Sennowe Park, Thomas Cook and The Edwardian Age

Sennowe Park in North Norfolk is one of the most ebullient country houses built during the swaggering Edwardian decade at the beginning of the 20th century.  It reflects the personality of the man for whom it was built, Thomas Cook, grandson of the Thomas Cook who founded the travel business. The latter, born in 1808, had been a Baptist evangelist and temperance campaigner. His epoch-making first excursion took place in 1841, when a special train took 570 people from Leicester to attend a Temperance meeting in Loughborough.  By the end of the century, when the grandson cashed to buy a sporting estate and build Sennowe, the firm had developed highly profitable banking interests through investing the large sums left with it, interest free, for travellers’ cheques.  Thomas Cook of Sennowe described himself as a banker, not travel agent.  A painting shows him on the box of a carriage driving horses four-in-hand through the park.  It is the image of a man who enjoyed life.

Cook’s architect was Skipper of Norwich, who had a genius for flamboyant effects. Unusually for an Edwardian house, Sennowe not only survives, due to the love and care of successive generations of Cooks, but it remains family home.  Much of the Edwardian technology that helped run the house is still in place, including the centralised vacuum cleaning system (a central motor was connected to the different rooms in the house, with openings into which house maids could insert a hose). 

In discussing this exuberant country house, John and Clive ponder the glamour of the period in which it was built, evoked by TV dramas such as Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age.  For domestic architecture in Britain they were golden years.