Lost Houses – Snelston Hall
Snelston was the most ambitious Gothic house in Derbyshire, renowned for its splendour, but also one of the more short-lived Derbyshire seats. The history of Snelston prior to 1813, when the builder of this prodigy house came on the scene, is excessively convoluted. In essence, there had been three separate manorial estates at the time of Domesday Book, all tenanted by the Montgomery family, usually associated with Cubley, nearby. Another portion was owned by the Abbey of Burton. At some stage the Montgomerys divided their holding into two unequal parts, called Upper Hall and Lower Hall, these later descending to the Brownes and the Dethicks. The two portions later by sale soldiered on under two upstart houses, the Doxeys and the Bowyers. In 1777, the Upper Hall and its estate was sold to Derby banker Thomas Evans (founder a few years later of Darley Abbey mills) whilst the Bowyers let Lower Hall, letting, with the result that in 1780 it was destroyed by fire. In 1821 a dispute broke out between the heirs of the Bowyers and the two daughters of Edmund Evans, installed in the Upper Hall by Thomas. In 1813, Sarah Evans, married John Harrison, a match that changed everything. In 1822 Harrison bought out his sister-in-law and then set about taking control of the Lower Hall estate, gaining full possession in 1826. John Harrison was a remarkable man. Born in 1782, he was the son of the first marriage of another John Harrison (1736-1808) who appears to have been the man who established the family fortune. His father had been a yeoman in the village of Normanton-by-Derby but who by his death on 3rd January 1808 had become a successful attorney, having set up in business in 1778, taking Samuel Richardson Radford into partnership in 1804. Where young John was educated is not clear, but he was called to the bar from the Inner Temple around 1804. In 1808 he was in Derby, taking over his father’s legal practice in St. Mary’s Gate and in 1822 entered into partnership with Benjamin Frear, retiring in 1825. Notably, two weeks before his own marriage, Harrison’s sister, Juliana, had married John Stanton, whose uncle, James, in turn had already married her elder sister Ann, twelve years before There is no doubt that Harrison was exceedingly wealthy, however, and soon he wanted a country seat. He had by 1817 acquired a modest estate at Littleover, and proceeded to draw up plans for a house there. To this end he employed Lewis Nockalls Cottingham (1787-1847) a London based architect who had set up on his own three years before. In all nine Greek revival designs were made, all for his Littleover Villa, the finished version being built as Littleover Grange, although re-instatement after a serious fire 25 years ago has changed it considerably. Yet he seems not to have been satisfied with his Regency suburban villa, and in 1822, Cottingham drew his first design for Upper Hall, Snelston, which was, once again, Greek revival. Harrison retired from practice in 1825 (he had clearly made a killing somewhere along the line) and having gained possession of the entire estate the following year, Cottingham was put to work yet again, producing a restrained effort in castellated Gothic, but essentially a Classical design dressed up with ‘old world’ detailing. This was quickly followed by a third, more thoroughgoing Gothic design, but a visit to Alton Towers, not far away across the Dove seems to have inspired Harrison to try and emulate the fast-rising Romantic skyline of Lord Shrewsbury’s House. Cottingham, whose strength lay in his understanding of Gothic in any case, did not fail him. The next design, which was indeed built, was a bravura display of high Gothic. The main (east) entrance front was given nine bays separated by buttresses running up to the parapet and ending in crocketed pinnacles, with paired lancet windows either side divided by transoms under hood moulds with foliate stops. The asymmetrical projecting portico was gabled, two storeys, with an arch beneath a battlemented oriel window. The south front was dominated by a wide full height canted bay in similar mode whilst behind arose a dominant baronial great hall, the west gable end window of which being impressively ecclesiastical, packed with heraldic stained glass and flanked by slim octagonal turrets, a high slate roof embellished with small cupolas and a forest of decorative chimney stacks beyond. The house’s main facade continued in similar mode ending in an octagonal three storey tower on the SW angle, and indeed, from the lake in the 350 acre park (also Cottingham’s work, inspired by Humphrey Repton) the silhouette was distinctly Alton Tower like and certainly impressive. Nor did he stint himself on the interiors, which were lavishly ornate yet at the same time unexpectedly delicate, especially in the arcading in the great hall and the filigree Gothic of the staircase. Cottingham designed everything himself, including much of the furniture, the designs for which are now in the collections at the V & A, donated by the late Col. Stanton. Much of this and other ornate timberwork was