Stoke Restoration Home

All over Britain, hundreds of precious historic buildings

are in danger of being lost forever.

The tragedy is that these buildings

are far more than just simply bricks and mortar.

They are the keepers of our past.

I love the idea that people have stood here

discussing the Battle of Waterloo and the Battle of Britain.

I'm following the fortunes of six properties.

Each of these six fragile buildings has found a would-be saviour.

New owners desperate to breathe life into these crumbling ruins

by creating there own 21st century dream home.

-Well, she found it!

-I just think it's an adorable building.

I know there's a lot of work be done,

but I think it's a building needs to be cared for and will be cared for.

As our owners get down to work,

architectural expert Kieran Long and historian Dr Kate Williams,

will help me unearth the fascinating secrets

hidden deep in each building's past.

I love old buildings and I always have.

And I've spent many years

restoring various different properties in an attempt to create

the perfect family home.

So I know from personal experience

the hard path that our families have chosen to follow.

I don't think we'd ever buy another listed building.

Ever.

It's Restoration Home.

This is Chatsworth.

One of Britain's finest stately homes.

It's been lived in by the aristocratic Cavendish family

since the 1500s.

Now, thankfully, Chatsworth doesn't need rescuing.

But it is a rare surviving jewel in a part of England

that used to be teeming with incredible country houses.

The bad news is that hundreds of our grand houses

have been lost over the last century or so.

Many that have managed to survive are teetering on the brink.

And, tragically, just eight miles up river from here

there's an extraordinary country house

that's in desperate need of being saved

before the cruel ravages of time finish it off for good.

And this is our Restoration Home.

Stoke Hall in Derbyshire.

A 30-room Georgian mansion

whose future has been dangling by a thread for decades.

With every month that passes, the leaking roof and widespread dry rot

make saving the building more difficult and more expensive.

At risk of being lost is the original 18th century decor,

which gives Stoke Hall a Grade II* listing.

That means it's considered

a building of more than special historic importance.

And that the conservation bodies responsible for protecting

our national heritage must approve restoration plans.

For Stoke Hall, new owners now offer new hope.

Meet Steve and Natalie Drury and their children, Tom and Laura.

The Drurys bought Stoke Hall in 2009

after a search for their perfect family home.

This one was the one we loved.

This was the house, so listen for going to be our home.

-This was the house to bring the family up in.

-Yes, definitely.

Childhood sweethearts Steve and Natalie started married life

in a three-bed semi.

Since then, Steve's become a self-made millionaire

with a successful business

supplying hi-tech products to the energy industry.

Full-time mum Natalie is also from a modest background.

Her dad's a plumber.

They see their listed mansion as a home for life.

You do get a very good feel when you drive over the hill

and you can see it in the distance and you see the striped lawns

you do think, "Actually, you've done well."

Stoke Hall's last owner had started to restore parts of the building,

but sadly he died with work still in progress.

Potential buyers were afraid to take on such a massive project,

until Steve and Natalie came along.

I could see what put a lot of people off.

The water running in, the buckets catching all the rainwater, dry rot everywhere.

But if you saw past that, you're left with these views

and this position, which is as good as it gets in Derbyshire.

They paid 2.5 million just to buy Stoke Hall.

This restoration certainly isn't going to come cheap.

We're looking to spend £4 million in total.

An extra £1.5 million over on what we bought.

They've already spent 150,000 making the leaking roof watertight.

And there's a further 350,000 budgeted for plastering,

decoration and new electrics.

While work goes on around them, the family will live in

the house's handful of habitable rooms.

They love having the workmen here, Tom especially because he likes to help them.

And Laura likes them to be here because...

she's a little bit bossy!

You have to work extra hard or you're fired!

They've set themselves an ambitious restoration schedule,

aiming to get most of the work done by Christmas 2010.

That's just over a year away.

The rooms they plan to transform include the two ground-floor rooms

on the south side of the house, with their Georgian decor.

A first-floor room with its original ceiling

which will become the master bedroom.

And the 1980s kitchen which will be revamped.

Some of the rooms are slightly daunting

and we just don't have a clue where to start.

-We'll get there.

-We will.

This room is going to be the grand dining room.

And, as you can see, it's got a lot of intricate work and detail.

This is the room that gives me the most apprehension about the house.

I'm used to the painted walls and the plain ceilings

and modern lights, so when I first came in this room, I thought, "Oh, my goodness!"

I don't think we'd ever take anything away from the house. The house is amazing.

But we just want to make it more ours, more of a home.

The smaller room next door,

originally the Georgian morning room, will become a study.

This is going to be Steve's little domain.

A happy little domain hopefully

and we're going to really have it quite masculine. You know?

Over in the east wing, there's more intricate decor to save.

