Decline and Restoration
The property was leased out during the 20th century and in the early 1960s became an hotel. It was largely destroyed by fire in 1978 and thereafter the ruins stood neglected and deteriorating. Much effort to find a use for the shell that would justify the substantial cost of renovation came to nothing. In the early 2000s the owners together with English Heritage, the local authority and the Landmark Trust planned for restorations that were finished in 2012. They sought to create a "Landmark for the 21st Century" that introduced modern accommodations while maintaining the ruins. The renovations were designed by Witherford Watson Mann Architects.
Read more about this topic: Astley Castle
Famous quotes containing the words decline and, decline and/or restoration:
“Or else I thought her supernatural;
As though a sterner eye looked through her eye
On this foul world in its decline and fall,
On gangling stocks grown great, great stocks run dry,
Ancestral pearls all pitched into a sty,
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In comparison to the French Revolution, the American Revolution has come to seem a parochial and rather dull event. This, despite the fact that the American Revolution was successful—realizing the purposes of the revolutionaries and establishing a durable political regime—while the French Revolution was a resounding failure, devouring its own children and leading to an imperial despotism, followed by an eventual restoration of the monarchy.”
—Irving Kristol (b. 1920)