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22 July 2004 Elaine Brunner Last week I had the honour of speaking at an exhibition celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of a very beautiful house in Buckinghamshire, called Wotton. This fine building would have been destroyed in the 1950s but for the determination of a woman called Elaine Brunner who discovered Wotton when the demolition teams were about to move in. She devoted first her life savings and then her life to rescuing the building from decay. I came across that story by chance. I visited the house as a tourist in the 1980s. It was not often open, probably because, as I soon discovered, Mrs Brunner gave the tours herself. She was a forceful figure. It was her habit to order her tourist groups about and to ask her visitors questions. When I got an answer wrong she called me a stupid boy. I was the Minister of Transport at the time and people did not often speak to me like that. I am sure that being brought down to earth by Mrs Brunner did me good! Elaine was a great admirer of the architect Sir John Soane who was called in by Wotton's owners, the Buckinghams, when fire destroyed the house in 1820. Soane made huge changes to the original design, especially by replacing the top storey, which had had high windows, with a much shorter attic storey. It made the house broader and better proportioned, and more homely too. Some years after my first visit, just after I lost my parliamentary seat in the 1997 election, the BBC asked me to make a short film about a building that I loved for the One Foot in the Past series. With a television crew I headed back to Wotton. By now Mrs Brunner had aged a lot, but her enthusiasm was undiminished. She showed me - and the camera - the wonderful features of Soane's staircases and interior balconies, and the elegantly proportioned salons. Elaine had been an actress, and the BBC documentary supplied her with a last opportunity for a great performance. Defying all the conventions of television she addressed the lens directly to thank us for visiting the house that she had saved. It reminded me of that wonderful last scene in the movie Sunset Boulevard. Alas she died very shortly after, but the little film provides an enduring memento of her. The exhibition Saving Wotton can be seen at the John Soane Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It displays comprehensive material on the house's original construction, its rebuilding by Soane and its rescue by Elaine Brunner. The design of the buildings around us has a material effect on our quality of life. Fine architecture is uplifting, and ugly buildings are deeply depressing. Soane produced structures of great elegance, and Wotton is a beautiful example of his work. If it were not for Elaine Brunner the documents now on display at the Soane Museum would be the only surviving evidence of that lovely house.
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