Backlash over ‘Rave King's' plan to save fire-ravaged stately home

Times

5 days ago

When it came to restoring Parnham House, the music entrepreneur James Perkins once declared he 'never bothered about budgets'.
The 16th-century stately home, which the promoter describes as the 'Buckingham Palace of Dorset', is being brought back to life after a fire largely destroyed it eight years ago.
But with scaffolding bills of £1.7 million, the snooker room roof falling in and the walls close to crumbling away, the occasional wedding in the manor's restored suites is not paying the builder's fees.
Instead, Perkins intends to fund the renovations with the construction of 85 homes on 25 acres of the estate's fields, if Dorset council approves his planning application.
If he is successful, Grade 1-listed Parnham House — which Perkins bought for £2.5 million in 2020 — could host weddings, parties and overnight guests in sixty bedrooms.
The likes of Noel Gallagher, Kate Moss, Madonna and Bono have attended lavish gatherings at Perkins's former property, Aynhoe Park, a Jacobean stately home on the Northamptonshire-Oxfordshire border. The parties at Aynhoe helped cement his nickname of 'rave king'.
But residents of nearby Beaminster, who were already up in arms when the council granted the venue a 24-hour alcohol licence, have formed a group to frustrate the application. One said the houses would drive 'coach and horses' through local wildlife, 'destroy the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty' and remove centuries-old footpaths.
The successful alcohol application faced so many objections that the council meeting ran for two days. The local Conservative MP said it was not appropriate for the estate.
Residents say a site plan drawn up four years ago outlining twenty houses has ballooned into proposals for dozens of dwellings across the green space. At risk is a meadow area where kingfishers dart and otters roam.
One resident said that were the application granted, Perkins stood to benefit from a large capital increase on his private property while the council and villagers lost out.
Perkins, 56, hopes that the council will grant him permission to build under 'enabled development' laws, where permission is granted if the project generates funds that outweigh the harm caused by the development.
He is confident that he has won over Historic England, which initially stated it could not support the application but is now due to advise the council committee. The application alone has cost about £1.5 million to submit.
The development could mean a new chapter for a house. In 2017, two months after the fire, its owner Michael Treichl, an Austrian hedge fund tycoon, took his own life 'having suffered severe depression'.
Treichl's wife said he had admitted starting the fire, but he publicly denied the allegation and insisted that he was at Claridges in London when the blaze broke out.
Perkins was 15 when he began staging parties in his home town of Cheltenham and went on to establish the rave music promoter Fantazia. In 1992, aged 22, he attracted 28,000 people to a rave in Castle Donington.
Parnham House has been a private home, nursing home, country club and woodwork school. Parts of it date back to the mid-1500s, when it was owned by the Strode family, who lived in the property for more than 200 years.
During the Second World War, it was requisitioned by the US Army to be the headquarters for General Patton before the D-Day landings.
A spokesman for Parnham House said: 'Through intensive planning and design work involving many consultants, including extensive talks with Dorset council, Historic England, and their subsidiaries, it was acknowledged that Enabling Development is the only solution to save this nationally important Grade 1-listed treasure.
'The enabling development application will raise the equity needed to save and restore the building to the minimum required factor and once again make Parnham something our neighbours and Dorset can be proud of.'
The spokesman said that this would 'increase the biodiversity of the estate, restore forgotten nature highways along the River Brit, and reopen the original drive and entrance'.
'The development will provide much needed housing, employment, tourism and huge economic benefit to our immediate area and Dorset as a whole.'
Perkins was approached for comment.