On the top floor is the room with the original ceiling

which will become Steve and Natalie's master bedroom.

We are hoping to keep this ceiling,

although it is being sort of held up by poles at the moment.

I think it's beautiful. Apart from the brown colour.

# One, two, three, four. #

Turning an 18th century pile into a 21st century home

is a huge challenge.

And for the new Lord and Lady of the Manor,

the restoration journey is only just beginning.

I don't come from this kind of background,

so it's hard to know if you're doing it properly.

It's just hard.

The 18th-century room that will be Steve's study

helps give Stoke Hall its Grade II* listing.

The builders have been preparing the foundations

to install a new oak floor.

And they've found evidence left behind

by one of their Georgian counterparts.

This is like his tally mark

that he'd have put on for maybe the end of a week or two weeks' work.

I think this one is probably the same chap

who's put his own little bit of graffiti on. 1762 or 1769.

But... We all like to leave our marks, us builders.

But Steve and Natalie can't install the floor in their study

until local conservation officers approve their plan.

Their building's Grade II* listing

even affects the floor they choose to modernise the 1980s kitchen.

It's not a formal or not really a listed part of the house.

It's going to be our home part of the house

and they're going to make us put a planning application in for the floor that they could well reject.

Learning more about the history of their Georgian home

is going to help with the restoration journey that lies ahead.

We want to know as much about the house as possible.

It's been here a long time.

How it came to be designed, built as it was.

Because we've got decisions to make

on decor and things we want to do in the house.

While I keep an eye on Steve and Natalie's massive restoration,

our investigators are going to

help me uncover the story of their building.

Historian Dr Kate Williams,

will track down Stoke Hall's owners through the centuries.

And architecture expert Kieran Long gets our investigation

underway by looking for clues in the DNA of the building itself.

So it's a just simply beautiful old Georgian mansion in the landscape.

A really, really, really beautiful Palladian villa in Derbyshire.

The Palladian style of architecture was all about using

classical symmetry in the design of grand houses.

The style originated in Italy in the 1500s,

but it became all the rage in well-to-do 18th-century Britain.

When you see the building, it looks almost like a perfect cube.

Quite a grand ground floor level,

where each window has corbelling and has cornice work and so on.

And then, as your eye scans up the facade, you see that there's slightly less decoration

and then finally the attic storey with smaller windows.

That is absolutely a hallmark of this kind of architecture -

of an understanding of a classical arrangement.

It's all too easy for Kieran to see

why Stoke Hall has been a building at risk for so many years.

Well, this is the corner that faces the valley

and it's the corner that's taken

a buffeting of 250 years of wind and rain and sleet and snow.

And it's showing it, to be honest.

This is a solidly made building, but you can see on this facade in particular

it's gone almost black with weathering.

Inside, he examines the room that presents Steve and Natalie

with one of their biggest restoration challenges.

The Georgian morning room, earmarked as Steve's 21st-century study.

It's just amazing to see a room in this state.

What you see here is the various layers of the construction of the building.

Remarkably, reeds used to build these 18th-century walls

still have their seeds.

Reeds or rough wooden batons were used by Georgian builders

as the base for each wall's original plaster covering.

This is the back of house stuff - the stuff that no-one was ever supposed to see.

And we see just how there's no fineness to the making of this.

The timber batons are just picked off the floor

and not even cut to be the same size.

That's how construction works.

You want to hide your dirty laundry away, and we're embarrassing

the Georgian craftsman by revealing it here and showing it to the world.

But it's about giving yourself a solid base

to make beautiful things on.

If Steve and Natalie succeed in restoring this room,

they'll have rescued a rare piece of our national heritage.

It's made of reeds and wood. It's made of almost nothing.

Somehow it's survived. That makes it all the more precious.

You see so many of these interiors deteriorating until they are

unsalvageable or have to be replaced by modern equivalents,

but this is the original stuff and it has to be saved.

Kids still leave the bikes out.

Steve and Natalie have no idea

who the original Georgian owner of their house was.

I imagine they'd be very well-to-do,

maybe, you know, aristocracy sort of thing. Lord of the Manor.

Had to go and open garden fetes, or something like that, you know!

But our private eye of the past, Kate, has discovered the man

who built Steve and Natalie's mansion wasn't an aristocrat,

he was a man of the cloth.

A Reverend John Simpson.

She's traced his origins

to the country parish of Babworth in Nottinghamshire.

30 miles from Stoke Hall.

And she hopes to learn more about the reverend, if she can find his grave.

So, I wonder if any of these graves are Simpson family graves.

They're all so old and it's so hard to see because they're covered in all this moss.

She's looking for a Simpson gravestone from the late 1700s.

So long ago that any useful information could well be obscured

by the passage of time.

What have we got here?

