Category Archives: Country Houses

Money well spent

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Cusworth Hall, South Yorkshire: chapel

Cusworth Hall, South Yorkshire: chapel

Photo:  Mike Higginbottom, courtesy of Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council

William Wrightson (1676-1760), the builder of the present Cusworth Hall, was, like his father, an able and successful lawyer.  He successively married two Northumbrian heiresses, one the daughter of a coal-merchant, the other co-heiress to a landed estate.  He acted as steward for the Duke of Norfolk’s Sheffield estate, and was still accumulating lucrative government offices at the age of 84.

By the time he inherited Cusworth in 1724 he was easily in a financial position to improve the property:  he enlarged the gardens, and in the late 1730s commissioned George Platt of Rotherham (1700-1743) to design a completely new house to the south of the earlier Hall.  When George Platt died his son John, then in his mid-teens, continued the project, possibly assisted by his grandfather William Rickard.

The Platts’ building work was finished in 1745, and shortly afterwards the heir, John Battie (1722-1765), suggested that the central block was “too tall for its length”, and recommended James Paine (c1716-1789) to extend the wings to improve the house and correct its proportions.

Paine’s suggestions included extending the side pavilions to make a chapel wing to the west and a library to the east.  Wrightson seems to have kept a close eye on the accounts, preferring quality to ostentation, and employing the excellent craftsmen recommended by Paine, such as the plasterer Joseph Rose and the artist Francis Hayman whose ‘Ascension’ remains in situ.  All this work was completed by 1755.

The only substantial further addition is the dining room of 1907, tactfully inserted behind the chapel for Lady Isabella Battie-Wrightson (1853-1917).

Cusworth Hall and its park can be enjoyed throughout the year as an amenity of Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council:  its excellent teashop is as cramped as the fascinating museum inside the house, but the parkland and the view is a breath of fresh air.

For further information see http://www.doncaster.gov.uk/Leisure_and_Culture/Museums_and_Galleries/Cusworth_Hall_and_Park/Information.asp.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Do-it-yourself castle

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Stainborough Castle, South Yorkshire

Stainborough Castle, South Yorkshire

Thomas Wentworth, Lord Raby, was furious when he failed to inherit the estate of Wentworth Woodhouse.

He bought the nearby Stainborough estate and had the family earldom revived in his favour.

Even after he’d tacked on to the existing house a grand baroque wing gazing east towards Wentworth Woodhouse he felt a need to impress his superiority over his Watson neighbours, so he built himself a ruined castle, Stainborough Castle, which its inscription describes as “rebuilt” in 1730.

Mining subsidence has made it even more of a ruin than Lord Strafford had intended, and it has in recent years been tidied up.

It’s the literal high spot of the longest walk round Wentworth Castle Gardens [http://www.wentworthcastle.org/view.asp?id=145], which takes in a sample of the other garden buildings that Lord Strafford and his son scattered about the estate – the Corinthian Temple, Archer’s Hill Gate and Lady Mary’s Obelisk which commemorates the bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her encouragement of inoculation against smallpox.

The restored garden has outstanding interpretation boards at regular intervals, so that it’s possible to understand the significance of near and distant features at leisure, strolling through a succession of small gardens, informal wildernesses and formal linear walks.

At a greater distance – up to four miles – there are walks around the park, taking in a greater series of monuments, including the Queen Anne Monument (1734), the Rotunda (1742-6) and the Duke of Argyle Monument.

Wentworth Castle Gardens has a superb visitor centre with a café and a programme of events throughout the year:  http://www.wentworthcastle.org/diary.asp.  Christmas is particularly attractive:  Santa feeds the deer, answers letters and hands out presents in his grotto, while parents are kept occupied with mulled wine.

There’s something for everybody, almost every day of the year.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

Keeping up with the Wentworths

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Wentworth Castle, South Yorkshire: east front

Wentworth Castle, South Yorkshire: east front

Wentworth Woodhouse is but one of the great estates of South Yorkshire.  Its literal neighbour, Wentworth Castle, is the result of a saga of gargantuan rivalry between distant relatives, expressed in grand architecture, extensive landscapes and demonstrative garden buildings.

Thomas Wentworth (1672-1739), Lord Raby, had what might now be called “issues” because he had expected to inherit the great estate of Wentworth Woodhouse from his cousin, the 2nd Earl of Strafford.  James Lees-Milne pinned him down as “an unbending Tory, an arch snob…and remarkable for ‘excess of bloated pride’ in his own descent”.

Lord Strafford chose to bequeath Wentworth Woodhouse to his sister’s son, Mr Thomas Watson, who took the name Wentworth and liked to be known as “His Honour Wentworth”.

