Lost Houses – Spondon Old Hall
Researching the grander houses of Spondon has never been easy, simply because there have been more than a few: Spondon Hall, The Grange, The Cottage, Field and Spondon Houses, The Homestead, West and Prospect Houses. Of these only the last three survive, and not all had estates attached. Most were what is called by estate agents ‘village houses’ and their profusion reflects the prosperity of this part of Derbyshire over many centuries. S pondon Old Hall may well have lain on the site of the earliest manor house. It faces south east overlooking the valley of the lower Derwent, a fact rather lost on today’s visitor, for the view is obscured by 20th century building, including a large council estate. In any case, were there a house still in situ from which to enjoy the view, the main thing that would strike the eye is the now derelict Courtaulds/ British Celanese site. From 1298 until 1522, the Hall was in the hands of the Twyfords of Kirk Langley, who inherited it from the first and last Lord Pipard, a descendant of the FitzRalphs, a younger line of the Staffords and thus kin to the Longfords and Gresleys. In 1309 a surviving charter tells us that John Pipard inherited a capital mansion at Spondon from his father, Ralph. In 1522 the Twyford heiress brought a considerable holding to Henry, second son of Peter Pole of Heage, enabling him to found the cadet branch of the Poles of Langley. Spondon, being separate seems to have been sold on and partly split up, a portion being bought by the emergent Wilmots of Chaddesden. It was this portion that contained the original manor house. A younger Wilmot son, Edward, settled in the house in 1718 marrying his cousin Catherine Cassandra, daughter and co-heiress of William Coke of Trusley. Their son married yet another Wilmot cousin and the grandson Francis, rector of both Trusley and Pinxton, died unmarried in 1818 leaving all to his sister Susannah. In 1806 she had conveniently married her kinsman, John Coke of Debdale Hall, Nottinghamshire. The complicating factor here was that he died without issue in 1841 leaving everything to a nephew, Col. Edward Thomas Coke (1807-1888) who thereby restored Trusley to the family after a 123-year break. Thus we have charter evidence for a mansion in 1309 and clear evidence for one in 1718. There is further evidence concerning the actual building a century later in the form of an 1810 document amongst the Coke-Steel muniments at Trusley which reads, “The Mansion House….the buildings consist of a large old rough cast House, brick and tile, – detach’d brewhouse half timbered and tiled, – coalhouse & pigstyes with dovecote over, brick & tile all in tolerable repair, – an old barn half timbered & thatched in very moderate repair…” From this, for which and much other information I am most grateful to David Coke-Steel, one gets only the sketchiest idea of the house except that it was of stone probably no more than roughly shaped and brought to course – from the description “roughcast” – reinforced with brick and with a tile roof. There were also two timber framed outbuildings the brew-house and barn plus the dovecote/pigsty, so the entire ensemble was visually in all probability extremely attractive. From the death of William Coke it is likely that the house was either let as a farm or tenanted and when the inventory was drawn up it was lived in by the Misses Pickering who were paying £105 – 12s – 7d a year for the mansion, three crofts, a close and two cottages, one a saddle house for the other. These ladies were the two unmarried sisters of Revd William Pickering (1740—1802), who had succeeded his father as rector of Mackworth in 1790. The family were anciently stewards to the Mundys of Markeaton Hall and their father was an intellectual, mathematician, astronomer and tutor of Revd Thomas Gisborne. More to the point the mother was sister of the Miss Wilmot who had married Edward Wilmot’s son, which explains a lot! After their death the house was let briefly to Bryan Balguy, the Recorder of Derby who quickly moved to Borrowash Manor and then to Field House at Spondon. He was succeeded by Alderman John Drewry proprietor of the Derby Mercury, who later in 1839 sold his former house and printing works on the corner of Iron Gate and Sadler Gate to William Bemrose and then Roger Cox (1777-1843). The latter, who took over in 1837 was a member of a notable lead-smelting family originally from Brailsford. In 1846, Bagshaw’s Directory says of the house, “…large mansion west of the village…inhabited by Mrs Fanny Cox”. It was in fact not in the west at all, but more to the east in Moor Street, later Sitwell Street and Fanny was Roger’s widow, the daughter and heiress of the Derby banker George Richardson. The renaming of the street seems to have been thanks to the long residence at the Old Hall, after Fanny’s death