Chichester & the South Downs - Great houses & gardens

The chalk ridge of the South Downs runs 80 miles across Hampshire and Sussex to meet the sea at Eastbourne. With spectacular viewpoints, unique natural history and ease of access, it also contains a glittering string of great stately homes, housing personal collections that reflect changing national fortunes as well as personal tastes and triumphs.

For successive generations of settlers and great builders, the strategic importance of the South Downs overlooking the Channel was gradually replaced by the attraction of their spectacular beauty. Be inspired by histories of fortifications and pleasure palaces: repositories of treasured collections as symbols of power, and places of leisure and entertainment.

Exploitation of natural resources, from flintmining, charcoal burning and iron-smelting to sheep-farming and forestry, shaped the Downland landscape. The great family estates helped to conserve this area of outstanding natural beauty, now protected and sustainably managed as a protected National Park.

Changing attitudes to conservation are illustrated by the contrasting fortunes of Midhurst’s Cowdray Ruins and rebuilt Stansted House – each destroyed a century apart by disastrous fires and reborn in a new context.

Two thousand years of history, taste and politics survive, including one of the most important collections of fine art in the care of the National Trust at Petworth. Exquisite medieval sculpture at Boxgrove and Chichester, the unique Stansted Chapel and High Victorian Gothic at Arundel are highlights of religious patronage. Splendid historic houses that are still private homes reflect the tastes and fortunes of royal Dukes, Earls and Lords of church and country.

The story of the English country house would not be complete without an exploration of life ‘downstairs’. At both Petworth and Stansted these stories are vividly brought to life.

Contemporary patronage can be enjoyed in Chichester Cathedral and at England’s oldest continuously occupied castle at Arundel, where the seventeenth-century Collector Earl is commemorated in a wonderful modern garden commission by the Duke of Norfolk. Modern art sits in a striking contemporary setting alongside one of the finest eighteenth-century houses in Chichester at Pallant House.