Preston Manor, on the outskirts of Brighton and Hove, has recently re-opened to the public after a five-year closure.
Was it worth the wait?
Well, yes, we think so.
The house is the same, but the new visitor experience opens up the Edwardian world of Ellen and Charles Thomas-Stanford; their values, their snobbery and their family disagreements, as well as shining a light on the far busier and much more exhausting life below stairs.
Perfect for people like us who enjoy poking our noses into long-dead people’s business. Isn’t that what history is really all about?
Plus, the room with Ellen Stanford’s collection of Chinese porcelain Kylin dogs is now home to a tearoom, so it ticks all our boxes!
We stepped into Edwardian Life and explored the revamped Preston Manor.
What is Preston Manor?
An elegant historic house on the outskirts of Brighton in Sussex.
There’s been a house on the site for centuries. The current building dates back to the 1700s, when it was a manor house set amongst the fields of the village of Preston.
By the time the Thomas-Stanford family lived there in the early 1900s, Preston was no longer a quiet village, but part of the ever-growing metropolis of Brighton.
Ellen and Charles decided when they died, their house and all its furniture and furnishings, should be left to the Brighton Corporation, to be used for the benefit of local people.
That must have been a bit of a slap in the face for Ellen’s son John (known as Mad Jack) who presumably expected to inherit it all.
But, as the new exhibition makes clear, the Thomas-Stanford family were often at loggerheads, and the family feud means the house has been preserved, almost intact, as the perfect example of upper class life in Edwardian times.
Today, the tour guides you through a single day in the same week in 1912 that the Titanic sank, as the mistress plans a convivial evening party.
Eating Edwardian style
The appetites of members of the Edwardian upper class were, by all accounts, enormous. While servants scurried about preparing rooms, cooking and cleaning, the family sat down to three good meals a day, plus snacks!
Preston Manor brings that vividly to life, with a spectacular table set for breakfast, in front of the large ornate fireplace, featuring eggs, bacon, sausages, kedgeree and kippers. So lifelike, we felt we could pull up a chair and tuck in, although we doubt we’d have been posh enough for an invitation to such a lavish Edwardian breakfast!
As soon as breakfast was cleared away the table would immediately be re-set for lunch, and later Lady Thomas-Stanford would regale her visitors with afternoon tea before putting on a sumptuous evening meal.
As the day ended, and the guests departed, the couple would sit in the luxurious drawing room, sipping spirits and snacking on dainty morsels of fruit, dessert and even a cold chicken leg or two!
And with nothing more than a bit of hunting, fishing and a stately game of croquet in the way of exercise, they can’t have been exactly healthy.
Life below stairs at Preston Manor
It was a different story for the servants. Their food would have been adequate, but racing up and down stairs, beating, sweeping and cleaning left the staff lean, lithe and permanently exhausted!
This is the part of any historic house that really grabs our interest, and the updated displays at Preston Manor have much more to say about the people who kept the whole house going than previously.
Using old documents, the exhibition brings to life the stories of the butler, the maids, the cook and the groundsmen who served the family throughout the early 20th century.
Some, like lady’s maid Beatrice, were happy with their lot. Others spoke matter-of-factly about the hard work, cold rooms, frequent illnesses and deprivation. One left service after a very short time, with thoughts of independence that were quite revolutionary!
It’s a shame the room with the old cooking range with its admonishment to ‘Waste Not Want Not’ is now reserved only for educational visits, but there’s still plenty to see in the kitchen, butler’s pantry and scullery.
The old mangles, washing tubs, heavy irons and huge pots and pans demonstrate perfectly how hard the below-stairs staff worked. Plus, those bells just kept on ringing – recreated now for visitors in the service corridor.
Life upstairs at Preston Manor
Bedrooms say a lot about a person, and the rooms of Ellen and Charles are revealing.
Both well-travelled, Charles was a dedicated fisherman who kept careful notes of his catches while studying their habitats in his well-stocked library.
Ellen was a socialite, a bit of a snob to be honest, with an outfit and hairstyle for every occasion.
A copy of the Kama Sutra lying on her bed hints at an intimate relationship between the two, although popular opinion was that Ellen cared more for her dogs than people!
Preston Manor is perfect for history lovers, especially if you’ve ever wondered what it was really like to live upstairs or downstairs in Edwardian times.
Ghost Stories and Supernatural Lore
Preston Manor’s reputation for ghostly apparitions is almost as old as the house itself, and it’s known as one of the most haunted homes in Sussex, something that Ellen Thomas-Stanford revelled in.
She would often invite guests to join her for a séance in the darkly mysterious Cleves Room, panelled in antique leather. Usually the place for card games, on these evenings it would be dimly lit and full of strange and arcane furnishings.
The lady of the house thoroughly enjoyed hosting these occasions, and even used them to play tricks on her guests.
But she didn’t have to invent much to foster a spooky atmosphere, the house itself has long been steeped in ghostly lore.
A grey-clad woman has been spotted several times by residents and visitors, sometimes in the boiler room downstairs, more often on the main staircase.
A blonde woman told one of the séance sessions that she was a nun, buried outside the house in unhallowed ground, for reasons that remain a mystery. Strangely, a short time afterwards, two workmen clearing drains under the south terrace discovered the twisted skeleton of a woman. The remains were apparently reburied at the edge of the neighbouring churchyard, and her ghost has not been seen since.
Some say they have seen a small child riding a toy tractor on the croquet lawn behind the house, and one visitor during the Thomas-Stanford’s time claimed to see a disembodied hand climbing up the four-poster bed in the southwestern bedroom.
On our visit, in bright spring sunshine, there was no suggestion of spookiness and even Ellen’s beloved dogs in the pet cemetery in the walled garden lay quiet.
Gardens, Tearooms and Visiting Info
One of the benefits of the house being gifted to the city is that you don’t have to pay to stroll around the walled garden and look at the outside of the manor from the croquet lawn. You can access these sections, and the café when the house is open, directly from neighbouring Preston Park.
The garden is small and informal, with a mass of seasonal plants including a beautiful laburnum arch which blooms throughout May and June.
The house is open Friday to Sunday from 10am to 4pm, with the last entry at 3.15pm. Tickets last a year and admission is £12.50 adults, £7.50 children and under 5s are free.
Residents in BN1, BN2, BN3 and BN41 postcodes pay £9.50. More details can be found on the Brighton & Hove Museums website
Snack Attack
Café Rust runs the tearoom at Preston Manor, open Friday to Sunday from 10 til 4. It serves good coffee, nice pastries and a selection of light bites, but we are not fans of seeing food displayed uncovered on an open counter at waist height, so we settled for coffee and a croissant.
The café is accessible from Preston Park if you’re not touring the house itself.
Getting to Preston Manor
If you can bear the potholed and traffic-filled roads of Brighton, there is free parking for up to four hours on Preston Drove, but it gets busy at weekends.
Much easier to take a train (it’s only 50 minutes from London!) that stops at Preston Park, which is a ten-minute walk away, or the bus 5 or 5A from the centre of Brighton, which stops a five-minute walk away.
With 20 rooms spread over four floors, accessibility is an issue as the staircases are old and in some cases narrow and steep and the garden has uneven paths and steps.
We’ve been visiting Preston Manor on and off for years and with this new look, and our annual residents pass, we’ll be back again soon.
All photographs copyright © John Heinrich
Where to next?
• A Riot of Colour at Royal Pavilion, Brighton
• Famous Haunted Hotels in Sussex
• Little Woodham, living history in action