a few years later, of Miss Selina Sitwell a member of the Stainsby House (Smalley) family and again a kinswoman of the Wilmots and the Cokes. By this time however, John Coke had died (1841) the house passing to E T Coke who died in 1888. Also by this time the picturesque old hall had been rebuilt or replaced, allegedly in 1851. Unfortunately we only have the 20th century remnant left to help us understand what this replacement house was like but it was clearly built quite close to 1846 in the late Regency fashion, and was Classical, three storeys high and about twice as large as the building people remember. It was presumably of brick – as from c1850 there was the railway to bring in building materials – with busy quoins at the angles, simple Georgian 12 pane sash windows with entablatures over and a rather fussy portico (possibly a later addition) with rather too many
Lost Houses – Wheston Hall
I realise that knowledgeable readers will read this heading and exclaim that Wheston Hall is not a lost house at all and still stands. Yet the rather mauled remnant which survived the collapse of much of the fabric in a gale in 1952 is largely a new house which made ingenious use of some surviving parts of the original. In truth, the house was never a modest affair and although we have no idea what it originally looked like before the 18th century, the house that emerged from a thorough rebuilding in 1726-1727 does provide us with some clues. The earliest person of some standing to have been recorded as living at Wheston was Thomas Browne in 1362. We do not have much information about him, although it would be safe to assume he held some royally-appointed regulatory post relating to lead extraction. After that there is a lacuna of over a century before we encounter Thomas Alleyne there, whose wife Elizabeth may well have brought him the estate at Wheston, in which case she may have been the Browne heiress. Thomas himself was the third son of John Alleyne of Stanton-in-Peak, descended in all probability from Robert Alyn of Winster living in 1277. The elder branch of the family continued at Stanton Woodseats and elsewhere in Stanton for many generations. Thomas’s son Thurstan was Bailiff and Receiver of the High Peak and by his wife, a Garlick of Glossop, was progenitor of the Alleynes of Wheston along with junior branches at Derby and Loughborough. The family grew rich in the unpredictable business of lead extraction and trading.Sometime in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, but before 1592 when they were fined for Catholic recusancy, they appear to have built a new house. A substantial fragment of this house remained embedded in the building that fell in 1952. It was a rectangular tower house of carboniferous limestone rubble brought to course with millstone grit long-and-short quoins, similar dressings to the mullioned windows with cranked hood moulds and for the string courses. It was at least three storeys and may have had a gabled top, like that surviving at Cutthorpe Old Hall, or parapeted like a larger version of North Lees in Hope, not so far away. A similar tower house is thought to form the core of the hall at Great Longstone too. In photographs of the main façade of the house it can easily be identified as the left hand projection, with its much more irregular quoins, asymmetrical window spacings and greater dimensions than its right hand counterpart. Behind it latterly, was a jumble of near-irreconcilable fragments, extraordinarily difficult to interpret. The Alleynes were Catholics and adherents of the Dukes of Norfolk, at that time major landowners in the Dark Peak and also major investors in the lead trade. The house may have been again rebuilt, in order to enlarge it, in the years preceding the Civil War, for the very striking baroque façade put on in the 1720s strongly suggests that a second tower was probably built with an intervening perhaps gabled range, with two stair towers inwards from the end-towers which probably featured crenelated tops like those at Wingerworth Old Hall and Barlborough Old Hall, both seemingly designed by John Smythson (of Bolsover Castle fame) or someone closely associated with him. Soon after this, the family divided into two lines and it is possible that the house was also divided with both families living under one roof, a common compromise at the time. With two staircases, the house was certainly suitable for division. Yet early in the 18th century, both branches failed virtually simultaneously and half the property, along with its lead-rich estate, passed to a kinsman, Thomas Alleyne of Loughborough (a scion of the Derby branch of the family) and half to the two daughters and co-heiresses of the other Alleyne branch. Of these, one was married to a Fleetwood and the other to a wily Sheffield attorney, Thomas Freeman. He set about uniting the