Sold By Fitzwilliam Family
By 1989 the house was in a poor state of repair. With the Polytechnic no longer a tenant, and with the family no longer requiring the house, the family trustees decided to sell the house and the 30 acres (120,000 m2) surrounding it, but retained the Wentworth Estate's 89,000 acres (360 km2) of productive land. The house was bought by locally-born businessman Wensley Grosvenor Haydon-Baillie, who started a programme of restoration; however a business failure caused it to be repossessed by a Swiss bank and put back on the market in 1998. The present owner is Clifford Newbold, an architect from Highgate, who bought it for something over £1.5 million. Mr Newbold has clearly undertaken and is progressing with a defined programme of renovation/restoration as evidenced in two recent editions of Country Life magazine dated 17 February and 24 February 2010. Much of the garden is operated as a country park by Rotherham council.
Read more about this topic: Wentworth Woodhouse
Famous quotes containing the words sold and/or family:
“As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (18541900)
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert DOr with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)