Seems a bit shallow.
The real downfall of the great British houses (architectural sense) was the financial catastrophe that 1914 to 1946 was for the British Empire. Top billing in two world wars - and they went from being blatantly the richest and most powerful nation on earth, to needing a US Treasury bail-out to avoid national bankruptcy.
(Though over in America, most of the historic grand mansions are now tourist attractions, for lack of heirs with the wealth and interest in maintaining them.)
And the benefits of British aristocratic titles faded over quite a few centuries, not just recently. Compare King Charles I of the early 1600's (Parliament didn't like his exercise of Divine Right) with George III of the later 1700's (a clever King could appoint his own Prime Ministers against Parliament's wishes) with Queen Victoria of the later 1800's (she complained to the PM that the Foreign Secretary was taking actions without her approval) with Queen Elizabeth II of the later 1900's (she dutifully read her supposed "Queen's Speech" to Parliament, whether she agreed with a word of it or not).
> (Though over in America, most of the historic grand mansions are now tourist attractions, for lack of heirs with the wealth and interest in maintaining them.)
Part of this is that the "old money" tended to withdraw from public life after the Great Depression when they decided infamy was a serious liability.
That's why one struggles to name any of the living heirs of the big names of that era, who are absolutely still filthy stinking rich, while newbies like Musk, everyone knows. The culture of what Fussell calls the "top out-of-sight" is to remain sufficiently anonymous that nobody knows their given names unless one goes looking (and even then, it may be hard to find much trace of them). A bunch of them don't show up on any of those "richest" lists not because they couldn't rank, but because you effectively have to opt-in to those, for enough of your wealth to be traceable without great effort to get counted.
Owning a highly-visible Newport mansion could well be a mark of poor taste, among that set.
They still have their grand houses, they just may not (though, may) be in the Georgian or Neoclassical style or whatever, and they're probably not visible (from remotely close-up, at any rate) from any public road. Drive minor highways in the right parts of the country and look for nice (though, not necessarily imposing or impressive) gates leading into what looks like a simple, wooded lot with an unremarkable, perhaps even gravel, drive that immediately disappears into the trees, and you've probably found one, and they're all over the place... plus their families will usually own plenty of extremely nice, but not flashy, well-located houses and condos and such in more-populated areas.
the houses are really easy to find in satellite view on maps too
I read a biography of a British politician who was later elevated to the aristocracy (although I guess his family was somewhere between commoner and aristocrat prior to that). It said his family took a financial hit because of a decline in crops in the late 1800s. I dug it up and found out that the US was partly responsible for that actually because of cheaper imported grains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_depression_of_British_ag...
Many aristocrats relied on agricultural income from their property holdings.
Another interesting point is that it seems like the majority of titles were awarded relatively recently as in within the last 120-150 years. That doesn't mean there aren't some older ones but it changes the perception of them from being a centuries old group of warlords or relatives of the king to a group of lawyers, military officers, and politicians.
Yes-ish? I might have linked https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_Laws#Repeal In many ways that repeal was a direct consequence of the Industrial Revolution, and the IR's "new rich" were often eager to acquire the architectural trappings of the old rich, pay staggering sums to marry into them, and other tricks.
>(Though over in America, most of the historic grand mansions are now tourist attractions, for lack of heirs with the wealth and interest in maintaining them.)
Taxes had a lot to do with it--though, really, in the UK as well. In Newport RI, a lot of the gilded era mansions ended up donated to a local college because, as you say, the heirs didn't have either the wealth or the interest in maintaining (and playing the taxes on) them. A lot of these places were also summer "cottages" and would require a huge amount of money to update to modern standards. I know someone whose extended family owned one of these places (not in Newport but similar) and it was going to be a huge expense; don't know how it ended up.
> Taxes had a lot to do...
Kinda? Taxes on the UK's wealthy (not just property taxes) skyrocketed from '14 to '46, mostly because the gov't needed to seize every farthing it could, to starve off national bankruptcy. And taxes were only part of the US issue. Wikipedia notes that just https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakers needed 50-ish servants to run, and 150 tons of coal a year to heat. Imagine the payroll and utilities to live at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biltmore_Estate
Worth noting - in Britain's "good old days", there mostly seemed to be no lack of heirs with the £££££ to staff and maintain those enormous estates, century after century after century. Yes, that was partly social. And primogeniture certainly helped.
In fact there was a lot of churn and drama. What we have left today in the UK is literally the result of survivor bias.
A lot of country houses are now state-owned, managed through nominal charities. Quite a few disappeared in the 20th century.
The British aristocracy is a complex thing, with came-over-with-the-Normans at one extreme, and relatively recent self-made opportunists at the other. It's a socio-archaeological phenomenon in its own right - influential, but under-researched, and opaque to outsiders.
Heck, a whole TV show about it :-)
What little direct insight into it I have in the northeast US, it gets very complicated especially as large extended families get involved. People have very different goals with largely differing amounts of money and taste for spending it. Best is to run away in my experience.
Oh I don't really disagree with any of that. In both the US and the UK, the interest in staffing and maintaining multi-million dollar high-maintenance summer places (typically in conjunction with multi-million dollar city places) definitely declined over time.
There are still some ultra-wealthy with multiple homes, but there are also probably increasingly options for people to just rent something for a month or two that's a lot less headache with some minimal staff (if that)--or at least have one of a couple of places be as low maintenance as possible.