fabricated nearby at the hands of a much overlooked talent, Adam Bede of Norbury a craftsman of more than ordinary talent and whose name was the inspiration for a central character of George Eliot’s, who knew Bede from her childhood at Norbury, where her grandfather had been estate foreman and is believed to have had Bede as an apprentice. The entire project took about a decade, 1827-1837, but Cottingham continued to design estate cottages, model farm buildings and the stable block (on the site of the burnt out Lower Hall). The entire combination of house, contents, gardens, village and estate were essentially the creation of Harrison and his architect. Had the house survived, it would now be an ensemble of major national importance. Harrison was appointed to both the Staffordshire and Derbyshire bench and in 1833 served as High Sheriff of Derbyshire. He obtained a
Lost Houses – Exeter House, Derby
In the early 17th century, the West bank of the Derwent was becoming very sought after for gardens and suddenly Full Street and Cockpit Hill became fashionable places to live. Exeter House, No. 1, Full Street, was the house occupied for three days and two nights by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745. Derby has had an unfortunate habit of demolishing buildings connected to famous figures from the past, buildings which today could be a tourist draw. As recently as 1971 the childhood home in Wilmot Street of philosopher Herbert Spencer was demolished, preceded by only four years by that of his birthplace; Erasmus Darwin’s house was lost to a planning scheme in 1933 and Joseph Wright’s birthplace went in 1909, whilst the house he lived in until four years before his death succumbed as early as 1800. Yet the rot really started with the demolition of Exeter House, No. 1, Full Street, early in 1855, for this was the house occupied for three days and two nights by Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, and in which he held the Council of War at which the fateful decision to turn back to Scotland was arrived at. Even then there were voices raised in protest. Not that it saved Exeter House, but at least the panelling from the so-called Council Chamber in the house was rescued and preserved by a sympathiser whose executors advertised it for sale in April 1872: ‘Old historic oak for sale. The whole of the oak panelling, cornicing, fittings of three window places, two fluted pilasters, two solid oak doors &c., &c., which were removed from THE OAK COUNCIL ROOM (on the pulling down of Exeter House in Derby, formerly the residence of the Earls of Exeter) in which Prince Charles Edward Stuart held his council of War previous to his retreat from Derby in 1745. The whole of the oak is of the finest grain and polish and a plan of the room having been kept (the dimensions being 20 feet square, height 10ft. 6in) it can easily be adapted and refixed. Apply Mr., Powell, 1 Full Street, 24 April l872.’ In March 1873 with buyers still hovering around, Michael Thomas Bass heard about it and stepped in himself and saved them for the Borough. In 1879 he presented the panelling to the newly-founded Museum and where they were given an allegedly ‘purpose-built’ room in which it has resided ever since. The room then spent 116 years as a meetings room, which meant that the public never got to see the fine oak panelling with its fluted Tuscan pilasters and pretty chimney piece. When I took over as Keeper of Antiquities, I lobbied consistently that we should turn it into a gallery celebrating Derby’s part in the ’Forty Five and hold meetings elsewhere. It was only after a change of Director that this got taken seriously and was finally agreed in 1995. We got a wax figure looking like Prince Charles Edward made, re-furnished the room, and the panelling (which we discovered had been seriously ‘bodged’ to fit it in the room, which was nowhere near 20 x 20ft) and disguised the Early English lancet windows with re-placement 12 pane sashes. We put out everything connected with the event, dimmed the lights, provided a moon and had a recording made of the man himself reading out loud from a letter reporting progress to his father James VII & III. Indeed, it was the last large project I was able to complete before being made redundant from the Museum in 1998. Exeter House though, had a longer history entirely. In the early 17th century, the West bank of the Derwent was becoming very sought after for gardens and suddenly Full Street and Cockpit Hill became fashionable places to live. Thus it was that on the outside of the curve Full Street used to make towards the Market Place, the Bagnold family erected c. 1635/1640 a two storey brick house with two straight gables over five bays of windows, probably at that stage, mullioned ones, although possibly also with a transom too. The gardens stretched down to the river bank, whilst the front door was virtually on the street. The son of the household, John Bagnold, rose from high municipal office (he had been town clerk) to be elected one of the two MPs for Derby in the 1680s, the first under the new 1682 Charter granted by Charles