One Pair of Eyes — Season 1, Episode 53: Lord Montagu of Beaulieu: You're Never Alone with a Stately Home...

Episode synopsis

This weekend, between 8,000 and 10,000 people each day will visit Lord Montagu's-home at Beaulieu in Hampshire. Is this taking commercialisation too far? Would it not be more dignified for a stately home owner who cannot afford to maintain his house to hand it over to the nation? In this film Lord Montagu puts the case for private ownership. 'Our historic houses must above all remain as family homes, not museums.' He looks at the situation in France, where the chateaux so often stand 'as dead mausoleums of a bygone age,' and visits other stately homes in Britain. He also gets forthright comments from some Oxford students and a group of car workers at Cowley.

About One Pair of Eyes

A monthly series of highly personal documentary films in which individuals are given a platform to discuss issues close to their heart.

More episodes from Season 1

• E1James Cameron: Temporary Person Passing Through
• E2Dr Alex Comfort: A Traveller in the Dreamtime
• E3Anthony Howard: A City of Magnificent Intentions
• E4Nicholas Tomalin: No Worse Heresy
• E5James Cameron: The Road to Kingdom Come
• E6Jo Grimond: The Dead Hand of Democracy
• E7Peter Wilson: You've Got to Win
• E8Norman Parkinson: Stay Baby Stay
• E9Sir Tyrone Guthrie: Off to Philadelphia
• E10James Cameron: Berlin - The Haunted House
• E11Margaret Drabble: A Place Called Exile
• E12Claud Cockburn: One More River To Cross