Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Green Hall, Belper
The story of the Strutt family and that of modern Belper, which they more or less created, are intertwined. They built the mills and the workers’ housing (to a very high standard for the period) and over several generations endowed the town with numerous benisons, leaving the built environment the better for it; today it is a settlement with, for its size, an extraordinary number of listed buildings. Some, however, failed to survive to be listed, or at least to benefit from the 1968 planning act. This obliged listed buildings to be put through a series of evaluations, resulting in consent or otherwise to demolish or alter them. Prior to 1st January 1969 one had merely to notify the local authority and the Royal Commission on Historic Monuments (so they could record the building) before doing anything drastic. One Belper building to fall to the wrecking ball was Green Hall, situated at the top of King Street on the north side. It was one of a group of three local country houses built in the period 1790-1810 for various members of the Strutt family: Milford House, Makeney House and Bridge Hill House being the others, of which the latter appeared in these pages in November 2012. Three of these houses were designed by Jedediah Strutt’s eldest son, William Strutt, FRS, an amateur architect who worked in a Neo-Classical style and who was usually sensible enough to employ what we would today call an executant architect, for instance Samuel Brown when he designed the Derbyshire General Infirmary at Derby, 1806-1810. The latter year is that in which the sources agree the house was built at Green Hall. The idea was to provide a house for Jedediah Strutt the younger, second son of George Benson Strutt, younger son of the first Jedediah, and founder of the Belper branch of the family. G. B. Strutt lived at Bridge Hill House, and in 1810, his son married on 12th April, Susannah, daughter of Rotherham steel maker Joshua Walker. Green Hall was to be their home until such time as Jedediah’s father died and they could move to Bridge Hill. The house was nothing like as grand as Bridge Hill, and once extended lacked the latter’s symmetry and elegance, although the hand of uncle William can still be discerned in it. Yet it is a bit of a hotch-potch when viewed from the small garden on its west, nor was the short, south (entrance front) particularly architectonic either. The North side was blank and the east side was aggressively plain and stood flush to the west edge of Green Lane. The west front had five bays and although the entire house was of two storeys, the range to the North was higher, under a hipped roof and dwarf parapet; This contained the high-ceilinged dining room. To the right was a conservatory fronted room beyond which was the only symmetrical portion, three bays with a central pediment under which were superimposed tripartite windows, where were the drawing room with master bedroom above. This part had a slightly higher hipped slate roof, and was the original William Strutt-designed house. On the east side the extension created a recessed court yard which acquired a glazed roof. From the asymmetrical extensions it becomes clear that as Jedediah and Susannah’s family increased, so the house was extended accordingly, hence the taller block at the NW angle and the linking range. The need to entertain may have increased too, after the death of Jedediah’s elder brother George in 1821, unmarried. Jedediah was henceforth the heir and thereafter the manager of the mills. The house was filled with gadgetry of the type pioneered by John Whitehurst and Erasmus Darwin (the latter a mentor of William Strutt) designed to improve what was then called the domestic economy and included improved kitchen ranges with back boilers to heat water for bathing, flushing lavatories and clever ventilation systems, all of which William Strutt had tried out in St. Helen’s House, Derby. There was only a low stone wall in front of the main range and a patch of lawn with a near-circular path, the remainder of the pleasure grounds lay on the other side of King Street, which in 1830 was cut through the grounds between stone retaining walls. Part of the grounds to the west of the house even oversailed shops built into the retaining walls. To ensure continued access to all the pleasure grounds therefore, an iron bridge with a depressed Tudor arch was built, to connect to the land on its south side, called The Paddock. This was cast, at a cost of £42.10s.9d, at a local foundry, the bill being paid on completion in August 1832. All this was probably done at the behest of Jedediah who, as manager of the Strutt mills in the town, was a keen improver, like his father. The Paddock itself was the scene of public celebrations marking the passage of the Reform Act in the autumn of 1832, when the new bridge no doubt proved handy. When George Benson Strutt died aged eighty in 1841, Jedediah and his second wife moved into Bridge Hill House, leaving his own son, able to move into it when he came of age in 1847. In his turn he succeeded to Bridge Hill House on Jedediah’s death in 1854. It then became home to John Strutt, the youngest brother, who died unmarried in 1858. It remained, largely unoccupied until 1867, by which time it had become clear that no member of the family was likely to want it as a residence, a probable exacerbated by the construction of the railway station immediately to the west in 1840. Nor was any likely candidate found to take a lease on the place and in the end, it was let to a boys’ preparatory school and the garden bridge was removed in late autumn 1867. The Paddock itself was given to the Belper UDC in 1921 and the town’s war memorial,