II. He resolved to enlarge the house, adding an impressive parallel range nearer the river, of two storeys with attic dormers in a hipped and sprocketed roof, embellished by tall panelled chimney stacks, linking the old house to his new creation by a short block. This new house was nine bays wide and was in the latest architectural manner. Although we have no account of the interior then, the surviving ceiling from contemporary Newcastle House (see Country Images July 2014) suggests lavish plasterwork and frescoes, along with fielded panelling and so forth. Bagnold died in 1698 aged 55, yet the daughter and ultimately co-heiress of this grandson of a yeoman farmer from Marston-on-Dove married one of the first of the ‘super-rich’, as we call them today: copper and lead entrepreneur Thomas Chambers (1660-1726) a London Merchant whose coat-of-arms has three copper cakes upon the shield and a miner in a mine for a crest, carved on his lavish marble tomb in Derby Cathedral by no less a sculptor than Louis-Francois Roubiliac. He even commissioned Robert Bakewell to surround the structure with a fine iron railing. Thomas Chambers’s father had been a Derby lead trader and he added to the grounds, acquiring a tract of land on the opposite side of the river to the house from the Sitwells as his pleasure grounds. He also built the delightful brick pavilion, boat house or summer house on the Derwent’s edge visible in the old East Prospect of the town. He too left an heiress and she made a glittering marriage in
Lost Houses – Castlefields
With heavy machinery at work and much building going up in the tract of land between the Railway Station and Traffic Street in Derby, the site of the most ambitious country house close to Derby will be developed for the second time since its demolition nearly 180 years ago. The area is now called Castleward – the name of the voting district, of course – but derives from Castlefields, the ancient name of the area and of the later house. That in itself derives from the shadowy castle at Derby, of which no trace remains, nor has since the Civil War, when a bank and ditch were reported, roughly where Albion Street is now. Castles, even totally vanished ones, usually leave a documentary trace, if only because if the Crown did not build them, one of the great magnates will have done so and not without Royal approval either. Yet no documents survive concerning a castle at Derby, although place name evidence is early enough to be convincing as proof that one did exist. In many of these undocumented cases, the missing fortification turns out to have been a prehistoric (often Iron Age) fort, but this is exceedingly unlikely at Derby, the topography being all against it. The discovery of a previously undocumented motte and bailey castle at Repton by Professor Martin Biddle in the Headmaster’s garden in 1989 (at first thought to have been a Viking dock!) gave the key. It was established as part of a chain of fortifications set up by Hugh Lupus, Earl of Chester around 1141, during the anarchy of King Stephen’s reign. He hoped to use the chaos to secure a separate Northern sovereign principality for himself, and these unauthorized or adulterine castles to defend his southern border, roughly along the Trent Valley, were the result. That at Castle Gresley is another example, and it rapidly became clear that the one at Derby fitted the distribution pattern perfectly. After the war, when Henry II managed to establish order again, they were mainly destroyed, Derby and Repton amongst them. Only the toponym lingered on, in the SE corner of the town. The Castle Fields lay south of Cockpit Hill (possibly the site of the castle’s motte), west of the Derwent and east of Osmaston Road, there being no London Road as we know it then. Before the early 18th century, one went to London following the Roman/Prehistoric route along Osmaston Road to Swarkestone Bridge and thence to Leicester. London Road was only formalised in the age of the turnpike. In order to raise funds, the Corporation, the rather paltry income of which derived from stall rents at fairs and tolls, from time to time sold some of the generous quantities of land it controlled around the edge of the town, the original common fields, of which Castle Fields was one. Others included Parkfield, Whitecross Field, Newlands and so on. At the end of the first decade of the 18th century money was required to build a new Guildhall to replace the 15th century one camped out in the middle of the Market Place. Castle Field was therefore sold to Isaac Borrow of Hulland Hall (1673-1745), whose father John had migrated from Gotham, Notts., and was descended from a family living at Thrumpton in the 16th century. The historian William Woolley wrote of ‘…Castlefields, where Mr. Boroughs [sic] builds a very good house (with a curious garden and paddock for deer)’. Woolley’s MS is undated but internal evidence suggests that he wrote the Derby portion in 1713, which fixes the date for a house that one would on architectural grounds describe as ‘Queen Anne’ fairly firmly. Castlefields was a provincial Baroque house