Christian Bale once stalked its grounds as Batman, plotting his caped crusade from its recesses.
But the stately English home that featured in Christopher Nolan’s 2005 film Batman Begins has lately hosted another type of bat: the smaller and smellier kind.
Mentmore Towers, the 19th-century Jacobethan estate that served as Wayne Manor and as a backdrop for other movies, was found littered with bat droppings during an inspection by local environmental officials last year. They also found a dead bat.
Spooked by its decline, authorities in Buckinghamshire, in the countryside northwest of London, are demanding that Mentmore’s owners carry out urgent bat surveys and roof repairs. If not, officials said, they could move to force the owners to sell the mansion, which holds a Grade I listing, Britain’s highest heritage status.
“Our focus and priority is making sure this Grade I-listed building – well known and well-loved in Buckinghamshire – is protected and preserved,” Peter Strachan, deputy leader of the local council, said this month.
Conservationists describe the 250-room manor as one of Britain’s finest examples of Jacobethan Revival architecture, an amalgam of Elizabethan and Jacobean styles.
It has been owned by the family trust of British Syrian property tycoon Simon Halabi since 1998. Local officials gave Halabi’s family trust a deadline of October 4th to comply with the repair notice and conduct professional bat surveys.
At least two species of bat appeared to be roosting in Mentmore Towers, local inspectors said, based on the droppings found there. Inspectors shared photographs of broken windows, ceiling holes and cracked exterior walls, which they said had offered the bats possible entry routes.
Bats are a protected species in Britain and property owners are legally obligated to take precautions to avoid disturbing them.
In response to the notice, Halabi’s family said that it had begun a bat survey and a programme of repairs and restorations.
“There is an irony in the suggestion that nobody is dealing with the bats when a team of professional ecologists, effectively Mentmore’s own ‘Batman’ team, has already been on the case,” it said in a statement. The Halabi family trust was “absolutely committed to the long-term preservation and restoration of Mentmore Towers,” it added.
Christian Bale as Batman and Cillian Murphy as the Scarecrow in Batman Begins
The statement argued that Buckinghamshire Council had slowed down the family’s efforts by opposing the construction of a security fence and a storage facility on the grounds. The council said they breached planning rules.
Mentmore Towers is the only major surviving work in Britain by Joseph Paxton, a Victorian innovator best known for designing London’s Crystal Palace, an iron-and-glass symbol of the Industrial Age that burned down in 1936.
Long before it was a filming location — including for Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), the Sacha Baron Cohen comedy Ali G Indahouse (2002) and the Spice Girls’ Goodbye music video — Mentmore served for over a century as a country palace of the Rothschild banking dynasty.
At one point it was home to a future British prime minister, the Earl of Rosebery, who married into the family. Photographs taken in 1975 show its grand hall dripping in tapestries, with lavish furnishings and a cabinet brimming with trophies.
Hit by British inheritance taxes nearing $7 million in the 1970s, the Rothschild family sold the house and held a flash auction of its furnishings. Over nine days in 1977, nearly 3,000 items of Baroque art, gilded furniture and other treasures were sold, fetching more than $10 million.
The following year, Mentmore was acquired by an organisation that promoted transcendental meditation, according to a local history museum. Two decades later, Halabi’s family trust purchased the property with the idea of converting it into a luxury hotel.
According to court documents filed this month in a separate dispute between Halabi and a neighbour, Halabi said he ended up keeping the property as a family home after the death in 2003 of his eldest son, who was buried on the estate.
Halabi has been a fixture in the British news media for years. In the early 2000s, The Times of London named him one of Britain’s wealthiest people, having amassed a portfolio of properties that included a share in the development of the Shard, London’s tallest building. According to public records, he declared bankruptcy in 2010.
Historic England, the government’s heritage adviser, lists Mentmore Towers as a building of “exceptional interest,” a classification that requires owners to protect its architectural significance. The body now says the building is in a “very bad” state and requires urgent repair.
Mentmore Towers has fallen into disrepair, as shown by cracks such as this one. Photograph: Buckinghamshire Council
Constructed from 1852 to 1854 in buff sandstone, and noted for its large plateglass windows, Mentmore took inspiration from Wollaton Hall, an Elizabethan mansion in the city of Nottingham, according to conservationists.
Morgan Ellis Leah, a conservationist at Britain’s Victorian Society, a heritage group, said that the pace of the building’s deterioration was deeply concerning.
“What remains of Mentmore’s interiors are of extraordinary quality: from the Caen stone entrance hall to the 12-meter-high grand hall with its glazed ceiling,” Leah said.
He commended local officials for trying to safeguard the mansion’s future but added that the effort “underscores the fragility of the building and the absolute necessity of protecting its setting from further harm.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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