William Bridgeman-Simpson, born 9 September 1813, died 1835.

So, these ones are all a bit later, these are all Victorian.

It's when Kate steps inside the church

that she eventually finds what she's been looking for.

A memorial in prime position close to the altar.

Here's our man.

"Within the family vault of this church

"are deposited the remains of the Reverend John Simpson.

"Late of Stoke Hall in the County of Derby."

Simpson gets to sit right in the middle of the church

and to be seen by all. He's arrived.

Not like those people outside who are sitting in the chilly old earth.

Kate's investigation is only just beginning.

But her picture of the 18th century clergyman

who built Steve and Natalie's house is starting to take shape.

To find out more about John Simpson,

she needs to dig deeper into his past.

Over 200 years later, the new owners of Reverend Simpson's mansion

have other things on their minds.

Four months into Steve and Natalie Drury's restoration, things are not going smoothly.

Does just goes everywhere. Seeps in every nook and cranny we've got.

The builders go home, and I quickly Hoover and clean what I can

before I fetch the kids, and then I get the children home and feed them

and homework and bath and everything,

and when they're back in bed, I carry on cleaning for another hour or so.

So, normally by about 8:30pm, 9pm, I'm exhausted.

She's never lived in such a big house

and Natalie does all the domestic work on her own.

The idea of hired help simply isn't in her make-up.

The thought of having staff, like, it shouldn't happen to me.

I've not grown up with anything like that, you know. It's my job.

It's... It's who I am in the family.

As well as overseeing the restoration,

Steve's business demands over 60 hours a week of his time.

What time's Louise get in?

He is copping quite well,

but he does like the order and tidiness when he comes home.

Because he's got a stressful job, so coming home to a very dirty house

would stress him out a bit more.

Owning a listed building gives Steve and Natalie a huge responsibility

to our national heritage.

The Peak District National Park Authority,

the local conservation body overseeing the restoration,

expects work on the study to be sympathetic

to the original 18th-century materials.

Some of the rotten oak timbers have been replaced

with a different kind of wood.

This is the piece that originally came out

and we were asked to replace them,

but after inspection by the Peak Park,

the timber wasn't the right timber,

so it's taken out and done again but in oak this time.

It's a bit frustrating when you're doing jobs twice,

but you have to do as you're told, I'm afraid.

Conservation officers also want to be sure plans for

the study's new oak floor are sympathetic to the room.

There's been a delay while they consider Steve and Natalie's plans

for the height of the floor as well as the type of wood.

Everything's ready, but we can't cut the wood to size

because we don't know how high the floor's going to be, what kind of floor it's going to be yet.

We have to wait for a decision to be made,

so we're in Limbo Land really at the moment for this room.

In the kitchen, they want to replace the 1980s vinyl tiles

with a polished limestone floor.

But this was once part of Stoke Hall servants' quarters

and the conservation officers prefer a different floor covering.

They think it should be

flagstones because that's what would have been down.

But that turns it back round into a servant's quarters.

Putting the flags down would just make it feel really cold

and, you know, I really think

it would totally change the dynamic of it

and it would really, really upset me, to be fair.

Conservation bodies do their best to protect our heritage,

but their views don't always coincide with those of the owners.

There's all this bureaucracy around a Grade II* building. Grade I and II are quite clear cut.

Grade II* is somewhere in-between. Where in-between I'm still trying to establish.

Agreement on restoration plans often become a matter of negotiation.

But just four months in, Natalie's thinking, "Never again".

We've never own a listed building before.

And...

if we did have to sell this house, for whatever reason -

and it would not be our choice - but if we did,

I don't think we'd ever buy another listed building.

Ever, so...

I think the worst part is the dampening of the enthusiasm.

There are people I know that would have packed in by now.

Kate has been trying to find out how the Reverend John Simpson

came to build Steve and Natalie's mansion.

The fact is, some 18th-century clergyman could accumulate considerable wealth

through income from church land alone.

To be a vicar in this period could be incredibly lucrative -

if you got the right church -

and this one, here in Babworth, was a goldmine.

The son of the local squire, John Simpson,

was a member of the English gentry.

A class with land, and money, but no aristocratic title.

But, in the 18th century, the gentry was on its way up the social ladder.

The Reverend made a very good marriage to the granddaughter

of English naval hero Admiral Benbow,

and inherited the Stoke Hall Estate,

as part of his marriage settlement.

He started work on his fashionable new mansion in the 1750s.

Kate has tracked down the Reverend's will

in the National Archives -

the country's largest collection of historical documents.

This was a country clergyman

who made material, as well as social, progress in his lifetime.

The Reverend Simpson is utterly aware of everything he owns.