in brick of three storeys oriented east – west. The two main fronts were astylar, seven bays wide, the central three recessed on the east side and breaking forward by a brick’s width on the west. The two entrance aedicules have segmental pediments, and the angles are marked by stone quoins. It is difficult to tell whether the fenestration is set in stone surrounds, but if it is, they were clearly fairly skimpy. There were also recessed blind brick panels above the windows on the second floor forming the parapet, which had no cornice only copings, as at Clifton Campville (Staffs., 1708 by William Dickinson) and the Wardwick Tavern, Derby (also 1708). There are no sill or plat bands and no visible string courses. The north & south sides appear to have been of two bays if the painting is to be trusted, but south and north Bucks’ 1728 view suggests a much more credible deeper, double pile house, probably giving five bays on the returns. Both pictures suggest that the south front at least projected by a further bay, recessed from the main facade, like the central section on the east. From Woolley’s description the park was intended for deer, and the curious garden may have been the rather dated looking parterre seen in the picture. There were two slightly detached service wings to the north and south, too with stables beside the former. The whole ensemble was really quite grand. I am coming to the opinion that its similarities to the square, three storey houses without an order of columns or pilasters (astylar) like Wingerworth (1725), Umberslade (1700, Warw.), Newbold Revel (Warw. 1715), Longnor (Staffs. 1726) link it firmly to the oeuvre of Francis Smith of Warwick. He designed all the foregoing (or is firmly linked to them) and whilst building All Saints’, Derby for James Gibbs seems to have acquired seven other Derbyshire commissions from amongst the subscribers to the new church (now the Cathedral). Nor was Smith unknown locally before that, having designed and built Kedleston (1700-1721) and rebuilt Etwall Halls. Indeed, the very year Castlefields was ‘building’, 1713, he was providing a design for a new Guildhall for the Corporation of Derby. As Isaac Borrow was a member of the Corporation then, this may be the link between
Lost Houses – Crich Manor House
Crich is really rather a confusing place, not least in respect to its country houses. The descent of the manorial estate since Hubert Fitz Ralph, the Domesday proprietor has been something of a saga, and many of the subsequent lords were non-resident. This phenomenon certainly would have put paid to the original manor house, built, as one might reasonably expect, beside the church. Quite when it was built is not really known. Hubert was a tenant-in-chief of the Crown and was described in several documentary sources as ‘of Crich’ or ‘Lord of Crich’ which would suggest that he was probably seated there. There is, however, some room for doubt as he held 25 manorial estates in Derbyshire alone, of which only eight had recorded sub-tenants holding under him in 1086. Hubert’s father was a Norman called Ralph de Ryes, and a younger branch of the family were the Ryes of Whitwell. As there is a field to the NW of the church at Crich called Hall Croft, it would seem safe to conclude that this is where one of the FitzRalphs built their capital mansion, although it is not mentioned in any document until it had passed via an heiress in 1218 to Ralph de Frecheville. He certainly, therefore, lived at Crich, but his son, Anker, married the heiress of the much richer manor of Staveley and re-located thence. At this juncture, the house at Crich may have been used either as a dower house or by younger members of the family. Eventually, the Frechevilles decided they no longer needed the manorial estate and sold it to Roger Belers of Kirkby Park, Leicestershire (hence Kirkby Bellairs) around 1301. They were a branch of the Norman family of d’Albini, so were much out of the same mould as the FitzRalphs. They were also descendants of the FitzRalphs, as Alice de Wakebridge, Roger’s wife had Juliana, sister of a later Hubert FitzRalph of Crich for a mother. Although his son Sir Roger is also frequently described as ‘of Crich’, his brother Thomas seems to have been the one that lived in the manor house. Despite four wives, Sir Roger left only daughters, between whom the manor was split, but the elder, initially married to Sir Robert Swillington of Swillington, in Yorkshire, had a son, Sir Roger, who managed to re-unite the two halves of the patrimony. One of his two sons may have lived at Crich, but the family by and large remained in Yorkshire. Eventually, both died without have had children, and the estate passed by marriage to Sir John Gray of Ingleby, Lincolnshire from whom it came to Ralph, Lord Cromwell, Henry VI’s Treasurer, who already owned the South Wingfield estate. Thus Crich became for nearly 150 years, part of the extensive holdings of the Cromwells and their heirs the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury. It was without doubt from this point (1467) that the original manor house would have