Althorp

Althorp is Charles Spencer’s history of the Northamptonshire house that has been the centre of the Spencer family’s landed life for centuries. He traces the estate from its Tudor origins through successive generations of owners, showing how architecture, collecting, inheritance, politics and changing ideas of aristocratic responsibility shaped both the house and the family that occupied it.

The book also brings the story into the modern period, including Spencer’s own childhood at Althorp and the transformation of the estate after the death and burial there of his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales. Rather than treating the house simply as an architectural monument, Spencer uses it as a framework for a broader social history of an English aristocratic family and the pressures that altered country-house life over time.