Book review: Woodchester Mansion, Artistry’s haunting curse – the incomplete, by Margaret Lister and John Fullard

Don’t be put off if you don’t know the quotation: this is a beautiful book to look at and to read. Margaret Lister’s photographs are an exceptional record of a haunting building. Woodchester Mansion is a place of mystery: is it really a house if it has never really housed anybody in its main rooms, an unfinished hymn to the High Gothic? Is it a ruin when it is being faithfully and gently conserved by the Woodchester Mansion Trust? Is it architecture in the service of faith, or just ambition cut down by a lack of funds? John Fullard writes in unfussy, very readable prose, telling the story of the estate, the family who built the Mansion, the project itself and its failure, as well as its links to the Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Annunciation and the Convent of Poor Clares at Woodchester. Margaret Lister, herself one of the founder members of the Trust, shows the Mansion from the moment when it was ‘rediscovered’ in 1987 to the present day, and in all its moods, from the park gates, shrouded in mist, to the sun-filled Hall with its enormous windows and gaping fireplaces, and its gargoyles reminiscent of a French cathedral. The mansion is a place to visit and experience, and this book will make the visit perhaps less of an enigma, and more memorable. It is on sale at the mansion and at the Yellow Lighted Bookshop, Nailsworth.

Jacqueline Sarsby