estate in his own person, elbowing Thomas Alleyne aside on the grounds of his Catholic faith and likewise neutralising Fleetwood, whose mother was a Catholic Eyre of Hassop. Freeman thereafter set about modernising his new seat at Wheston, unifying the building with a new Georgian façade which receded in two stages from the corner pavilions to incorporate the old stair towers and culminating in a centrepiece of two bays flanking a rather inconsequential and marginally off-centre entrance; the visual strength of the remainder, marked only by an oeil-de-boeuf on the parapeted upper storey. A pair of Baroque gate piers marked the entrance from the road, topped by pineapples (long a symbol of welcome) flanked by an ornamental timber fence on a dwarf wall. The anonymous person who designed this clearly had flair, but probably lacked formal architectural training, as he would have made much more of the centrepiece. Probably it was an experienced builder recruited from Sheffield. If so, his hand can be seen elsewhere in the Peak, at Winster Hall (c1715), Shallcross Hall (1723-35) and certainly at Norton House, Norton (1733) as all share characteristics of Wheston. Unfortunately we have no record of the interior, but no doubt it had some pretension, as witness accounts of the saloon at Winster. Freeman also laid out an avenue from the front door into a small park that he formed from his own land, ending in a further pair of gate piers, although today the avenue has mainly long gone and few trees survive from the avenue itself which is now is a narrow wall-flanked lane. When Thomas’s son Robert died unmarried in 1763, the property passed through heiresses of the Charltons and then the Maxwells of Meir, Staffordshire, who let it, as did the Dukes of Norfolk to whom the house and estate were eventually bequeathed about two centuries ago. The Duke made it the home of the agent for his White Peak estates, John Allen but in 1827 sold it all to the 6th
Lost Houses – The Field, Litchurch
In its declining years, this suburban Regency Villa was known merely as 237 Osmaston Road, Derby on the thoroughfare of the ancient pre-Roman route south of Derby towards Swarkestone Bridge. This was a place which in the early 19th century was still extremely rural; one has the description by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) of the fields surrounding the home in which he grew up, in newly-built Wilmot Street, as testimony to the bucolic character of the area. Here in Litchurch, which was absorbed by the Borough of Derby in the 1880s, stood Joseph Strutt’s ‘summer villa’ the pleasure grounds which in 1840 he gave to the Borough as the Arboretum and it was just to the east of the Arboretum that the next earliest villa was built, sometime in the early 1820s. This was The Field. Although it has been demolished for some fifty years, it has not been previously chronicled, but surely deserves to be. It was never the town residence of a landed family, but the spacious residence of a number of prominent Derby families. Before it was demolished it was listed Grade III, which was the lowest grade, later abolished, with all surviving Grade III buildings being either promoted to Grade II or relegated to the Local List. The house was originally of three by three bays, two storeys high, and constructed of ashlared blocks of Keuper sandstone from Weston Cliff on the Trent, rather than the ubiquitous Roman Cement of other contemporary villas. Clearly the person who commissioned the house was making a statement about the state of his bank balance! The centre bays all the main fronts broke forward slightly under a low parapet in a very restrained Neo-Greek manner. It was architecturally sophisticated too, with the floor heights of the ground floor greater on the south and east fronts and at the entrance front, where the hall ran right through house to dog-leg staircase under two depressed arches, ceiling heights were lower giving a more spacious feel to the master suite above. The service wing was to the north, although later an extension beside the entrance and incorporating part of it, was added to provide an extra reception room. On the east side an almost free standing top-lit billiard room was built on much later in the 19th century. The interior focused on the long hallway, the layout closely resembling that at Leaper’s Highfields, the space being broken into three sections divided by depressed arches supported on pilasters and decorated with egg-and-date plaster moulding. The cornices were all of ornamental modillions and the main reception room was stuccoed in French Baroque manner, like the Headmaster’s study at The Pastures and Parkfield House (also lost) on Duffield Road. The dog-leg staircase had an ornamental cast iron balustrade, undoubtedly made by the Derby foundry of Weatherhead, Glover & Co in Duke Street. They