disappeared. The patrimony of the Shrewsburys was eventually split three ways amongst his daughters, on the death of the 6th Earl in 1616, Two thirds of the manorial estate were sold off by their descendants, a third in 1660 to a group of seven rich local farmers, and another third in 1710 to William Sudbury. From these, the manor was rapidly split into a number of small freeholds. Nevertheless, under the long sequence of absentee chief lords, there were families who held sub-tenancies of parts of the estate, Anthony Babington of Dethick (the plotter) being one. Just prior to his fall, trial and execution, probably in anticipation of the possibility of the plot to free Mary Stuart failing, he off-loaded some of the family holdings, including an estate at Crich, held under Lord Shrewsbury. So it was, that in 1584, John Clay, grandson of another John, who held a modest but lead-rich estate at Chappell in Crich, purchased this Babington tenancy, by this date a rich one, through the exploitation of its minerals. He twice married well, obtained a grant of arms at the Heralds’ Visitation of 1569 and died in 1632, by which time he had built himself a manor house, thought to be the one visible on the celebrated early 18th century panoramic painting bought by the late Col. Denys Bower of The Grove and now at Chiddingstone Castle in Kent. Here we see a stone built L-plan house of two storeys and attics, the gables being coped with ball finials on the kneelers. The windows are clearly mullioned and the house is set in a garden on the SW and a farmyard on the SE with a range of outbuildings to the north. It much resembles houses like Goss Hall in Ashover, Rowtor in Birchover or Allen Hill at Matlock. John Clay’s monument in Crich church establishes that his two sons William and Theophilus, died before him and his daughter Penelope married Thomas Brailsford of Seanor in Ault Hucknall, not far from Hardwick, who duly inherited what amounted to an extensive estate. One of their eight sons was duly named Theophilus after his uncle and the eldest John after old Clay himself. It seems unlikely that the Brailsfords altered the house and it was taxed on six hearths in 1670 when it appears to have been let to the Wood family, the Brailsfords being still ensconced at Seanor. Towards the end of the 17th century (certainly before 1712) it passed to the Flint family of Crich and they seem to have rebuilt the house fairly extensively. This seems to have taken the form of demolishing the cross wing and extending the hall range by three bays, but in a fashionable classical style, with vertical mullioned and transomed cross windows (later adapted as sashes). A new entrance was included where this new range joined the 16th century or early 17th century work, so that to the left there was this new two storey range, and to the right the old three bays, which included the original attics. Hence
Lost Houses – Hasland House
Hasland is one of the many outliers of the Manor of Chesterfield, and was long held by the ancient family of Linacre, under whom it was, in the 15th century, tenanted by a cadet branch of the Leakes of Sutton Scarsdale. Thomas Leake of Hasland, for instance, was Bess of Hardwick’s maternal grandfather. After the death in a duel in 1597 of another Thomas Leake, the succession to the estate was thrown into disarray and it was eventually acquired by Col. Roger Molyneux of the Teversal (Notts.) family, later a prominent Parliamentary officer but, ironically, he disposed of it shortly before the Civil war to a Royalist Capt. John Lowe of Owlgreaves (now Algrave) Hall, second son of Anthony Lowe of Alderwasley – if only he’d known!. The estate and house – the still extant old Manor House is written up in The Derbyshire Country House 3rd edition (Ashbourne 2001) Vol. II. pp. 277-8 – continued amongst their descendants until in 1727 the heiress brought it to her husband (and kinsman) Henry Lowe of Park Hall, Denby, whereupon it was sold to the upwardly mobile Lucas family. It seems to have been at this juncture that Hasland House was built in a small park immediately NNW of the village centre, presumably because the old hall was considered inadequate for more up-to-date requirements and was thereupon let as a farm. Thomas Lucas alias Oliver was the son of Bernard (originally from Grindleford) and started out as a Chesterfield butcher being fined for operating without being a burgess in 1689. Nevertheless, thanks to him and his sons, the family swiftly became unconscionably rich. It is not clear who actually built the house. In 1727 Thomas was getting on and had a house elsewhere and it was more likely his second son, Bernard, who built a fine new brick house. It was five bays wide on both main facades, of three storeys with a hipped roof behind a low parapet, the gauged brick lintels having triple stone keyblocks. There were plain pilasters at the angles and the entrance – surely aping the style of Francis Smith of Warwick – set in a stone surround crowned with a segmental pediment. The fact that the roof was irregular, ending with a hip to the west but not to the east, might