He's listing every type of possession he has here,

from his cattle, to his jewellery,

to his furniture, to his clothes, and, by the end of his life,

he's an incredibly wealthy man,

dispensing huge amounts of possessions and money

and land to his relations, his friends.

Reverend Simpson's wealth exemplifies the sea change

in the 18th century, the rise of what we call now the middle classes,

the people who had money, who were going to spend.

This is Reverend Simpson's life exemplified.

Our architectural expert, Kieran, has noticed

Reverend Simpson's mansion was built

very much with appearances in mind.

You arrive from the South and you see the corner of the building.

And all the money, all of the design effort,

was spent making those two facades as impressive as they can be.

Making the building seem more grand, perhaps, than it is.

The miniature portico over the main entrance is another clue

that Stoke Hall was an 18th-century gentleman's mini version

of a stately home.

It should be another few feet out into the street,

in order that you could drive a carriage into it and descend from the carriage under cover.

So this is, in a way, a little bit of bourgeois pretension, this portico.

It's kind of a domesticated version of a country house, shrunk to fit.

Rather like mock-Tudor, in the 1900, mock-Palladian

was the favoured choice of well-to-do Georgian homeowners.

And it's likely Stoke Hall's builders and craftsmen

were briefed to copy fashionable designs

that Reverend Simpson liked.

Well, at the time, in England, there was an explosion of house building.

There was an emerging upper-middle-class,

building buildings like this.

There are details here which probably came from catalogues and books.

Those details would have been copied from those books,

and the craftsmen here would have been quite familiar with creating those ornamental elements.

It's the surviving ornamental elements

of Stoke Hall's largest Georgian room

that owners Steve and Natalie are trying so hard to save.

Wow! This is an incredible room.

MUSIC: "Secrets" by OneRepublic

The fire surround is of a really high quality, I think.

This is timber carving, and to do this with this kind of fineness,

whoever did this was a very fine craftsman.

Two other features of the fireplace suggest it was inspired

by someone with rather racy artistic tastes.

There's a pair of young men, one either side of this incredible fireplace,

made of plaster,

Who look, somehow, like they are in a kind of ecstasy,

running their hands through their hair.

This guy seems to have a moustache. Like a footballer, or a '70s porn star, I'm not sure which.

The architecture of this era was all about being composed

on the outside, and being incredibly rich and sensuous on the inside,

and that, to me, says something about the English character.

There's something about the English which is kind of, you know,

we wear a suit, but have, these terrible perversions.

Reverend Simpson's interiors were likely to have impressed his visitors.

When your friends came here, they would have said, "That guy's been on the grand tour.

"He's travelled to Italy, he's travelled to London,

"and he's seen the fashionable churches of the age,

"by Hawksmoor and so on, and brought a little bit of it to Derbyshire."

Kieran suspects the hand of an influential 18th-century architect

in some of Stoke Hall's designs, and aims to find out who it was.

One of my big questions is,

what's the house's relationship to the other great houses of the area?

I hope we discover that some of the great craftsmen

of this part of England, at that period, worked on this house.

It's now five months since Steve and Natalie started the restoration.

After weeks of delay, conservation officers have approved plans

for new floors in the two Georgian rooms.

We've been told we can put oak all the way through

and take that pine up, so we can start doing those two rooms.

And the 1980s vinyl floor in the kitchen can also be replaced.

But Steve and Natalie won't be getting a polished limestone floor.

It's going to be black slate instead.

They did agree to the black slate. Not exactly what we wanted, but...

We had to wait three months and argue about the floor we wanted, or we found a compromise.

So...

we compromised.

At last, work on the new kitchen can begin in earnest.

We hope there's going to be a beam. That's what we're really hoping.

That would be great, to find a beam.

Because, what else could there be under there?

Why would you have a bump in the middle of the ceiling?

Must be a beam.

Oh! We've got an oak beam!

Yay!

The kitchen gets its compromise black slate floor.

Elsewhere in the building, it's a matter of making up for lost time.

The Georgian morning room is finally on its way to becoming the study.

And there's been no issue with the restoration of its precious original walls.

Steve and Natalie have always planned to restore the room

as the 18th-century builders would have created it,

using rough timber battens as the base

for a traditional lime plaster covering.

It's all hand-cut and hand-split.

Because it's all rough, and hand-split,

it's got a texture that the plaster can grip onto.

Traditional methods require specialist craftsmen, and do come at a cost.

Steve and Natalie are paying around £8,000 to replaster the study,

and it's a lengthy process.

If it was in a modern situation,

it would be huge, great sheets of plasterboard,

then it would just be a skim, and it'd all be done in a day.

Whereas this takes up to a week to do a wall.

It might be more time-consuming to apply,

but the Georgians certainly knew how to make good plaster.

It's a mix of hydraulic lime and sand.