Lord Raby, who had other names for the man he regarded as the usurper of his birthright, bought the neighbouring estate of Stainborough in 1708, and built a baroque wing, designed by the Huguenot Jean de Bodt, on to the existing house (1710-20).

He also persuaded Queen Anne to revive the Earldom of Strafford for him in 1711, while “His Honour” remained a commoner.

Thomas Watson Wentworth’s son, also Thomas, accordingly built a brick baroque wing at Wentworth Woodhouse, the so-called “back front”, and in 1728 took the title Baron Malton.

Then, six years later, he began the huge Palladian east front of Wentworth Woodhouse, back to back with the baroque wing, designed by Henry Flitcroft.  This huge project, later enlarged by John Carr of York, was still being completed at the start of the nineteenth century.

In 1746 Lord Malton became the first Marquess of Rockingham – in fact, the first marquess in the British peerage, and superior to an earl.

Quietly determined not to be outdone, William, 2nd Earl of Strafford of the 2nd creation, built the Palladian south wing at Wentworth Castle (1759-62).

And in between times this ludicrous competition in houses and titles was maintained by a descant of monuments – obelisks and columns, temples and follies.

The whole area is dotted with the mementoes of this rivalry, and there is much to see.

Wentworth Castle is now the Northern College, and though the tours of the house are available, the building is in active educational use throughout the year:  http://www.northern.ac.uk.  Wentworth Castle Gardens, however, are open to tourists almost every day of the year, and are well worth an extended visit:  http://www.wentworthcastle.org/view.asp?id=145.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Labour’s home

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Wortley Hall, South Yorkshire: south front

Wortley Hall, South Yorkshire: south front

In the uncertain times after the Second World War, when many country-house owners had to decide whether they could ever live in their big houses again, Wortley Hall, South Yorkshire became a socialist stately home, and for seventy years now has been a home for stately socialists.

In 1950 Archibald, 3rd Earl of Wharncliffe (1892-1953) leased the much-battered house to a consortium of Labour organisations under the leadership of Vin Williams, the South Yorkshire organiser for the National Council of Labour Colleges.

Trade union organisations have unusually good access to craftspeople, and in May 1951, powered by the efforts of a small army of volunteers, Wortley Hall opened as a conference centre under the title Wortley Hall (Labour’s Home).  Even with masses of goodwill from the Labour movement, the initial conversion cost the then huge sum of around £10,000.

John Cornwell’s account, The Voices of Wortley Hall: the sixtieth anniversary history of Labour’s home, 1951-2011, tells this remarkable story in detail.

Ever since, Wortley Hall has grown and thrived, hosting groups from Britain and abroad, from the Workers Music Association Summer School to the Clarion Cycling Club, and providing an entertaining series of public events from car rallies to comedy nights.  Friends of mine count themselves lucky if they are quick enough to book the Wortley Hall New Year’s Eve celebration.

Wortley Hall Ltd, as it’s now called, is a shining example of the spirit of co-operation which traces back directly to the Rochdale Pioneers.

It’s a very beautiful place – a Palladian show-house by John Platt of Rotherham on a more modest scale to the nearby Wentworth Castle and the gargantuan Wentworth Woodhouse, vigorously extended in Victorian times, and surrounded by elegant grounds with a panoramic view to the east across the Yorkshire countryside.

In the days when I ran senior-student training at Wortley Hall for a local comprehensive school, the younger kids aspired to become senior students so they could go to “that mansion”.

There is a detailed photograph-album of Wortley Hall at http://www.flickr.com/photos/59839574@N05/5981134438/in/photostream.  The conference-centre website is at http://www.wortleyhall.org.uk/wortley-hall.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Antique floorshow

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Samlesbury Hall, Lancashire

Samlesbury Hall, Lancashire

Samlesbury Hall is only a couple of miles away from Hoghton Tower and can easily be visited on the same day.  It too is a palimpsest, though its architectural significance is completely different:  the current volume of Pevsner describes it as “one of the outstanding Lancashire halls of the timber-framed variety”.

The chapel was licensed in 1420 and was probably built around that time;  the hall is of a similar date, and the south range dates from around 1545, except for the west end which is 1862.  Originally the home of the Southworth family, the hall was apparently an inn by the 1830s.

There are all sorts of fascinating details.  The traceried window in the chapel, and presumably others, were imported from Whalley Abbey after the Dissolution.

The great hall had a movable screen like the one at Rufford Old Hall, and the bizarre carved finials were later incorporated in the minstrels’ gallery.  The hall fireplace is Victorian, probably dating from 1845.  The oriel at the dais end houses a magnificent Bechstein grand piano.

A frankly modern bridge leads visitors over to ancillary buildings in the courtyard.

