Tuesday 5th August 2025

I snagged my cardy on the Tudor House – when was that? Fifteen years ago at least. Then the Tudor House was new. Newly re-Tudorised by Angus Willis’s genius at the cost of the mental wards of Hastings being piled to the rafters with all Hastings’ builders. Out with the Aga, all mod cons in fact, out with Smallbone of Devizes. In were huge open fireplaces, stone floors, bakelite sockets and switches, furniture chewed by the rats and pecked by the hens of Eastern Europe, the ‘London’ gas cooker – the full Tudor effect. When the public were admitted at Christmas for the Christmas Tudor Show, some of them trembled and cowered on arrival. They really thought they’d been tardis-ed.

Estate agents once were asked to value the house on TV. One of them said it was uninhabitable. There was a staircase, of a kind, but you still had to self-haul on a rope. Getting down was worse.

It was eerie. The wholeness of the decor, utterly complete.

This was the greatest new interior in this country since the War. Why was it not preserved for the Nation?

On Monday I went down to Battle to collect my Tudor House remnant. There’d been an auction. I was online. I had to have a Tudor relic. I’d have liked the Tudor Georgian wing arm chair – but where to put it? In the event I clutched at the 18th century Tudor Hungarian peg table.

At this table, in the Tudor House, I had once had an exhibition lunch with Genevieve Suzy, head of Dainty Lady TV, lunching before the public who came in on a paying-basis for the Christmas Tudor opening rather as Raine Spencer would elaborately take tea at Althorp with Johnie in full public view to complete for them the ‘stately home experience’. And before that, there was the chimpanzees’ tea party of course.

The Battle auction house is a former cinema. Glorious artefacts from the Tudor House were piled up at the back, awaiting collection by their new owners.

Tudor now entirely over.

The pieces strewn far and wide, perhaps to become Tudor again. Who knows?

After collection, I went round to the humble cott in a wood where Angus Willis actually lives. He never lived in Tudor and Fergus Strachan wouldn’t go there because no TV allowed. Angus has a diet where he doesn’t eat anything except in the evening. So no lunch. He was on a 30s settee. The drawing room does need re-doing. On the settee, he totted up his recent Clarice Cliff purchases. I did think £12,000 might have been spent on having a toilet seat that doesn’t fall down during use – and perhaps a new drawing room carpet. The dining room has been re-done. A brick floor was exposed with ravines and crevices. You’d never get a trolley over it. There’s an enormous model yacht parked on one side.

Angus has got a Regency House now, as well as a shop. So decor will go on. There will be more decor. The simple cott, though. I don’t think it will ever be done. Each evening, it seems, it’s necessary retreat to somewhere that isn’t done.