probably also made the cast iron sliding jalousies which once protected the windows but were removed in the 1942 scrap metal drive. The grounds were originally fairly extensive and landscaped, declining towards a small lake just west of London Road, although as the 19th century went on chunks were disposed of to provide housing. Indeed after the construction of a further pair of villas the street was lined during the 1840s and ‘50s with well-proportioned brick terraced housing, the Arboretum proving a draw for those wishing to live in the style then referred to as genteel. Yet the down side for the occupiers of The Field must have been the erection of the Union Workhouse (now the Royal Crown Derby factory) on the meadow opposite. The building is firmly attributable to an amateur architect, Alderman Richard Leaper, the third son of William Leaper JP (1713-1784) a banker in partnership with a kinsman, Robert Newton of Mickleover. Leaper’s father had served as Mayor of Derby in 1776-1777 and in 1753 had married Sarah Ward, sister of Archer Ward, also on the bank’s board and a keen Baptist. Richard, born in 1759, was educated at Derby School, becoming a brother of the Corporation in 1790 and elected Mayor in 1794-95 then an alderman shortly thereafter. He served as Mayor again in 1807, 1815 and 1824, by which time he was, like his father before him, also a partner in the bank. He lived initially at 59 Friar Gate, Derby but after 1817 at a house of his own devising, Parkfield Cedars, Kedleston Road (also regrettably a lost house), which bore many features in common with The Field, where he died, unmarried, in 1838. As an architect, the Derbyshire historian Stephen Glover, who knew him, averred (writing in 1831) that he “has had great taste and much experience in building family mansions…” going on to a number of other houses he had designed. The building dates lies somewhere between 1819 and 1824 and the client was Francis Severne, a manufacturing jeweller with premises in Corn Market. On his death, his son Henry moved over the road to build Ashtree House and The Field (then called Litchurch Field) was sold to silk manufacturer, Henry Boden of Ednaston Lodge (1807-1862), whose wife was the sister of Sir John (‘Brassy’) Smith. He later moved to The Friary and let the house to the Midland Railway’s eminent engineer William Henry Barlow FRS (1812-1902) who lived there until 1857 when he moved to London to design St Pancras Station and the main line from Derby. His successor, John Sidney Crossley, another civil engineer, occupied the house thereafter until around 1871 when Alderman Sir Abraham Woodiwiss (1828-1884), a multi-millionaire railway contractor acquired it. He probably added the NW extension (done in brick and stuccoed over, hence the rendering of the remainder of the street front to unite, visually, the disparity) and the billiard room. He served two consecutive terms as Mayor, in 1880-1 and 1881-2, but moved to another Leaper House, The Pastures in Littleover, around 1880 and died there, leaving his son Abraham, junior (1852-1912) in residence at The Field; he
Lost Houses: Littleover Old Hall
There is still a Littleover Old Hall standing in our leafy Derby suburb, as any member of the community would be only too pleased to inform you. Yet the house that now acts as the centrepiece of the HQ of the Derbyshire Fire & Rescue Service, hemmed in as it is by utilitarian modern buildings, is a building of 1891, erected to the design of Alexander MacPherson for businessman Edward MacInnes. Prior to that however, there was a house of some architectural pretension on the site that dated to the late Elizabethan era, of which few are aware. Littleover was never a separate manorial estate, but was part of the great manor of Mickleover, as was Findern and the deserted medieval village of Potlock. It had all been given to endow the Abbey of Burton by its founder, the Saxon thegn Wulfric Spot in 1002. By the 14th century though, much land in Findern, Potlock and Littleover had been in the tenancy of the Fynderne family since the early 12th century. In the 16th century, an opulent lawyer of Staffordshire family, Sir Richard Harpur, married Jane daughter of George Fynderne of Findern, thereby acquiring some land at Swarkestone in the settlement, subsequently purchasing much more of that family’s property both there and elsewhere, including an estate at Littleover and the Manor of Breadsall Upper Hall. When the last member of the Fynderne family died without issue, Sir Richard’s wife became the heiress, so he also acquired the remainder of the family’s estates, including Findern and Potlock. Sometime in the 1580s, Sir Richard’s second son, also called Sir Richard Harpur (whose 1635 monument is still to be admired in the parish church), was granted the Littleover estate by his elder brother on his marriage 1588 to a