suggest that a fairly substantial earlier house with gables might have been rebuilt, rather than the house being entirely new. Inside there were three excellent panelled rooms and a timber staircase of very fine joinery with three balusters per tread and carved tread ends. From its style and appearance, the house must have been built within a year or two of Lucas acquiring the estate and it was later described as “a commodious and pleasant mansion”. It could even have been built to a design by the great Francis Smith, who was then building Wingerworth Hall not very far away for the much grander Hunlokes, but no building records appear to have survived. Bernard Lucas (1708-1771) was Mayor of Chesterfield in 1741 and was succeeded by his son – another – Bernard, who died unmarried in 1810, and then by the latter’s younger brother Thomas (1731-1818). Thomas’s son, yet another Bernard, greatly increased his fortune by marrying Esther, sister and heiress of Anthony Lax (later Maynard) of Chesterfield, an opulent attorney with a Yorkshire estate and decided to build a new house again, not so far away. This is the present Hasland Hall, for many years now a school, and Hasland House was let and later sold to Josiah Claughton, a Chesterfield druggist and wholesale chemist with 35 acres. The Claughtons were thereafter in residence for almost the whole of the 19th century for, although Josiah died in 1836, his widow Elizabeth only died in1853 and four unmarried daughters – Jane, Catherine, Ellen and Fanny – lived there until the death of Catherine, the last survivor, in 1895. Nobody, in all this time seems to have sought to alter or rebuild the old house, which appears nevertheless to have had much charm. The only exception seems to have been that during the Claughton regime, the three over four glazing bar sashes were replaced by plate glass ones with Victorian margin glazing bars, which did nothing for the appearance of the house. The house was briefly let to Capt. Herbert Murray having been inherited by Catherine Claughton’s nephew Revd. Maurice Beedham, and then by his son, John, who was based in Canada and sold their house and modest acres in 1904. The purchaser was Chesterfield grandee Bernard Lucas, a descendant of the original Lucas owner in the 18th century, who paid £7,650. His tenant was another member of a notable local family, Eric Drayton Swanwick, second son of Russell Swanwick and grandson of Frederick Swanwick of Whittington Hall, the man who surveyed the North Midland Railway for George Stevenson (later of Tapton Hall) in 1838-1840. Frederick also designed many of the buildings, the stations not done by Francis Thompson, and bridges on the NMR. E. D. Swanwick, however, later moved to the family seat, Whittington Hall, and Hasland House entered its last phase. The house and only 15 acres of grounds were acquired in 1912 by the philanthropic Chesterfield Alderman George Albert Eastwood, who had been Mayor of Chesterfield over three successive years from 1905 to 1907/8. He was exceedingly wealthy and was the manufacturer of railway wagons. He gave the house and grounds for a public park, opened 2nd July 1913 in memory of his father, George Eastwood (1826-1910). The following year, former owner’s son Bernard Chaytor Lucas built a new community hall adjacent to the house, in front of which was positioned a rather fine fountain from the grounds of Ringwood Hall, given courtesy of Charles Markham who had lived at both Ringwood and Hasland Halls. The community hall was six bays long, the windows separated by buttresses, and boasted a broken pediment towards to park, a tall round headed window penetrating
Lost Houses – Abbot’s Hill House
It is very difficult to imagine, when looking at Derby’s Babington Lane with its endless tail-backs of ’buses, that less than a century ago it was virtually rus in urbe: the countryside in town par excellence. Indeed, the last owner of Abbot’s Hill House, that stood for just on two centuries between Babington and Green Lanes, W. H. Richardson, was a keen huntsman and kept his hunters in the stable block there. Architecturally, Abbot’s Hill was one of Derby’s more important mansions, being one of a small group of early 18th century town houses which all appear to have been designed by the same architect. We have no certain idea who he was except that he worked in the style of Francis Smith of Warwick, architect of Darley Hall (1727). Another similar house was Castle Fields, nearby (demolished 1838) and The Friary. The house was built in about 1720 on a large area of elevated semi-parkland that lay east of Green Lane and west of the grounds of Sitwell Hall (later Babington House), at The Spot, now the site of Waterstone’s. This was once the park of Babington Hall, a Tudor (or earlier) mansion belonging to the Babingtons of Dethick. That venerable building, wherein Mary Queen of Scots passed one night in January 1586, was demolished in 1811, and the land itself was by then bounded by Babington Lane, a new street pitched by Derby’s Second Improvement Commission in 1789. This left a wedge to the east of Green Lane (then more