You can see animal hairs in it.

The horsehair binds it all together.

That's how it was done, and he wants it going back how it was,

so that's how it's going to be.

Kieran is searching for a vital clue, to help him identify

the 18th-century designer of Steve and Natalie's house.

Architects often leave behind a tell-tale signature

of their work, and Kieran thinks he's found one.

To me, the biggest clue is the central arch surround

to the main central bay of the facade.

Just the way that geometrically,

the arch inter-wraps with these drapery-like surrounds on the sides of the window,

there's something very geometrically pleasing about that. That doesn't happen by accident.

The hunt is on to find the same detail

on another mid-18th century building.

The trail leads Kieran to London's Victoria and Albert Museum,

where he tries to match Stoke Hall's interiors with the work of known Georgian designers.

But it's in the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects

that he clinches the link.

This is almost identical to the window surrounds

on the exterior of Stoke Hall.

He's found a book by 18th-century architect, James Paine.

His latest house designs were the talk of a Georgian high society.

Just like an architecture magazine, a design magazine today,

these publications had subscribers.

The status of Paine's work is proven

by the fact that, at the top of the list of subscribers, is the king and queen.

And we also know the Reverend Simpson was a subscriber, and here we are.

"The Reverend Mr J Simpson, Stoke, Derbyshire."

James Paine was one of the hottest architects around.

As a subscriber to the book,

Reverend Simpson could pick and choose from his trendy designs.

It's likely the Reverend hired a local man, a Mr Booth

to build Stoke Hall.

It's his craftsmanship and Paine's designs

that Steve and Natalie are trying to save today.

Lot of work to do.

Hmmm.

It's the designer Paine and builder Booth who connect Stoke Hall

to one of the grandest houses of all.

Chatsworth. Just a few miles away.

Paine and Booth built Chatsworth's grand stables around the same time

and the estate's elegant Georgian bridge is also the work of Paine.

What we have down the road is one of the most important houses

in this country, or any other country, in Chatsworth,

which Paine and Booth were involved in, so it's a great discovery

that Stoke Hall has this link with one of the greatest works of architecture in the country.

Steve and Natalie have been working on their house for months now.

I'm going to go inside

and find out how they're coping with this massive, massive refurbishment.

But, before I can get my foot in the door,

Steve nabs me with a bit of a bombshell.

Natalie is expecting a baby and, by November,

we'll have filled another one of the bedrooms.

Congratulations! That's really fantastic!

A 30-room mansion should be the perfect place

to expand your family.

But the baby's due in four months' time, and over in the east wing,

it's by no means certain Steve and Natalie's master bedroom

will be ready.

So, this, we're going through now, to the bedrooms?

Yeah, to my future bedroom, I keep calling it.

'In the east wing, restoration work has also fallen behind schedule.'

Still quite a lot to do, I'm thinking, Natalie,

getting slight palpitations, actually!

This is known as the Corridor of Doom,

because it was full of dry rot.

Watch the wire.

'It's dry rot that's delaying work to save the original decor

'in the master bedroom.'

This is the ceiling that's caused you all the grief, isn't it?

Yeah. We're not sure if it's going to stay up.

There's still a long way to go, isn't there, Natalie?

Er... Ah, do you know...

I mean, it looks that way.

It looks that way.

You look around, see the exposed stonework here and there, and everything, but it'll be fine.

It's going to be absolutely fine!

SHE GIGGLES NERVOUSLY

Is that fear? Was that hysteria?!

'Natalie is still coming to terms with the crumbling legacy'

of a building that's seen 250 years of British history.

By the early 1800s, the house Reverend John Simpson built

had entered a new era and was in new hands.

In Stoke Hall's first 50 years of existence,

Britain had changed almost beyond recognition.

People's lives were transformed by the Industrial Revolution.

Richard Arkwright was the man at its epicentre.

The machines he invented made laborious hand-made processes redundant,

and the Arkwright family filthy rich.

In 1816, Richard's grandson, Robert, was living at Stoke Hall.

As a member of British industrial royalty,

Robert Arkwright would have been expected to marry a PROPER lady.

You know, the sort of girl that would sit in the corner

and gently sew a fine seam, or quietly finger her harpsichord.

But Robert followed his heart.

As we found out,

Robert married the very worst sort of 18th-century woman,

worse than a harlot or a prostitute.

Robert married an actress.

Kate has found evidence that Robert Arkwright's marriage

to Frances Crawford Kemble, from a well-known theatrical family,

was a real cloak-and-dagger affair.

It seems the Arkwrights wanted to stop Robert and Frances getting hitched.

This was shocking. Actresses were utterly beyond the pale. They were practically courtesans.

And they would do anything they could to split them up.

Richard, the older brother, the goody-two-shoes,

went storming off as fast as he could to try and separate the pair.

