Cornflower and the Home of the Real Downton Abbey

In this guest post, museum and culture expert Maxwell Blowfield - aka maxwell museums - speaks to Sally Popplewell at Highclere Castle to discover more about Cornflower’s long-running partnership with the Home of the Real Downton Abbey.

Castles don’t get much more famous than Highclere. Hundreds of millions of people in every corner of the globe have seen it and will instantly recognise it, as Downton Abbey.

Yes, Highclere Castle is the magnificent Victorian house and gardens in Hampshire, that gained superstar status thanks to being picked as the on-screen location for the hugely popular ITV drama series that took the world by storm.

But Highclere has a much longer history, with the estate recorded in Anglo-Saxon charters as early as 749 AD. Before Downton fame, it was most well known for its links to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, as the castle’s owner at the time, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, worked with Howard Carter to find the Boy King’s final resting place. It was one of the most sensational historical discoveries ever made.

The castle today sits in a 5,000 acre estate, which comprises farmland, woodland, and stunning gardens designed by the renowned Capability Brown, who was the UK's most famous landscape designer of the 18th century.

So with such a long and varied story, it’s no wonder that visitors flock to it. For well over a decade, Cornflower has worked with the castle’s retail team to make sure the shop serves all those visitors, ensuring there are beautiful and bespoke products for them to take home that reflect the estate’s many selling points.

To find out what makes Cornflower and Highclere’s partnership so successful, at 12 years-long and counting, I sat down for a quick chat with Sally Popplewell, the Castle’s Retail Consultant, to get the low-down.

Hi Sally. So, Highclere: Tutankhamun. Downton Abbey. Capability Brown gardens. The castle has multiple and varied reasons for people to visit. Give us an overview of the shop and how it reflects it all.

There’s been a shop here since the Castle first opened to the public. Highclere’s shop is rather compact for the number of visitors we get but by using every available wall we manage to include all our regular ranges that are inspired by all of the aspects of why people come and visit us — most notably the Castle’s history with the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun, its location as the real Downton Abbey, and our Wildflower meadow.

Plus of course we stock a large assortment of items that are more generally inspired by the English country house ethos.

As a tourist shop, most of our products concentrate on lower priced pick-up items.

Highclere-branded products are a hugely important part of your retail offer. What are the biggest sellers?

About 50% of the shop is Highclere branded and the other 50% are items which fit in with our ethos.

Of the branded items, the most successful in terms of volume are inevitably fridge magnets, boxes of fudge and postcards. Mugs do well and at the other end of the scale we do very well with our Highclere Castle tea set.

The Highclere Castle gin in its distinctive purple bottle sells extremely well and of course, uniquely, we have our own range of books written by the current Countess about the Castle, its grounds and previous owners. These have been very successful with one title, Lady Almina, spending 60 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Your first collaboration with Cornflower was actually on a Downton Abbey range — tell me about how this was created.

When I started 14 years ago, the shop concentrated on Egyptian souvenirs which was primarily for the school parties who came to visit the Egyptian exhibition plus a selection of the usual gift shop offerings – homemade jam, tea towels, mugs and so on.

But I arrived as Downton Abbey took off. At first it was a bit of a learning curve for all of us because of the huge popularity of the series. One of the first things I wanted to design was a range of goods based on Downton Abbey. We had to be careful because the show was copyrighted to its originators so I took a two-pronged approach.

Firstly, we developed the tag line “Inspired by the Real Downton Abbey” which mentioned the show without fringing copyright and which we could put on all our gift boxes and then I wanted a range of Downton inspired products illustrated in such a way which implied the show without being explicit. This was my first collaboration with Cornflower.

We have since revisited the design in time for the third film to come out this September but it still remains one of our most popular and incorporates items ranging from a biro at £2.50 to a gusseted bag at £14.50.

How else have you worked with Cornflower?

Since the first Downton collaboration, Cornflower has helped design a number of successful ranges for Highclere. Some of these were pertinent to specific events such as the 100th anniversary of Tutankhamun and others were designed to have a longer shelf life.

The most successful of these has been the Wildflower Meadow design. I came up with the concept after seeing a book on Victorian wildflower paintings and Cornflower did a brilliant interpretation of my scribbles as I cannot draw at all. The range now includes items in all price points — from a biro, a fridge magnet and a shopper pad to a silk scarf, and it includes our own harvested wildflower seeds in a cornflower designed drum.

Cornflower works so well for us because we don’t have an inhouse art department and they are experts in this, which means they can interpret my musings and scribbles for me without me having to find a graphic designer. I’m not sure how many designs they have done for me over the last 12 years or so but quite a few!