picturesquely, and accurately, called Green Hill) on which Dr. Simon Degge, FRS, FSA began to erect Abbott’s Hill. The name has no obvious resonance with any of Derby’s six whilom monastic establishments and may have been a conceit of Degge’s, for he was a keen archaeologist and indeed was the first man to have excavated the necropolis in the vicarage garden at Repton, subsequently opened in much more scientific style by Professor Martin Biddle in the 1980s. Degge was the great-grandson of Staffordshire born Sir Simon Degge, who was a notable Recorder of Derby, who is locally famous for having spared the life of the waterborne gentleman counterfeiter Noah Bullock in the 1670s. Dr. Degge also had a country estate at Stramshall in Staffordshire, so Abbot’s Hill was, strictly speaking, a town house, or occasional residence. The house itself was typical of the period, being brick, of two-and-half storeys, with a flat roof hidden by a parapet set on a modest cornice. It was five bays wide with the central bay breaking forward by a brick’s width and the sides were of four bays. It and an entrance set within a bolection moulding topped by an entablature supported on brackets with a central keyblock. The windows had cambered heads with gauged brick lintels again centered by keyblocks with small cornices on them, rather like those on The Wardwick Tavern of 1708. The south side (of which no illustration appears to survive) was presumably similar, with grounds coming to an apex where Green Lane and Normanton Road met Babington Lane and Burton Road began. The dining room was panelled with oak which was said to have been rescued from Babington Hall. As the latter co-existed with Degge’s house for almost a century, and bearing in mind that Georgian dining rooms were invariably panelled in order to facilitate the removal of tobacco deposits, there must have been some earlier panelling which was presumably moved elsewhere c. 1811. The room itself was 25ft 8in by 16ft 3in, opening off the entrance hall from which also rose an impressive oak staircase with a ramped handrail set on a balustrade with three turned balusters per tread. Also opening off the hall were the breakfast parlour, study and drawing room, the latter altered as a laboratory by a later owner, Dr. Forester French, a friend of William Strutt, to conduct medical experiments. There was also a second staircase, a private drawing room on the first floor, three bedrooms with sitting rooms and a further five bedrooms in the attic. In 1817 the Derby builder/architect Joseph Cooper built a new stable block and extended the service wing to include a ‘fireproof safe’ and a self-flushing water closet after the design by John Whitehurst FRS for Clumber Park as refined by Charles Sylvester and William Strutt. The gardens were terraced down to St. Peter’s church yard. Dr. French, a brother-in-law of F N C Mundy of Markeaton Hall, had bought the house from Dr. Degge’s heirs, and in 1844 his heirs in turn sold it to Alderman Robert Forman, an exceedingly rich 53-year old Chellaston-born maltster who went on to serve as Mayor of Derby in 1848. His maltings were nearby and in 1823 he had somewhat compromised the setting of his new house by building a terraced row of 28 cottages on the opposite side of Babington Lane with a malting floor set above the living accommodation and all the windows facing away from the street, presenting therefore an intimidating windowless aspect to Babington Lane. Alderman Forman’s son Robert inherited less than a decade later and died in 1862, leaving it to his brother, Cllr. Frederick Forman. He, though, built himself a new house (to the designs of Edward du Sautoy, great grand-father of the late Cllr. Martin du Sautoy), on the grounds, at the edge of Green Lane opposite Wilson Street. Completed in 1869, this was called Green Hill Villa and was a fine house unpardonably destroyed in 2006 to build an exceedingly intrusive hostel. Thus in 1869, the remaining grounds of Abbot’s Hill plus house and stables were sold to lace magnate Walter Boden, brother of Henry Boden of The Friary. In 1888 Boden added a rather odd looking new wing and formed a new drive from Green Lane, now Degge Street. He also sold part of the land to the Council to build the Art College and more just south of St. Peter’s church, to form Gower Street. The architect for
Lost Houses – Stainsby House
