The soap opera began hundreds of years before Edith wrote her letter to the Turkish ambassador! Yet the aristocratic way of life that had evolved at places like Downton Abbey was nearly ruined by the time we first meet the Crawleys in 1912. How did a few families come to own so much English property? Why did Robert’s family need him to marry an heiress like Cora? And why do places like Down Abbey (Highclere Castle in real life) look the way they do? Learn about the landscape designers, land ownership patterns, and inheritance laws that produced great estates like Downton, and why radical changes were inevitable. This slide lecture is presented by landscape historian Barbara Geiger, who specializes in late 19th and early 20th century places. She teaches in the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology.