In 1940, John Piper had become an Official War Artist for the Ministry of Information and for the Ministry of War. He painted bomb damage in Coventry and London and his subsequent paintings of the ruined buildings of England became a metaphor for the horrendous destruction he was witnessing in the cities. In 1941, whilst staying as a guest of Viscount Ridley in at Blagdon in Northumberland, Lord Ridley took him to the coast to look at the ruins of Vanbrugh’s great house Seaton Delaval. The subsequent dramatic interpretation echoes the very horror of the burning and shattered metropolises:

The centre block… ochre and flame-licked red, pock-marked and stained in purolish umber and black, the colour is extremely up to date: very much of-our-times...(1)

Seaton Delaval By John Piper, pages 43-47, Orion, A Miscellany:

Past the pubs and the non-conformity and the mechanics-institute urbanness of Seaton, the grass and dark hedges springing from the blackened land between, past the blocks of miners’ dwellings like a queer game of dominoes some weird masters are playing on the surprised earth, as D. H. Lawrence said – this is the approach from the Newcastle side. Until 1940 a turn in the road gave onto Vanbrugh’s gate-piers, but these have been cleared for an air-raid shelter: symbolic of the loppings and destructions the house has suffered ever since its heyday. The avenue is still there, wind-blown, derelict, and bordering a bus route, and miners with lamps on their hats go home down it to Seaton Sluice on the low cliffs half a mile away by the North Sea. The landscape is nowhere more than a hundred feet above sea level but it seems high and plateau-like as in so much of Northumberland, the Northumberland of gradual slopes and wide sweeps of sky. Dark pyramids of colliery tips dot the landscapes, overground and overhead railways criss-cross it. There is yet room for vistas, and for more than mere suggestion of a vast planned effect.

Towards the Sluice the avenue ceases suddenly, and there on the right is the great forecourt that now grows grass for hay. The central block faces down the slight slope of the court, the colonnaded wings embrace it on two other sides. Ochre and flame-licked red, pock-marked and stained in purplish umber and black, the colour is extremely up-to-date: very much of our times. And not the colour only. House and landscape are seared by the east wind that blows from Germany, and riven with fretting industrialism, but they still withstand the noise and neglect, the fires and hauntings of twentieth-century life. Its main block an untenanted stone shell, the Hall is somehow alive, unlike many statley homes. This palace, this drop-scene for melodrama in four dimensions, this vast old war-horse of a house was built with a splendid sense of drama, and acts up. Fires it has turned to its own account; it encouraged grand-scale practical jokes in the eighteenth century, adapted itself to the specialised romance if the nineteenth, and knows how to toe the line in our own arid, military time by behaving as barrack and store, by keeping furniture dry under dust sheets and by providing ablution-space for troops in gorgeous stables. Vanbrugh the man of the theatre was at least as operative here as Vanbrugh the architect. In this last work he created a rich stage which, when the footlights were turned down and the smart audiences gone, would adapt itself to anytime of ham acting and if necessary would carry on with the play itself.

Admiral George Delaval set about building the house by degrees and for the entertainment of his old age in 1718. Vanbrugh approved of his patron. "The Admiral" he said, "is very gallant in his operations, not being disposed to starve the design at all." Both of them had some entertainment from it, but neither lived to see the house completed. The admiral’s nephews peopled it with large families, and with them the fun really began. There were pantomimes, dancing bears, bull baitings, gamblings, tilts and tournaments. Four thousand people would assemble to witness rope dancing; there was a constant stream of guests, constant shouting and bellowing laughter. At night beds were lowered into tanks of cold water, or partition walls of rooms drawn up to disclose the intimates in giggling deshabille. Fragmentary facts and legends, growing by what they fed on, about members of the family are always in character. A Delaval dressed as a conjurer does a lady with a £900,000 fortune into marrying him, persuading her that it is her fate; another is killed by an urn precipitating itself from its pedestal in the avenue; among an array of daughters celebrated for their beauty is one whose hair floats upon her saddle as she rides; the whole family acts at Dury Lane by permission of Garrick; Foote the actor is a close friend. Others are studious, and travel, but all propagate the legend of romantic Delaval behaviour. Edward Hussey author of The Cause of Changes in Opaque and Coloured Bodies, 1777, is also in Gray’s letters, playing like an angel on the musical glasses and “talking as loud as ever.” Another won a seat in Parliament by firing five hundred golden guineas from a cannon into a crowd of voters. And the last there died, with rough propriety, from a kick given him by an unwilling laundry maid.

The first fire, in 1752, damaged only the west wing, which was rebuilt to the original design: but this was only a warning. In 1822 a major fire made of the house a grandiloquent modern ruin. Delaval extravagance and magnificence leapt in tongues of flame affectionately round Vanbrugh’s mouldings, staining the stone permanently red and purple, and converting the monster into something that better fitted in with Victorian ideals of romance. So it remained until the sixties, and so it largely remains to-day, patched and empty, with rakish, rusted staircases hanging above boarded-up, floorless saloons.

Vanbrugh’s architecture has suffered badly during the war. The centre of Castle Howard has been gutted by accidental fire, and it has lost its dome; King’s Weston is severely battered; Eastbury’s gate piers have been attacked by tanks; Blenheim rears its walls, themselves unscathed, out of a sea of huts into which rivers of war-workers pour daily. Seaton Delaval has suffered so much – in the past that it can put up with most things now, though it is hard to see how, if such a fate should meet it, it would deal with consignment to the National Trust. The sight of the British public trusting with a piece of sugar on its nose for the right to enter and view on condition that all litter be put in the litter-basket might cause the veteran to split his sided with disastrous laughter. May its surrounding grass never be mowed by the smooth Atco. As to suitable contemporary treatment, the poor best that could be provided after the war would perhaps be permanent bank-holiday crowds, with much shouting, steam organs, and plenty of fireworks at night.

1 John Piper, Seaton Delaval, Orion, A Miscellany, No 1 1945 pages 43- 47