Any reader who thinks I might have run out of substantial lost country houses to describe by now will be, I am afraid, mistaken. I may have been seduced into writing about some modest ones, but more substantial casualties are still unrecorded in this series. One of them is Stainsby House, Smalley, seat of the Wilmot-Sitwell family. In The Derbyshire Country House (3rd edition 2001), I described this house as ‘remarkably large and incorrigibly unlovely’ and I feel that I can stand by that assessment without demur. One always expects Classical country houses to be symmetrical, but Stainsby was anything but. Stone built of finely ashlared Rough Rock from Horsley Castle quarry, the entrance front, which faced approximately North, had a recessed, wide, three bay three storey centre flanked on the left by a two bay wing which was built slightly forward of the centre and which extended by a further three bays to the west but of only two lower storeys. To the right was a much longer four bay wing, also breaking forward, and the two projections were joined by a ground floor loggia centered by a pedimented Ionic portico. There were quoins at the angles, a top parapet and grooved cornice. As if that wasn’t enough, the south (garden) front had a regular three bay pedimented centre, flanked by two bays either side set slightly back, although the attic storey to the right had three lights, whilst that to the left only two. The east portion ended with a full height canted bay, but this feature was absent from the west end of the façade, which stopped abruptly with the lower three bay two storey part seemingly tacked on and set back a little further. At the west end, too, was a sort of pavilion wing with five bays facing west, beyond which was the coach house and stable court with a high arcaded lantern, probably the handsomest part of the entire building. The origin of the house and estate are equally complex. A part of Smalley came into the hands of the Morleys of Morley but, by c1250 it had come to William de Steynesby, a member of the family of Steynesby from the village near Hardwick we now spell Stainsby, and it is thanks to him that the estate acquired that name. His grandson, Sir William de Steynesby died c1300 and from him it somehow became the property of the Sacheverells of Hopwell about 1601. Because the estate was rich in coal, it was extremely valuable and was sold on again to George, second son of George Mower of Barlow Woodseats, whose name in the context of Stainsby is more often spelled More. In 1629, aged 21 he married Mary daughter of Robert Wilmot of Chaddesden. With his son also George (died c1705), he exploited the coal. The second George More died without surviving issue when the estate was again sold to a Heanor mining entrepreneur John Fletcher (died 1734), whose newly granted (1731) coat-of-arms was a riot of mining implements. He probably built the core of the later house, being the wide three bay three storey centre portion. Indeed, the Mores’ house must have been a much more modest affair, taxed on only three hearths in 1670. Fletcher’s son married the eventual heiress of the Smalley Hall estate (which went on his death to the eldest grandson). The youngest grandson , John Fletcher, inherited Stainsby. With his death without issue, it came to his sister, married to Francis Barber of Greasley, Notts, who like all the other families involved, were coal owners. The estate then passed to Francis’s son John (1734-1801), who lived amongst the family’s Warwickshire coal mines at Weddington and allowed his mother to remain in the house until her death. He is notable as a friend of John Whitehurst and was the inventor of the gas turbine. When old Mrs Barber died the estate was sold, through a middle man called Samuel Buxton, to Edward Sacheverell Wilmot, a grandson of Robert Wilmot of Chaddesden Hall, Derby who had married Joyce, the heiress of the famous Whig politician, William Sacheverell, whose extensive estate included that of Morley. His aim in acquiring the estate was to unite the two portions of the original Morley family holding, half of which he had already inherited from the Sacheverells. Another Sacheverell heiress had conveyed a third portion of the estate to the Sitwells of Renishaw and George Sitwell’s heiress Elizabeth, had left it to him in her will, obliging him to assume the surname and arms of Sitwell in addition to Wilmot. He seems immediately to have set about enlarging the house by adding the projecting wings, presumably in view of their irregularity in separate building campaigns, although the four bay one may originally have been narrower. Whatever additions had previously been made to the Fletchers’ house is beyond our ken, but it may have dictated the disparity in size of the projecting bays and the strange placing of the attic windows on the garden front. Whether he had an architect – Thomas Gardner of Uttoxeter built in this plain monumental style in the 1790s locally – or used a local builder we do not know. The new owner died in 1836 whereupon his son, Edward Degge Wilmot-Sitwell decided on a rebuild which Charles Kerry claims was done in 1839, including having the house ‘refaced and restored’. This seems to have included the west extension, the entrance front arcaded loggia and the canted bay on the right of the garden front. It may also have included the Main Road boundary wall with its strange conically roofed bastions and Gothick gateway, along with the expansion of the right hand bay of the entrance front as well. As it would seem likely that any scheme of rebuilding would have surely included a matching bay to the left of the garden front, one is of the opinion that the alterations were actually set in train by Wilmot-Sitwell senior
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 – 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
