Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Stretton-in-Shirland
It is entirely through the thorough researches undertaken by Gladwyn Turbutt that we have a good, comprehensive history of this lost house and its occupants. Derbyshire historian Stephen Glover wrote in around 1832 that the house overlooked ‘one of the finest valleys in the county’ and if you were to go to our excellent Museum at Derby you will see Joseph Wright’s painting The Rainbow, which is understood to have been painted by the river Amber just below the house which, in its heyday, was set in a small park of unusual beauty. And indeed, Joseph Wright had strong connections with the house (as he had with lost Yoxall Lodge in Staffordshire through his long friendship with Derby’s slavery abolitionist Thomas Gisborne). When I wrote about Derwent Hall, we encountered a house that was lost to the building of a reservoir, and Errwood Hall was also a secondary casualty in Derbyshire of a house lost to the desire of local authorities to flood valleys of incomparable beauty to quench the thirst of the citizens of adjoining towns. Regrettably, Ford House and its predecessor, Ford Old Hall (or House), were also casualties of this ecologically unfriendly aspect of having to deal with a burgeoning population. Some time in the Tudor era, a family called Curtis held a modest estate at Ford, but they enjoyed the status of yeoman farmer rather than of gentlemen. In the seventh century John Curtis married a daughter of their near neighbours, the Revels of Ogston Hall, subsequently became a Quaker and in 1680, with the encouragement of a Revell kinsman, migrated to America where his progeny still flourish. The Curtis family must have built the old hall, a single range of which survived into the twentieth century, and which was the subject of a postcard issued by a local firm at Alfreton. What one sees is a lowish two storey range of coal measures sandstone with two light mullioned windows set with cast iron casements and topped with a stone slate roof. To the right was a later range, and the whole functioned as a farmhouse until it met its nemesis. Swathwick, in Wingerworth, who initially added the range to the right of the Old Hall around 1700, allegedly as a malthouse, although the formality of its architecture rather suggests increased accommodation for Holland who had married three years before. Yet he was a maltster, and a successful one, but one feels that the epicentre of his trade would more likely have been in Alfreton, three miles away. In 1713 George was succeeded by his son Thomas, whose accounts partially survive, entries from which suggest that he spent £100 building stables in 1721 and a few years later spent £336 for ‘building the house at fford’ which is usually taken to be the Ford House that survived to be photographed. Yet there are reasons to doubt this. The three photographs I have been able to dig our (three of them locally printed postcards) show the house as a three storey stone building, of coal measures sandstone, ashlared to the main (east) front and of random rubble brought to course at the sides. It had a hipped roof, a cornice supporting a dwarf parapet and three bays of paired sashes to the main façade, a most unusual arrangement for the date. The pediment at the centre of the ground floor was clearly not intended as the main entrance, as it spanned two bays like the rest, of which only one serves as a door, almost certainly to give access to the garden. The entrance was clearly in the courtyard behind and to the left. To the left too there is a single bay of superimposed paired mullioned but sashed windows, roughly the same height as the main range and beyond that a courtyard connecting to a very pretty stable block consisting of a pediment over a triple arcade. The main house is most emphatically not in the style of George I, nor is the stable block for that matter. Looking at the two storey range to the left (the south wing) I suspect this is all that was suffered to remain after a later building campaign, of the original house, possibly a rebuild of an earlier building (Mr. Turbutt suspects that earlier stable block of the Old Hall which stood behind to the north). This remnant, latterly the kitchen wing, included an inscribed pane of glass to ‘Thomas Holland de Ford in Com. Derb. Gent. Decimo Quarto die Aprilis Anno Dni 1729’ This must surely be a commemoration of the completion of the building, for which the £336 payment was part. What was there latterly looks remarkably like a late eighteenth century house, although the paired windows are still a rare feature. Furthermore, the stables look a little earlier if anything; the arcade under a plain pediment closely resembles the summerhouse built by Joseph Pickford at Ashbourne Mansion around 1763 and in the early nineteenth century was embellished with stone balls to the gateway and wall in true Palladian tradition, these details known only from a contemporary painting. Finally, although the 1720s accounts break off, incomplete, £336 for a substantial house (unless a payment on account) is not a lot of money. Thomas Holland died in 1776 and, I suspect, at a much later date than his youthful building programme, he had the stables enlarged and embellished, probably in the 1760s, using an architect not unfamiliar with Palladian motifs, perhaps Edmund Stanley of Chesterfield, who oversaw the building of the new hall at Ogston nearby to the designs of Joseph Pickford of Derby. Thomas was succeeded by his son John, an altogether more sensitive man than his father. He married in 1777, his wife Mary being sister-in-law to his equally cultivated neighbour William Turbutt. The couple entertained at Ford an important network of enlightenment friends including painters like Wright and his friend William Tate, the abolitionist and collaborator of William Wilberforce, Revd. Thomas Gisborne and
