‘My 12th-century castle is at risk under Labour Government – I’m so angry’

Great Estates: Jason Lindsay says big houses like Hedingham are under threat from cultural vandalism

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The beginning of November 2024 was not, it’s fair to say, the ideal time to become president of a membership organisation for the owners of private built heritage.
Yet that was the lot facing Jason Lindsay just a few weeks ago at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre, when he was elected president of Historic Houses. The timing, just after the Budget that sprung an attack on Britain’s family heritage and farming communities, means he must also bear the burden of bringing about a renewed peace in our time for this generation of stately home owners.
Lindsay, 56, a former Sotheby’s Old Masters specialist, runs Hedingham Castle in Essex with his architect wife Demetra – “It was love, definitely, our marriage – but some advice to any incoming owner: marry a professional with skills that are suitable for the project ahead,” he laughs.
Hedingham is a castle in name and in nature: the Grade I-listed Norman keep was built in around 1140, while the Lindsays live in a Grade II*-listed Georgian house opposite.
Theirs was not an easy inheritance. Lindsay is the grandson of post-war National Trust chairman David Lindsay, 28th Earl of Crawford, who inherited Hedingham in 1998 from his father the Hon. Thomas Lindsay.
He had been left Hedingham by his distant cousin Musette Majendie in 1980. The Ashurst family, from whom Majendie descended, bought Hedingham from the Earls of Oxford in 1713, and she inherited it in 1939. By the time Thomas Lindsay and his wife got to Hedingham in 1980, the house needed so much work that they declined to move in.
With Demetra, Jason moved to Hedingham from London in the early 2000s where they found the house freezing, cluttered, and yet somehow soulless – with no curtains. They have spent the past 20 years renovating it room by room, and it is now transformed into a comfortable family home, with a biomass boiler to keep the chill off.
The keep, however, comes with concerns commensurate to its age and construction, and is on Historic England’s “Heritage at Risk Register”, after water was found infiltrating the uppermost masonry. It doesn’t affect the 80 weddings the Lindsays host every year, nor the school groups that visit, but the challenge will be completing work while keeping the business going.
With only 140 acres remaining, the keep, says Lindsay, “is the equivalent of our wider estate. I don’t think we would have survived if we just had the Georgian house. The land generates a couple of grand a year, but these places cost hundreds of thousands of pounds a year to run.”
Finding such sums could well be nixed by the Budget. Though Historic Houses represents some of the most famous privately owned properties in the world, the majority of its members do not have (as landholdings go) huge tracts of land, and mostly scrape by in a kind of genteel poverty.
Families like the Lindsays open their houses to visitors, keep them running, and pass them on to the next generation for the love of doing it. If they sold up, there would be no market for such a building to perform the same role – these buildings are part of the community, support local tourism and jobs, and give public access to works of art.
Instead, these homes would likely be closed by a buyer seeking privacy for his money, or sold to a hotel group. And, since the buildings are invariably listed, they cannot (nor should) be demolished either.
The Chancellor’s tweak to the business property relief (BPR) scheme might ensnare sales of not just land but houses too.
Beyond that, it will critically stunt growth in the sector and, by extension, in the rural economy if funds have to be reallocated from capital projects.
“Each of us has a different set-up,” says Lindsay. “With a discretionary trust [as is the case at Hedingham] you pay when you go into the trust, and then you pay 6pc every decade on the value. That is sort of affordable, but we would get business property relief on that, so that’s what they’ve pulled from under our feet, and they’re saying we’ve got to pay 3pc. It’s like getting another large mortgage.”
More holistically, the Budget has the potential to put an end to a period of stability for the country house. This was long-sought, following a mid-20th century that all but destroyed the big house: in 1955 alone, 48 country houses were partially or completely demolished, while estate duty peaked at 85pc in 1969.
Denis Healey’s introduction of conditional exemption in 1975 helped turn things around, and the ability of big houses to seek marriage licences in the 1990s, continued the upward trajectory. But now the boat has been rocked again, creating what Lindsay describes as a “really hostile environment”.
He hopes that the Government has miscalculated, “and they’re catching out these places by accident. I’m trying to give them the benefit of the doubt – that they don’t understand what these policies will do. This notion that you can just sell off 20pc – a few fields, a painting – and you’re so well off you won’t even notice… [if you do that] you end up like the empty French chateaux.” Or, he sighs, since his own estate was hollowed out by Majendie, “like Hedingham, limping along, last chance saloon.”
If this is the pattern of future activity, with paintings being sold to pay tax bills, “there’s going to be an enormous cultural departure, as took place in the early 20th century”.
Targeting the bigger seats – where, yes, there might be more assets to be sold but where the economic impact is greater – is wrong too, he says. “What, for example, [the Duke of Northumberland’s] Alnwick does for that part of Northumberland economically is staggering. It makes the whole area thrive – with the castle, the gardens, the filming, the employment, the land stewardship.
“The reason it is so successful is because of the Northumberlands’ passion to do it. They are like mini royals up there but that’s the fabric of the country, and it should not be taxed out of existence out of envy. There must be another way of raising money [without] trashing our cultural and built heritage.”
In 1950, the civil servant Sir Ernest Gowers concluded in his report into the future of Britain’s country house heritage that old families running big houses were the most economic solution. Lindsay urges the Government to commission a similar report today, and would be glad to host officials.
“Come and see what the economics are, talk to the people who work here, look at the jobs that we create, have a word with the visitors.” He admits that he does not feel terribly optimistic, and describes the Budget as “heritage vandalism… it’s made me so angry”.
Lindsay isn’t asking anyone to get out their tiny violin. He knows the impression that the big house at the end of the drive gives, and the perception that might exist of “the aristocracy”.
It isn’t about “monocled owners,” he says, “heritage is worth saving. I get that the Government has to raise money, and we have got to work out a way to have a dialogue with them. If they’re just blindly going to say, ‘Right, let’s tax you out of existence’, the damage they’re going to do will be unreconcilable.”
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