the times | Monday October 26 2020 1GT 7
life
Moreover, Ironbridge, next door, turns
out to be one of the worst flood areas
in the country. The weddings would
have been under water.
My misadventure reminded me
of the power of architectural beauty.
Certainly part of my motivation was
simply a bloody-minded sense of
aesthetic mission to save it from
becoming the soulless “corporate
HQ” of some local Telford company.
What would they have known of the
exquisite Caernarvon arch of 1377 that
led into the abbot’s great hall (marked
“function room”)? What would they
have known of what lay behind the
ceiling in the “storage garage” —
nothing less than the original abbot’s
private chapel?
I was relieved to hear that the house
was finally bought by a private family,
who are restoring it (slowly).
What I learnt is that to the English,
property is not just bricks and mortar.
It is an extension of our very identity
and sense of self. Our relationship
with buildings is an intimate extension
of our relationship with the past.
Property is often more about the
emotional than the purely economic.
We tend to invest not just money,
but also considerable emotion and
spiritual capital in our houses.
An obsession with a restoration
“project” can be as self-destructive
and as dangerous as taking on an
expensive mistress, or any other
addictive habit. My advice is: if you are
happy in your own home, stay put.
William Cash’s memoir Restoration
Heart (Little, Brown) is out now£170,000) I would have needed to pay
back a loan of more than £1 million in
less than six months. The final crunch
came when I was sitting in the kitchen
about to sign the “bridging loan
agreement”. As I read it through,
with my children bicycling around the
table, my wife suddenly declared that
it was a “crazy idea”. After all I had
been through, and having found the
most wonderful wife, an inner voice
told me that this was folly. The look
she flashed me made me read the
small print very carefully.
“Doing up a medieval house like
that will always cost more than the
house itself,” she said. She was right,
of course. Nearby picturesque Morville
Hall, owned by the National Trust,
has changed hands several times over
the past few years after tenants were
seduced by the £24,000 rent, but didn’t
factor in the cost of keeping up the
gardens and kitting the house out
with “suitable” furniture. One tenant
decorated the house with flat-pack
furniture from Ikea and had framed
Disney cartoons on the walls where
National Trust punters expected old
master paintings.
The final straw with the Abbey
House came when I asked what would
happen if I missed a payment. The
reply was: “We would reserve our right
as the lender to take any appropriate
action.” I felt like a condemned man
living on borrowed money and time.
I walked away from my deposit. I jilted
my 14th-century mistress.
It’s just as well I did. Covid has all
but killed off the wedding industry.The Nave of Buildwas
Abbey in Shropshire
and, right, William Cash
and his wife, Lauraa valuer in a Range Rover and a tweed
jacket was inspecting our family house.
My wife winced, then scowled. “Are
you really sure this is a good idea?”
she said. “I’m not keen on the idea
of moving out.”
My nearly fatal affair with Buildwas
abbot’s house began after I went for
a walk in the grounds of the English
Heritage property near Ironbridge to
walk off drinking too much rosé at a
weekend lunch. The last thing I was
looking for was a new house to live in;far from it. While restoring Upton
Cressett, after the misery of two
successive divorces in my forties, had
helped to restore my broken self, I
certainly wasn’t looking to repeat the
experience. It may have rescued me,
but it had also nearly ruined me.
Still, love can strike any time, often
when you least expect it. When the
Abbey House first came into view as
I walked up the old monastic apple
orchard by the Cistercian ruins, I
wondered who lived there. Beside
the door was a plaque saying “Abbey
House Sports Club”. It turned out that
the former abbot’s house was for sale
— with a bar, a bowling lawn and abilliards room — having been a social
club for workers at Buildwas power
station. The price for the 27-acre
monastic estate was £750,000.
“Due to imminent sale, all items in
the club will be sold at a boot sale next
Sunday,” said a notice on the door.
Then I noticed to my astonishment
that the 16th-century ornamental
plasterwork in the bar area was
identical to that of Upton Cressett.
A divine sign to buy, surely? It must
have been by the same Elizabethan
travelling plasterers. When I lifted
up the 1970s-style brown carpet, I
couldn’t believe the floor was covered
in original 13th-century painted
mosaic tiles. I felt as though I’d
scooped up gold coins from the
wreck of the Mary Rose.
I pursued the Abbey House with the
sort of conviction I’d only felt before
with a woman I was besotted with.
This was only compounded when
my research discovered that Henry
James had visited on a rainy July day
in 1877 and was also smitten by the
beauty of the Abbey House. As he
wrote in Abbeys and Castles, it was “the
paradise of a small English country-
gentleman”. He even confessed that it
was the one house in England he
wanted to buy and “move in” on the
“morrow”. JMW Turner also painted
the abbey ruins.
Yet despite falling in love with its
history, I ended up pulling out of the
sale (having paid the deposit) hours
before signing away the deeds to my
house in security. To buy the estate
(which included an extra VAT bill ofI walked away
from my deposit.
I jilted my 14th-
century mistress
ALISTAIR HEAP/SOLO SYNDICATION