’The Global Plutocracy and the Future of the U.K. Country House’

U.K. country houses as historical spaces embody many things, but always financial value. They represent wealth out of reach for most of us and therefore have the capacity to entrance. The country homes of twenty-first century financial élites, however, embody a further fascination and specific intellectual significance because the pathways enabling such architectural expressions of wealth are historically distinct. Today’s country house owners are increasingly part of a global plutocracy wealthy in ways qualitatively different from their predecessors. Country houses of the past were ‘power houses’, to use Mark Giroud’s phrase, and their owners rich, in the main, because they possessed land or inherited wealth. In contrast, twenty-first century seriously rich people are frequently so because of a new hybrid worker-capitalist model within which a series of economic effects work to their extreme advantage. This makes the twenty-first century country house far from a simple extension of the past. It encapsulates important shifts in human relationships that prompt fresh understandings of how architecture and landscape interact with expressions of identity and senses of ‘home’, however defined. Cognisance of these shifts expands contextualisation of the country house across disciplines, and brings hitherto discrete debates within economics, material and diplomatic history and identity analysis into dialogue. We may think about historic or country houses primarily in terms of the past, but they remain powerful harbingers of the future.