They applied for an emergency licence so that they could

get married quickly, and it was really a big love story.

According to older brother Richard's letters, he was too late to stop the wedding.

What's more, he believed Robert and Frances

had engaged in skulduggery, to marry as quickly as they could.

When he finds out that Robert was married to Miss Kemble

on Thursday last, he is sure that the marriage is illegal,

and he writes, "We inspected the register and found that

"the licence had been granted by an old clergyman of 84,

"whose handwriting was so shaky, it was as if he was very infirm."

So, what Richard is saying here, is that Robert and Frances

have paid off this infirm clergyman for hire.

Kate's travelled to the northeast of England,

where Frances and Robert's wedding took place.

She wants to track down the 200-year-old marriage register

to see if there's any truth in the Arkwright family's conspiracy theory.

Here it is - the terrible marriage, in writing.

Robert, the scion of the industrial family,

and Frances are married, and there's nothing Richard can do.

He's right, it's not the most clear handwriting, it is rather shaky, but it's here in black and white.

Just cos the handwriting's bad doesn't mean he can finish this marriage.

He is going to have to put up with the fact that his brother has married an actress.

No matter what anyone could do,

Stoke Hall had a new lady of the manor.

Back in Derbyshire, Kate discovers

Mrs Arkwright had some very influential friends.

This is Frances' scrapbook, full of her letters, poetry.

Here's a letter from Robert Burns, the poet, to her. My goodness.

And here's a letter, "Affectionately yours, Byron."

Mrs Arkwright is also swapping letters with one of the most powerful men in Britain -

her neighbour at Chatsworth House, the sixth Duke of Devonshire.

I can hardly believe it!

It's flowers collected by the Duke of Devonshire, the greatest aristocrat in the land.

He was her neighbour, but he was inestimably rich, so famous,

and what does he do but pick flowers, press them,

put his seal on them, and send them off to her.

But Frances Arkwright's scrapbook is the key to Stoke Hall's most amazing connection of all.

What we have here is Princess Victoria,

the future Queen Victoria, visiting Chatsworth.

Victoria was 13, it was 1832,

it was her first great tour of Britain with her mother,

and she heads to Chatsworth, in the Midlands, on the way to Wales.

We've discovered Frances Arkwright was one of a very select group

of the Duke's friends who hosted the young Victoria,

in October, 1832.

I invited Steve and Natalie,

the Arkwrights' successors at Stoke Hall, to come to Chatsworth

and find out what happened when Frances met Victoria.

So, I thought I'd bring you here to the theatre at Chatsworth House,

because this house has a connection to yours, to Stoke Hall.

'Our researchers uncovered a nugget of evidence,

'written nearly 170 years ago, by the sixth Duke of Devonshire himself.'

I'm going to show you something, I'm a bit over-excited.

The archivist here at Chatsworth House

has very, very kindly let us borrow, briefly,

the genuine pages out of the sixth duke's diary

-for the time when Princess Victoria was here visiting.

-Oh, right.

"Morpeth sat by the princess at dinner.

"She was very merry.

"At night, Mrs Arkwright..." there we are, "..sang to them."

-Ah!

-That's very interesting.

The duke's diary reveals the 13-year-old Victoria sang too.

Mrs Arkwright sang her a compliment to the princess "very successfully".

"The princess sang... the princess sang her little song."

That's it. That's it, she...

-She sang her little song back to Mrs Arkwright.

-Very good.

It is interesting to find out

the history of the house and the people behind it.

This person, not upper-class in the slightest,

living in Stoke Hall.

We're not upper class, last time I looked we weren't.

Arkwright, they made their money with their mills and everything else,

and we've built a business up.

There are quite a lot of similarities between those two,

and probably ourselves.

150 years after the Arkwrights were at Stoke Hall,

self-made millionaire Steve Drury is putting his own stamp

on his 23-acre estate.

-So this is the back of the house.

-Yes.

Why is it that whenever there's building work going on,

that glove is always there?

-That glove follows me around.

-I wonder if it's a corn circle thing.

-SHE LAUGHS

-Exactly.

-Do you inherit a title with this house?

-No.

-Is there a title that comes with it?

-No.

Because you are sort of the lord of the manor

of Stoke Hall in a way, aren't you?

Um... No, not really.

That said, I've cut my cricket wicket, have you seen?

So you will have villagers playing on your land?

There's the inaugural match being set up

-for bank holiday Sunday in August.

-Hurrah!

Hunting, shooting fishing?

I go shooting, not so much hunting, and I'm just starting to go fishing.

Are you? Brilliant. You've got a river near here, haven't you?

Yes, just there.

SHE LAUGHS

Oh! I promise you, I honestly did not...

