This is not uncommon in the historic house world. Indeed, the whole subject of
which local tourist and visitor attractions are deemed worthy of ‘Brown
Sign’ status is a highly controversial and sensitive subject within the
heritage tourism and historic house world.

Despite bringing in over £24 billion to the UK economy, government policy and
guidelines to local authorities on heritage tourism signage has been both
‘inconsistent’ and often ‘illogical’ according to the Historic Houses
Association (HHA), which has been campaigning for a ‘review’ of the existing
system which is based on awarding signs according to numbers of days open to
the public (typically 160), parking capacity and number of toilets.

This means that many historic houses which are – like Upton Cressett – located
way off the beaten track and urgently require signage to help people
actually find the place are being turned down by local Highway authorities
for Brown Signs whilst tourist signs are being granted to retail parks,
garden centres, supermarkets and in one case noted by the HHA’s policy
director, Frances Garnham ‘even a Mcdonalds fast-food restaurant’.

The HHA have been campaigning hard on behalf of their 1500 members to have
‘regional visitor threshold’ numbers reduced so that smaller historic homes
that do not have hundreds of thousands of visitors can get the much needed
signs.The HHA have lobbied the government with various case studies showing
the absurdities of the current system.

Part of the difficulty, however, is that promoting heritage tourism has been
so marginalised by the Coalition that there is not even a Minister of State
for Heritage any more for the HHA to lobby. That the word ‘Heritage’ has
been removed from any ministerial job title shows how increasingly
irrelevant the heritage and tourism sector has become to the metropolitan
political elite.

At the recent HHA AGM, president Richard Compton said that the backlog of
repairs for member houses had risen from £390m in 2009 to £764m in 2013 – an
increase of 96% in just four years. Such figures, he said, should ‘set alarm
bells ringing’.

This lack of any sense of government priority for heritage can be gauged by
the fact that although a Brown Sign Task Force was set up back in 2011 to
rectify the absurdities of the government promoting visiting Mcdonalds over
actual heritage attractions, the recommendations of this report – to
introduce a new definition of tourism that separates ‘genuine’ tourist
attractions from those with a ‘purely commercial interest’ – have yet to be
actioned by any government ministers.

Case examples cited by the HHA include Scampston Hall in Yorkshire (over
40,000 visitors a year) which was turned down on the grounds that the
attraction was located close to the village of Scampston and is therefore
‘easy to locate’; Muncaster Castle in Cumbria and Grimsthorpe Castle in
Lincolnshire where both reported that visitors were ‘discouraged’ by a lack
of signing and often do not achieve their destination’.

But HHA members are often enterprising. The situation become so desperate for
one stately home owner friend of mine – whose family own a well known castle
in the Cotswolds famous for its royal connections – that he has resorted to
‘faking’ a set of Brown Signs (made to special order in his local sign-shop)
in order to help the tens of thousands of visitors find his castle whose
visitor car-park can only be reached via a particular road in the village.
Confusingly, this is not the street called ‘Castle Street’.

The reason he resorted to such extreme measures is that – as with so many
historic houses – the castle was not ‘open’ for enough days a year to
qualify for the criteria laid down by the local authority.

When Brown Signs were first introduced in Britain (starting with Kent) in the
early 1980s – copying their success in France where elaborate menu boards of
chateaus, abbeys and other tourist symbols helped to drive tourism since the
1970s – they were relatively easy for historic houses to get.

The problem today is that as brown signs have veered away from their original
1980s purpose – to favour shopping, pubs and fast-food eating destinations –
many local authorities have complained of ‘over-signage’ at town roundabouts
and main junctions. This has led to some historic houses having their signs
removed, without warning – such as at Holme Pierrepont Hall in
Nottinghamshire, on the grounds that 15,000 visitors a year was inadequate.

I realise there may be a number of HHA members reading this who may be
overcome with Brown Sign Envy Syndrome. How did humble Upton Cressett get
its signs? Rare fowl, my pal. I have my wife Laura’s love of exotic chickens
and rare turkeys and peacocks to thank for our new good signage fortune.
After we were married in February, my wife and I decided that our house
visitor numbers weren’t good enough and that we needed to radically expand
the Upton Cressett gardens in order to attract new visitors looking for a
‘day out’.

Over the last year the gardens have been improved and expanded on a major
scale. In addition to our new rose garden, a new kitchen garden and woodland
garden are in the making for next season. But our coup de foudre was when
Laura announced that she wanted to open up a ‘rare fowl’ display in the
moat.

Whilst Laura was getting excited about having an exotic armada of
Appenzellers, Salmon Faverolles, Silkies, peacocks and Bronze turkeys
scrapping in the moat, I was thinking Brown Signs – the holy grail of the
heritage tourist trail. We would open a ‘rare fowl’ aviary in a penned off
section of our listed garden medieval moat (which is a Scheduled Ancient
Monument) which would become a family tourist attraction. More to the point,
the garden and rare fowl aviary would be open every day from May-September,
thus enabling us to qualify for Brown Signs.

I soon found myself in her car heading at speed towards Ludlow in the middle
of deepest Shropshire. After the village of Burwarton we saw a Brown Sign
which said ‘Gobbett Rare Breeds Farm’ – I took this as a good omen. We
followed it for a few lonely miles or so until another sign – this time
marked with a Rare Breed symbol – directed us to the farm.

Two hours later, my wife had ordered a large collection of exotic chickens,
turkeys and peacocks. Other than the mysterious and unsolved murder of a
black and white striped turkey, the rare fowl have proved a hit. Not least
with the visitors who can finally find us.