After the war, the declining condition of house and grounds at Kings Weston was the source of national concern. In fact, the architectural history of Bristol in particular was brought into sharp focus by wartime losses. The author Simon Harcourt-Smith clearly had a spirit inclined towards the romantic lure of the ruin, indeed, his own book “The last of Uptake” is an atmospheric story about the last days of a great mansion in decline, and its ultimate fall. Fortunately, unlike so many country houses, Kings Weston survived the decline many estates suffered in the three decades or so from the 1930s onwards, but only just.
 
Harcourt-Smith visited Bristol in October 1946 and wrote a lyrical piece for the high-society magazine The Tatler and Bystander  that included his great admiration for Kings Weston even in it’s war-worn state. It’s worth recounting here as a   

“How strange it is that Vanbrugh, who made his name as a writer of successful comedies, should have created an architecture which thrives in tragic circumstances. We can thank Providence that neither Blenheim nor Kimbolton nor Grimsthorpe have yet fallen into ruin. But ruin seems to be the proper mood of a Vanbrugh palace. I cannot believe Seaton Delavel was ever as moving in the days of its beautiful crazy owners as it is today, with the miners’ cottages creeping up the drive, and doves cooing among the Caesars in their alcoves, and a great purple cloud coming up out of the North Sea. I suspect that Castle Howard may have gained in drama from its fire; certainly Eastbury for Bubb Doddington now a mere fragment of a great house which should stir even a blind heart.”

“And now King’s Weston turned into a school, then befouled by the military during the recent war: dormitories in the garden, an outer defilement of Nissen huts round the park, the servants’ quarters pulled down and littered on the terrace, the mantelpieces gone from the great saloons, temples chocked with old litter. Here is but a skeleton of grandeur; but for that very reason it makes one see as never before how great a genius Vanbrugh was. This is an idiom entirely personal and in heroic strains. Gaze at one of his slender, elongated arches. It is unlike anything else in our architecture. Wren may be a perfect artist, but one feels him to be the conventional man raised to the height of the angels. Vanbrugh’s art, never perfect, needs no elevation to the clouds. For it began there. . . . “