I knew there was a river in the vicinity,

I didn't know it was at the bottom of the hill.

-Can you fish in that?

-Yes.

-What's in there?

-Trout and grayling.

You've got it all.

Stoke Hall's days as a grand country mansion

with a staff of housekeepers and servants are long gone.

Remarkably, there is someone who remembers the house

in the Upstairs Downstairs age.

It's 73 years ago.

I was 18 years old.

I'm just looking at them windows at the top.

One of them I slept in, I think.

Kit Sollitt, now in her 90s,

worked in the house before the Second World War

as a French polisher.

She finds her old room in what was the servants' quarters.

The fire's still there. Fireplace.

And the memories come flooding back.

The creepy butler.

He used to call up every night,

he'd knock and walk straight in with his bucket.

Very familiar with his hands.

Very. You got to watch him like a hawk.

In fact, I finished up putting me,

me big armchair at the door before I got to in bed.

In Kit's time, Stoke Hall's owners were the Viner family.

Super-rich cutlery manufacturers.

There was sunken baths, all in mother of pearl.

All the walls mirror,

it was something I'd never seen before.

Come to think of it, I don't think I've seen the same since.

Now, I gather a family has come to live in it once again.

It is looking good, what they have done.

But they've hard work and a lot of money to get it to the state it was in.

One year into the restoration,

Natalie has overcome her resistance

to having staff at Stoke Hall, and taken on a housekeeper.

I didn't want people to think, "La-dee-da, got a housekeeper."

Because I'm not like that.

I didn't realise how much pressure I was putting on myself

by not having someone to help me.

Oh gosh, he does everything.

He does all the cleaning and if you think how big this house is,

just keeping on top of it, just the windows alone, you know?

But Stoke Hall's restoration continues to throw up nasty surprises.

It turns out the east wing with its original ceiling

in the master bedroom was at risk of falling down altogether.

We didn't realise at the time,

but there was supposed to be tie bars underneath the floor

and above us holding this house together.

The bolts had been cut off outside so they were literally doing nothing.

So this part of the house was moving.

To save the east wing,

they've had to reinstate the structural metal tie bars

and tackle a series of other unexpected problems.

I don't think we realised how much rot

and everything else there was in the house.

That's put us back.

Um, probably a bit optimistic.

But we've saved the ceiling, which is beautiful.

Full marks to Steve and Natalie for managing to rescue

one of Stoke Hall's most precious original features,

but it will be a while before they can enjoy the views

from their master bedroom.

If there was one thing we probably underestimated a little bit,

was the amount of time and effort and research

and thought that goes into a room

that you just don't have to do on a normal house.

If you paint it a colour, you don't like the colour,

you get another tin and paint it a different colour.

It's not like that on a house like this.

It's the same tricky restoration story

with the two main Georgian rooms on the ground floor.

Steve and Natalie's grand dining room with all Reverend Simpson's

intricate 18th-century decor,

is proving an even bigger challenge than they thought.

Countless coats of paint applied over two-and-a-half centuries

need to be very delicately removed.

It's just been painted in loads and loads of layers of paint.

It's like a lot of the finer detail

is now really being filled with paint.

What we're trying to do is trying to strip it,

to get back to the fine detail again.

The cornice above one of the doors is encased with a chemical stripper

to see if it stands up to having 250 years of paint

removed in one go.

If things go wrong, there'll be more painstaking restoration to do.

It should come off with the paper and strip all the paint off.

We shall have a look.

We've got to be very careful.

That's right down to the original plaster.

And this piece here, it's not damaged anything,

so I'm not as nervous now.

It's going to be a huge job to reveal

all the decorative detail in this extraordinary room.

But the designs uncovered so far

show evidence of beautiful 18th-century craftsmanship.

I think it was fantastic, the designer that designed it all.

When you look the detail in the mouldings,

it's not only the designing it's the chap that's originally

carved for the mouldings and everything that's...

It's... It's superb.

The restoration might be taking longer than expected,

but Steve and Natalie's other big project

has delivered bang on schedule.

His hair's all puffed up. Don't! He likes it puffed up.

This is our newborn. Stanley.

Just to make it a little bit more interesting, restoring a house,

working full-time, having a hectic life with the kids,

and we have an additional baby to look after

just to fill those hours between ten and six which aren't filled at the moment.

They had hoped to get most of the restoration work done by Christmas 2010...

..but it's clear things are going to stretch into another year.

I feel slightly that I could have done more

and done it quicker and been a bit more organised.

But maybe I'm just harsh on myself.

I think we've done quite well in a year,

but you don't see that when you're in the middle of it.

It's been a tough old restoration journey.

-How's that?

-That's good.

But at least Steve and Natalie

are closer to the end than the beginning.