daughter of Thomas Reresby of Thryburgh in Yorkshire. It was probably him who built a house there around the the mid-1590s and presumably there was a previous house on the site, in which he lived beforehand, but of it we know nothing at all. The Harpurs flourished at Littleover until the senior male line died out with 32 year old John Harpur in 1754. His sister had married Samuel Heathcote, a Jacobean Derby alderman and successful lead trader. His descendants lived there until a grandson inherited The Pastures, a newish house situated further west along the Roman road to Burton-on-Trent. They let the old hall as a farm, retaining it and much of the estate after moving to Raleigh in Devon in the 1840s. Yet they only sold the hall in 1890 and the residue of the estate in Littleover and nearby in 1920. Indeed, it was this release of land in the village which enabled it to expand over the following two decades. What was the house like? We only have a limited number of clues. One is the hearth tax assessment of 1670, which records that Richard Harpur (Jr) was assessed for this tax on ten hearths, which suggests a house of medium size comparable with the manor houses at Locko, Duffield Park, Barton Blount and Weston-on-Trent, only the last of which survives in anything like the form it had in that era. We also have two paintings, one ostensibly of 1873 and another done about 15 years later, both of which show the building after major changes had taken place. Finally there are pieces of written evidence: inventories, legal documents and a few descriptions. Of the latter, the earliest is that of William Woolley (c1713) who unhelpfully said that it was ‘a large old house’, whilst James Pilkington described it as a fine old house in a ‘high and pleasant situation’. William Hutton, writing in 1791 was more critical. ‘Nothing,’ he wrote, ‘can be said in favour of this house except its antiquity: but everything may be in favour of its situation, which is charming beyond conception.’ The Lysons in 1817 call it a ‘good old mansion’ and inform us that Bache Heathcote was still living in it. The 1873 picture, which still hangs in the house today, was copied from an original (marked ‘after J. Rolfe 1873’) which was presumably in the possession of the Heathcotes. The question here is whether the house shown was as standing in 1873 or as it was when James Rolfe painted it, probably c1820. As the 1880’s painting shows a brick two storey Regency farm house with no towers and contemporary maps, a house with a footprint which was a simple rectangle, one has to assume that the painting is of the house as it was rather than in 1873; this must be the date of the copy. What the picture shows is a house in transition, from a glorious Elizabethan swagger-house to workaday farm. From the original build remains two square castellated three storey towers, lit by tiers of three light mullioned windows and embellished by a pair of tall brick Tudor chimney stacks. One tower boasts a quoined Gothic door in the base, which I cannot believe is in its original position, but could have been a fragment of the Medieval house, retained out of sentiment. The house may originally have sported two further towers on the north side and each may have been capped by a domed lantern, as at Dodington in Lincolnshire, essentially a mark two Hardwick, by Robert Smythson in 1600. It gives a flavour of what Littleover would have looked like, especially as its parapets would probably also have been crenellated. Originally the entire building would have been of three storeys, the rooms of the uppermost one higher than those below, as was then the fashion. An illustration of Wingerworth Old Hall (demolished in 1723) also gives an impression of the sort of house we are looking at but of only two storeys. The only surviving house which gives one some impression of what Littleover would have looked like is Holme Hall, near Bakewell of 1636. The structure behind the towers in the picture, however, appears as
Lost Houses – The Old Mayor’s Parlour
Of all the losses of large houses in Derbyshire one of the most grievous was the completely unnecessary – if not vindictive – demolition of the largest urban timber framed domestic residence in Britain of its date, the Old Mayor’s Parlour, 15 Tenant Street, Derby in 1948. By a cruel irony this was the same year that the first Statutory List for Derby was prepared. Had the building survived a few more months, it would without doubt have been listed grade I. From the 18th century until the late 1930s it was a difficult house to see, for like all houses built in Derby before the modern era, it had to be fitted onto one of the long, narrow and in this case slightly curving burgage plots with which the Saxon burh was laid out in the early 10th century. It was thus end-on to Tenant Street and in c1740 a Georgian house was grafted