The place was threatened with demolition in the 1920s and was bought by a group of Blackburn businessmen who established a Trust to preserve it for public enjoyment.  As such, the building has to earn its keep.

Consequently, several rooms are given over to the sales-floor of an antiques emporium and there are regular exhibitions of art, ceramics, sculpture and jewellery.  There is a wonderfully relaxed coffee-shop, stuffed with sofas, and a restaurant.  You can hire the place for many kinds of events, from a funeral to a hog roast.

For the casual tourist the presentation experience is completely different to Hoghton.  Visitors wander at will, guided by display panels which the lady greeter made no bones about declaring were incomplete.

Is it worth paying £3.00 admission to see?  Most definitely.  But I think I’d take exception to paying £3.00 for the privilege of buying antiques.  Perhaps they knock the admission charge off the price of the chaise-longue or whatever.

I think they would in Yorkshire.

Card-carrying Friends of the Historic Houses Association are admitted free to Samlesbury Hall:  see http://www.samlesburyhall.co.uk.

 

Jumbled chronology

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Hoghton Tower, Lancashire

Hoghton Tower, Lancashire

I visited Hoghton Tower (pronounced ‘Horton’) in Lancashire because I happened to be passing on my way to Poulton-le-Fylde.  Consequently I drove up the steep avenue knowing nothing at all about the place;  I left knowing little more and considerably confused.

Most country houses are palimpsests, and Hoghton Tower more than most – a document repeatedly erased and rewritten.  Layout and chronology matter in understanding how the building fits together.

According to our guide, one particular room was apparently completed for the present owner’s father’s twenty-first birthday and had been a schoolroom when William Shakespeare was tutor to the family.  The panelling, I was told, was by “young Mr Gillow” (which must be eighteenth century, though it depends which Gillow).  There were two marble fireplaces of obviously different periods, but I decided not to ask.

The current volume of Pevsner identifies this room as “pure Victorian Jacobean, the work of R D Oliver”.  Indeed, the whole house is a fascinating concoction by different generations, all of them aiming to suggest an earlier history.

There may well have been a medieval building here, perhaps on the site of the Well House in one corner.  The earliest standing remains are known to have been begun in a conservative manner by Thomas Hoghton in 1561-2.  Civil War damage was made good by Sir Christopher Hoghton at the end of the seventeenth century.  Planned modifications by Lewis Wyatt (1816) and George Webster (1835) were unbuilt.  Sir Henry Hoghton, 9th baronet, commissioned a careful, scholarly restoration in the 1860s, and his next two successors continued the work until 1901.

This makes for a fascinating structural and decorative jigsaw which illustrates country-house lifestyles as well as attitudes to the past over four centuries.  I simply don’t believe that members of the general public are so dim that they can only cope with disconnected anecdotes about kings and banquets.  I think visitors to historic places value being allowed to think.  It’s more interesting, if skilfully presented.

The interiors now have an atmosphere of a museum and a wedding and conference centre, which is what the place is.  The extensive underground service area is littered with dummies and skeletons, as if it’s not interesting enough without artificial aids [cf Finding a secret tunnel:  Stoke Rochford Hall and More country-house railways].

If you visit Hoghton Tower, read it up first.  Or, as our guide disarmingly suggested, buy the guide-book.

Or, better still, go and stay there.  The Irishman’s Tower is available as a self-catering let for two:  http://www.hoghtontower.co.uk/accommodation.html.  I rather fancy that as a base for seeing Blackpool Illuminations.

Card-carrying Friends of the Historic Houses Association are admitted free to Hoghton Tower.

 

Deer little house

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Deer Park House, Scampston, North Yorkshire

Deer Park House, Scampston, North Yorkshire

When you look out of the upstairs windows of the south front of Scampston Hall your eye is caught by a red-brick castellated lodge in the distance.

This is Deer Park Lodge, built by John Carr of York in Gothick style c1768 as an eye-catcher across the lake.  Originally, it was stuccoed in white, so that it stood out from the now-vanished forest behind it.

As well as being an ornament to the view, the lodge served a practical function.  To each side of the central bay were arcades to provide shelter when the deer came to feed.  Behind the building was a modest cottage in which the deer-keeper and his family lived.

The three-sided bay, with its castellated gable embellished with a trefoil, contains two grand rooms, connected by a steep, straight staircase.  Both have marble fireplaces and were decorated, apparently, with marbled paper.  The upper room, where visitors from the great house would take tea and admire the view, has a delicate plaster ceiling decorated with hunting horns and sheet music.

The current owners, David and Jane Crease, have carefully restored the lodge, and Jane explains how the three sides of the bay offered completely different views – the forest to the right (nature), the house straight ahead (culture) and the mill to the left (commerce).

