Chronicles twenty of England's most sadly lost estates, telling the history of the aristocratic dynasty that founded them, explaining the circumstances that led to their often fabulously prosperous peak, and then tracing the various, and occasionally outlandish, reasons for their decline and demolition. 150 photographs depict all that was lost: classical landscapes and architectural masterpieces that have gone forever, all too often to be replaced by a military base, a soulless resevoir, or the endless sprawl of light industry and suburbia. By the 1950s the National Trust was starting to be successful in saving and conserving great country estates for posterity, but it was already too late for more than a thousand country houses and their estates that had disappeared since the war. The ancient woodlands were chopped down for their lucrative timber, the house was demolished, the deer park, the cricket ground, and home farm often ending up under concrete for a new power station, housing estate or airport, and at best surviving as green space in the form of blanket pine forestry or a golf course.
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