onto its street front, so you could no longer get a glimpse of its ornamentally timbered north front from the street. It was only when the requirements of the 1929 Derby Central Improvement Plan were being met, that Corporation Street was driven through close by the east end of the house and the surrounding properties were razed, that the house once again became visible. With the coming of war in 1939, the scheme stalled for a decade until peace enabled the Council House to be finished in 1947, after the lifting of building restrictions. The Mayor would have occupied his fine suite of rooms (panelled with oak from freshly demolished Derwent Hall) and looked out of the window across the smart dual carriageway of Corporation Street. One can imagine the elected man of the people, seeing the decaying hulk of the Old Mayor’s Parlour before him, demanding it be cleared away forthwith as an eyesore, despite the undertaking by a predecessor to allow the Derbyshire Archaeological Society to purchase it for a nominal sum for re-erection elsewhere. No doubt ingratiating officers rushed to do His Worship’s bidding, for within weeks this fine old edifice was no more. It was a most terrible waste too, for the site has never subsequently been built upon. How splendid the old building would have looked, fully restored and put to beneficial community use and as a draw for tourists, if only some municipal grandee had not had his head full of the imagined desire of ‘the people’ for universal newness and for the destruction of what one of his colleagues called the ‘worn-out shibboleths of outmoded privilege’! The house itself was described even in the 1880s as ‘a picture more than a place; a ballad rather than a building’. Behind its Georgian street front it stretched over four wide gables containing the attics, with two floors below. The construction was close-studded oak framing with a heavy carved cornice below the gables. Issuing from each end of the façade on the first floor were two astonishing groups of four timber canted oriel windows, flanking a central bay that was almost blank, being lit only by an inconsequential three light mullioned window. On the ground floor each oriel crowned a four light flush mullioned window on the west end of the façade, whilst at the east the lower fenestration was only of three lights. There were no less than four doors, of which one, an impressive double-leafed affair elevated atop a flight of five stone steps, was the original entrance, whilst the others were evidence of the eastern end of the house having been turned into three tenements at an earlier date. This magnificent old town house once bore a date of 1483 which nobody has ever challenged since I first published it in 1987. Inside there was much period and later oak paneling, a massive oak newel staircase and a jolly frieze around part of the first floor landing of Achilles leading the Achaean cavalry against Troy, probably later 17th century in date. The name Old Mayor’s Parlour, is traditional but is only met with in the 19th century, when the house was occupied by various departments of the municipality and actually owned by two mayors. Yet its builder’s name is entirely lost to us, but from its size and magnificence it is likely to have been the town residence of one of the grandest County families, perhaps the Blounts, Lords Mountjoy, seated at Barton Blunt and at this period pre-eminent, but until some documentary evidence is found, we shall never be sure. By the time of the Hearth Tax return for Derby in 1670, the house seems to have been divided into two, with the east end rebuilt with an east facing seven bay two storey brick range under a hipped roof, clearly visible of the 1693 (Sitwell) and 1728 (Bucks’) East Prospects of the town. This part was the home of and was presumably extended by Dr Percival Willoughby (1596-1685) Britain’s first specialist gynaecologist. He was a younger son of the Willoughbys of Wollaton Hall, and had a long career in Derby. Even without his fees, his aristocratic background would have enabled him to fund such an extension. He is buried under a slab in the side aisle of St Peter’s church engraved with his coat of arms. The gardens stretched down to the river where once stood a fishing pavilion and a 19th century author claims that the river at this point was once spanned by a ‘bridge of crazy timbers’ although no confirmation of this bold assertion has ever emerged. It was after Dr Willoughby’s time, c1740 that the street front was rebuilt in Georgian style with a fine interior including a pretty mahogany staircase with two twisted balusters per tread. This was probably when the western part of the old house was adapted as a service wing and the eastern part divided up to make three houses – hence the multiplicity of doors. At some stage in the late 18th century, the building was
