25-04-2025
Brideshead revisited: first pictures inside new-look Castle Howard
There is nowhere on Earth like Castle Howard. There's the dome and the fountain, and the anticipation of that great long driveway. 'It's a world within itself,' says its custodian, Nick Howard.
This great North Yorkshire Whig palace, built for the earls of Carlisle by Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, is still best known as Brideshead, the stately home at the centre of Granada's 1981 adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited.
Its starring role paid for work to be done in the Garden Hall, but the restoration of Castle Howard has been a story 85 years in the making. In 1940, a fire ripped through the house, leaving a third of the building roofless. The heat caused its famous dome to collapse