Three months later, I'm going to pay my final visit to Stoke Hall

to see what they've managed to achieve.

But first, Kate and Kieran

are bringing Steve and Natalie up to date

with all they've discovered about their building's past.

They went to the Babworth Church which is so beautiful.

They've dug deep into two-and-a-half-centuries of Stoke Hall's history.

I wonder how the Reverend would have dealt with a conservation officer.

Steve and Natalie are impressed.

Everywhere you've been,

it's quite surreal that there's things relating to the house.

And how important the house actually is.

And what you're doing is adding another layer

to that incredible 250 years of history.

When Steve and Natalie took on Stoke Hall

they didn't just get a fantastic house,

they also got a nasty case of dry rot,

Georgian plasterwork hanging off the walls,

and wrangling with the planners

that would try the patience of a UN peacekeeper.

It's a year and a half later, let's find out

whether the place is fit for lord and lady of the manor.

Remember how the inside looked before the restoration began?

Have Steve and Natalie succeeded in turning

their crumbling Georgian mansion into a 21st-century family home?

'I'm going to start my tour in what was their old kitchen.'

With its 1980s fittings and pine ceiling.

-Do you want to have a look?

-May I?

-You may.

Yay! This is fantastic!

A whole series of other family rooms have been transformed.

And Steve and Natalie have put their own stamp on all of them.

Oh, this is looking great.

It's so light. It's lovely.

Natalie, it's very feminine here.

-Have you enjoyed using the floral prints?

-Yes.

I fell in love with the wallpaper, actually,

and did everything from there.

But it's Reverend Simpson's original Georgian rooms

on the south side of the house

that had given them the biggest restoration headache.

After months of work, the Reverend's intricate decor

in their grand dining room has been saved,

but there's more to do before the room is ready to use.

Reverend Simpson, he's costing you a fortune, isn't he?

Because it's all his stuff that needs to be renovated, isn't it?

Perhaps it is expensive, but that's where the value of the house is.

Because we understand a lot of the history now,

I think doing it right is what matters.

We're not quite ready to fully decide what colours...

-Before we commit to colours we need to research it a little bit more.

-We do.

They think they'll need another nine months

to do justice to this amazing room.

And they want more time to get the decor right

in their master bedroom where they had saved the original ceiling.

But Steve and Natalie's biggest challenge from the start

has been Reverend Simpson's morning Room.

A complete wreck 18 months ago,

it was meant to be Steve's 21st-century study by now.

So, have they pulled it off?

This is completely different!

This had mud on the floor...

There was nothing on the walls, the walls were just bare stone.

Go and sit in the chair, come on.

Ready to take banker managers.

This is a huge desk.

This is like a ship's desk.

Steve's desk is custom-made with a carved pattern

that echoes the 18th-century design

on the study's restored dado rails.

And this is the Reverend Simpson's design, is it?

I believe so.

If you go to Chatsworth, the pattern is the same as you get in Chatsworth.

I reckon this desk would have gone down a storm in the 18th century.

If only they'd had the technology back then.

-This is a drawer?

-It's a drawer.

-My secret button there.

-Am I about to explode, Mr Bond?

SHE LAUGHS

And, um...

I have a ...

I have to say, I didn't expect that to happen.

Steve has also given a high-tech 21st century spin

to other parts of the Reverend Simpson's house.

Like Stoke Hall's first owner,

the present one likes to live in some style.

The state-of-the-art desk didn't come cheap.

It's quite a complicated bit of kit. What did it cost?

Um, it cost...

It cost over £10,000.

It's definitely not been your average restoration.

But they're on course with their 1.5 million budget

to save the building and make it their home.

And one former lady of Stoke Hall

has had an influence on Steve and Natalie's choice of decor.

The ornate mirror in Steve's study may once have belonged

to Frances Arkwright's close friend down the road,

the sixth Duke of Devonshire.

-You bought this, it wasn't here.

-I bought it, yes.

-It's lovely.

-It's beautiful.

-Where did you get that?

-I went to Chatsworth sale.

-Did you?

-Yes.

-It is 200 years old.

-It's lovely.

-Beautiful.

Steve and Natalie have saved the fragile,

crumbling interior of Stoke Hall.

They really are restoration heroes.

Just like the original owners, they have fallen under its spell.

The social-climbing Reverend Simpson,

and the industrious Arkwrights

have something in common with Steve and Natalie.

They too were creators of their own wealth.

The creators of their own destiny.

And that is why Steve and Natalie

really are the rightful heirs to Stoke Hall.

Next time on Restoration Home...

a perfectly beautiful Georgian building...

It was love at first sight.

..that's hiding some dark secrets.

It's scary.

In a house on the verge of collapse,

we investigate a tale that changed the landscape of Britain for ever.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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