Omega
Post by beth on Sept 25, 2016 16:00:08 GMT -5
This is about another very old, very impressive English manor. I read this last month in my subscription copy of Vanity Fair, and have been trying to think of the best way to present it here for your reading enjoyment. I finally found it online, so'll I'll start it here and link to it as it's long but interesting .. almost to the point of being fascinating. I suppose it['s more about the family than the home but all comes into play.
In 1985, when he was six years old, the Honorable Nicholas Ashley-Cooper set off with his parents from Wimborne St. Giles, their quiet village in the Dorset countryside, for London, for a service in Westminster Abbey. Presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury, it commemorated the centenary of the death of Nicholas’s great-great-great-grandfather, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who was one of the most important social reformers during the Industrial Revolution.
The event was Nicholas’s first inkling that his family wasn’t ordinary. That suspicion deepened when he saw that one of London’s main avenues bore his family’s title, and that the iconic statue in the center of Piccadilly Circus was a memorial to his ancestor, too. The winged figure there of Anteros holds a bow, which, according to urban legend, is aimed directly at the Shaftesbury family seat, in Dorset.
St. Giles House, a gargantuan and grandiose Grade 1-listed brick pile, has been Nicholas’s family’s home since 1650. By the time he was born, however, it was like a haunted mansion. Uninhabited since the early 60s—when the Ashley-Coopers decamped to Mainsail Haul, the eight-bedroom dower house on the 5,700-acre estate—St. Giles House had fallen into a parlous state of decay, with rain and snow seeping in when the huge metal sheets that sealed it flapped in the wind.
As he grew up, Nicholas comprehended with some relief that, since he was the second son, the decaying manor wasn’t his problem. His brother Anthony, two years older, would inherit the dilapidated estate along with the family titles on the death of their father, Anthony, the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury.
Nick, as he is generally known, decided he needed to get away if he was going to make anything of his life. In the spring of 2002 he moved to New York’s East Village, where he began to thrive as a techno disc jockey going by the handle Nick AC.
Then, in November 2004, a series of tragic, hard-to-believe events changed everything.
all the rest of this fascinating story is here
www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/07/the-east-village-dj-who-became-the-savior-of-a-decaying-british-estate
In 1985, when he was six years old, the Honorable Nicholas Ashley-Cooper set off with his parents from Wimborne St. Giles, their quiet village in the Dorset countryside, for London, for a service in Westminster Abbey. Presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury, it commemorated the centenary of the death of Nicholas’s great-great-great-grandfather, the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, who was one of the most important social reformers during the Industrial Revolution.
The event was Nicholas’s first inkling that his family wasn’t ordinary. That suspicion deepened when he saw that one of London’s main avenues bore his family’s title, and that the iconic statue in the center of Piccadilly Circus was a memorial to his ancestor, too. The winged figure there of Anteros holds a bow, which, according to urban legend, is aimed directly at the Shaftesbury family seat, in Dorset.
St. Giles House, a gargantuan and grandiose Grade 1-listed brick pile, has been Nicholas’s family’s home since 1650. By the time he was born, however, it was like a haunted mansion. Uninhabited since the early 60s—when the Ashley-Coopers decamped to Mainsail Haul, the eight-bedroom dower house on the 5,700-acre estate—St. Giles House had fallen into a parlous state of decay, with rain and snow seeping in when the huge metal sheets that sealed it flapped in the wind.
As he grew up, Nicholas comprehended with some relief that, since he was the second son, the decaying manor wasn’t his problem. His brother Anthony, two years older, would inherit the dilapidated estate along with the family titles on the death of their father, Anthony, the 10th Earl of Shaftesbury.
Nick, as he is generally known, decided he needed to get away if he was going to make anything of his life. In the spring of 2002 he moved to New York’s East Village, where he began to thrive as a techno disc jockey going by the handle Nick AC.
Then, in November 2004, a series of tragic, hard-to-believe events changed everything.
all the rest of this fascinating story is here
www.vanityfair.com/style/2016/07/the-east-village-dj-who-became-the-savior-of-a-decaying-british-estate
