
One thing immediately striking about recent conference The Public Country House, which was held at the V&A in May 2024 and was in collaboration with the National Trust and The British Academy, was the sheer scale. The two-day conference marked 50 years since the V&A’s poignant Destruction of the Country House exhibition in 1974. From the outset, the large amount of paper proposals coming in facilitated the need for a separate two-day online conference that was in April. I was lucky enough to present a 10-minute paper online as part of a panel of four current and recent CDP students on new research in the field at this event.
The in-person conference was sold out at a max capacity of 250 attendees with over 700 additional people online for the live recording. If this says anything, it certainly tells of how truly important the British country house still is and the scale of interest from researchers and professionals alike. Over the course of the two days, panels of (primarily) heritage professionals spoke about their specific sites. The overarching direction of the discussions, at least in my opinion, was centered around either past or current projects that looked towards the future of the country house and their interpretation and welcome to a larger, more diverse audience.

For me, as someone newly back in the country, this conference was my first big networking opportunity since starting my PhD. I spoke at the PGECR Country House group conference in March, which was a fantastic entrée into society, but on a much smaller scale. The V&A’s Public Country House afforded me the opportunity to really network, meet new people with similar research interests and solidify budding relationships. As was mentioned more than once by various speakers, the audience was overall much younger than anticipated and provided a diverse crowd of scholars. As part of the conference, I was able to attend a breakfast meet-up hosted by the PGECR Country House group to formally meet other doctoral students in the field.
I was pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of the American heritage professionals, Professor Louis Nelson of the University of Virginia, who was the speaker for the plenary address at the end of the first day, and Brandon Dillard of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. As an American myself, I can safely say I knew absolutely nothing about the state of heritage in the East coast. To have collaborative relationships with ‘country house’ sites around the globe is a great way to share interpretation practices and think outside of the box. Especially with the significant British influence and joint histories with Colonial America.
Monticello and Montpellier, two Founding Father’s houses in America, were architecturally and ideologically inspired by the villa and its Classical and global iterations. The villa as a unique architectural form was not mentioned throughout the conference, though Kenwood, which was briefly cited at times, is a surviving suburban London villa. When the villa does get mentioned in active scholarship, it is often classified under the category of ‘country house.’ The two forms are of course related. In eighteenth-century Britain, people that primarily owned a villa also owned a country house as well as a London townhouse. As very few exceptional examples of villas and (even fewer) townhouses survive, they have nowhere to go but into the world of the country house. The methodologies for studying the social history of these spaces as lived-in houses are all similar and what I learned from the research exhibited at the V&A’s conference can and will be applied to my own research. The more country house events I attend, the more I appreciate my own work and see the need for the expansion of the field to include domestic history more broadly.