#391: The Melted Handrail
Exploring Seaton Delaval Hall
A stately home. Somewhere built to last through time, to house a family and be passed down with the family’s name and the family’s money. An unchanging bastion of tradition.
Stately homes still stand across the country, seemingly as solid as they ever were. Or at least to look at. Many have changed hands, have had several uses, have become burdensome to the families that own them. Their insides are now used as wedding venues or full of interpretive boards that tell of a once grand history. Even in these cases, though, often the stones, the bricks, the raw materials forming its structure remain the same.
Not at Seaton Delaval Hall.
Climb up the sweeping stone staircase, open the front door, and enter a shell. The room’s height is suddenly made higher by the missing floors. Light floods in through unintended windows that once were the beginnings of corridors. Up the newly renovated staircase, the handrail runs out. Suddenly the wrought iron twists and turns and splits. It becomes almost organic, like jagged flower stems.
In 1822, Seaton Delaval Hall was ravaged by fire. Wealth and power proved no match for nature’s weapon. Though people rushed to help and saved the kitchen and stable wings, the main home was never the same again.
Now open to the public, the centre of this home has a beautiful eeriness to it. Almost like the fake buildings on a film set, you enter the front door; travel the short corridors looking for rooms, for the heart of the home; and find nothing. Even the staircases can only take you so far.
It’s striking to see the bare stonework inside a home that was designed for opulent furnishings. To realise that even such a symbol of elitism was made of bricks and mortar, materials that can come crumbling down. It’s easier to imagine, viewing each brick and the empty sockets for beams, the men who must have built this hall. The shell reveals itself as a feat of engineering, as the result of hard labour, rather than a showy performance piece.
It feels almost intentional. Like an art installation. Or a giant educational model, ready to teach you about architecture. It’s not obvious Seaton Delaval Hall was ever a real home.
That is until you see the melted handrail, and suddenly the heat of the fire, the strength of the devastation, the story of this tragic house, is told in one mangled object.
