashbrook. “This concerned my father. He didn’t want to be thought of as someone who was chasing after an heiress, even though he had a title, and had been to Eton and Oxford. He was of very high moral mind.”
Nevertheless, the couple married in 1934 and Lord Ashbrook, then the Hon Michael Flower, was born a year later. In 1939, the late Lord Ashbrook enlisted. Egerton-Warburton’s mother, the Hon Lettice Legh, and her second husband Lt-Col John Waters then lived at Arley too, explains Lord Ashbrook. “When they eventually left in 1943 they had a special train that went from Northwich down to Hampshire with all their Guernsey cows – in the middle of the war!”
Lord Ashbrook remembers the war years well, when Arley was used as a hospital. “The big rooms were turned into dormitories. It was quite safe here, though they were trying to bomb Liverpool and Manchester. One of my earliest memories is being brought down during air raids. It was quite exciting.”
Life during the war seemed almost to go on as normal; there were gardeners at Arley, “and even a butler, though he was called up to do factory work. We had a nanny, housemaids, a cook, and a chauffeur – extraordinary.”
When the late Lord Ashbrook was demobilised in 1945, he took up running Arley full-time. “They said, we’ll give it 10 years. In 1945 places like this were problematic – a lot of families were leaving, a Labour government had just come in with a huge majority, and people didn’t know what the future held.” Arley was “enormously emotionally important” to the Ashbrooks, he adds: “My mother was devoted to it, and my father quickly became fond of it.”
The house they had inherited was unmanageably large, and not terribly fashionable. “It’s not a Chatsworth or a Longleat,” says Lord Ashbrook. “It’s pretty good second best. Victorian architecture is now quite admired, but when I was a boy it wasn’t at all. My grandmother, who came from Lyme Park [a Palladian-baroque mansion, the largest in Cheshire], thought nothing of Arley.”
So in 1968, the Ashbrooks decided to reduce the size of the house, demolishing 70 rooms, including the dining room. “It was quite difficult to live in, and it was thought that if the house was partially demolished it would be easier.” It wasn’t a total success. “Everything got well beyond budget, and when the partial demolition was finished, the money ran out. The back part was covered in cement rendering and it looked terrible.”
In the late Seventies, the current Lord and Lady Ashbrook moved in to Arley, Lord Ashbrook having given up his work as a solicitor for Farrer & Co. “We arrived in 1978 and the whole idea of managed public access interested me greatly,” says Lord Ashbrook, whose parents had opened the gardens at Arley in 1960.
Today, the house is open to the public two days a week, and the gardens March to October; fans of Peaky Blinders turn up in droves to tour the property, often in costume. The rest of the time, the house is used for weddings as well as for filming.
When the late Lord and Lady Ashbrook moved out in 1981, “the house needed a lot of renovation”, says Lady Ashbrook. “They were tired of having buckets everywhere.” The couple never moved in. “There wasn’t enough room, having pulled off half the wings,” says Lady Ashbrook.
Instead, they moved to a house on the estate, and use the Hall, where they have a flat, for big family occasions. In the Eighties a series of new houses were built on the foundations of the old wings; one of these is currently on the market for £550,000 with Yopa.
The North West is not always the easiest place to own an estate. Arley is eight miles from Warrington and 23 miles from Manchester, and while the land is good, people say that “they can’t find us, or they don’t know about us,” says Lady Ashbrook. “We’ve been trying to get a sign on the M6 for ages – that would help us.” But when people do find them, they love it, says Lord Ashbrook. “It’s a little oasis.”
Now Lord Ashbrook is 83, his eldest son, the Hon Rowland Flower, 44, has taken over the day-to-day running of the estate. Lord Ashbrook was happy to hand over. “I was ready for it; I don’t have the energy now.”
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