Mr & Mrs Crease entertained the members of the Art Fund South Yorkshire to tea on their way back from an art day in Scarborough.  It’s a rare privilege to enjoy a sumptuous afternoon tea sitting outside the lodge gazing across the lake towards Scampston Hall in the distance.

One of the ironies of an eye-catcher is that it commands at least as good a view as the view it belongs to.  No doubt that’s why the St Quentins and their descendants, the Legards, drove over to admire the big house in its setting.

Scampston Deer Park Lodge is a private residence and is not open to the public.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

 

Stop short of Scarborough

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Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire

Scampston Hall, North Yorkshire

Motorists hammering along the A64 to the coast have little chance of noticing that they fly through the Capability Brown park of Scampston Hall.  An understated road-sign indicates ‘Scampston only’.  It’s worth following.

Apart from its historic interest, Scampston Hall has a superb restaurant, offering better lunches than you’ll find within sight of the A64.

Its historic interest is considerable.  Five St Quintin baronets, all of them called William, developed this estate.  The 3rd baronet built the original house, parts of which are still visible at the back, in the 1690s.  The 4th baronet brought in Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown to landscape the park.  The 5th baronet accumulated a significant art collection.  His heir, William Thomas Darby St Quintin, employed the architect and interior designer Thomas Leverton to transform the house in 1800-3, so that it looks – inside and out – Regency in style.

The man who takes your ticket when you start a house tour is, in fact, the current owner, Sir Charles Legard, 15th Bt.  He and his wife Caroline took on the place in 1994 when it was, as Sir Charles puts it, “tired”, reroofed, rewired and replumbed it, and welcome the public on a limited number of days each year.  Their son Christopher’s family now lives there.

Lady Legard had, through her voluntary involvement in the National Trust, gained an invaluable apprenticeship from the interior designers John Fowler and David Mlinaric, planning the restoration of Beningborough Hall, Nostell Priory (after a fire) and Nunnington Hall.  She was more than qualified to take on the challenge of managing the restoration of her family home to the highest standards.  Scampston Hall was the Country Life House of the Year in 2000:  John Cornforth’s account of the house and family appeared in the January 27th and February 3rd 2000 issues.

Lady Legard then set about finding a purpose for the former kitchen garden.  She commissioned the internationally renowned Dutch designer Piet Oudolf [see http://www.oudolf.com/piet-oudolf/references] to create a flower garden to attract public visitors, and engaged the local architects Mark Bramhall and Ric Blenkharn to design the restaurant.  The Walled Garden opened in 2004.

The result is an utterly delightful visiting experience.  Sir Charles shows groups round his house in relaxed style:  visitors are encouraged to ask questions and to sit on the furniture.  Outside, a half-hour walk around the inner park, the Cascade Circuit, passes the Pump House with its plunge bath, the Palladian Bridge and the ruined ice-house.  The Walled Garden is a fascinating essay in contemporary garden design.  And the restaurant offers the sort of menu you need to return to.

You can always go to Scarborough another day…

Details of all that Scampston Hall has to offer are at http://www.scampston.co.uk/metadot/index.pl?id=0.  Card-carrying members and Friends of the Historic Houses Association are admitted free.

 

Arrested decline

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Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire

Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire

Brodsworth Hall, South Yorkshire, is remarkable because the entire house and garden were built and furnished within a short period, 1861-70, and have hardly been changed since.  It was designed by an Italian architect, the Chevalier Casentini, who appears never to have visited the site.

The money to build it came from the proceeds of the Thellusson will of 1797, which distributed the bulk of a £700,000 fortune in trust to the surviving descendants after three generations (or, in the absence of such survivors, to pay off the National Debt).  The protracted litigation that arose among Thellusson’s descendants is recognisably portrayed in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852-3).

When the last descendant of the original builder gave Brodsworth Hall to English Heritage in 1990, the decision was taken to restore the house as found, in “arrested decline”, rather than return its decoration and contents to their appearance when new.  This is not a “house that time forgot”, like Erddig or Calke Abbey or Mr Straw’s House at Worksop;  it retains evidence of each of its occupiers from the date of building to the late twentieth century, and chronicles the increasing difficulty of maintaining a home on the scale that was common among prosperous landed families before the First World War.

Walking through the front door, crossing the hall and glancing up the impressively grand staircase gives a very powerful feeling of stepping into the 1970s on some errand to meet Mrs Grant-Dalton.  The light, the colours, the patina of the furniture and walls look exactly as if the place has been untouched for decades.

On the route through the principal rooms it’s easy – apart from the apparently new carpets – to imagine oneself into almost any decade since the house was built.

But further into the tour, upstairs, bleak bedrooms with folded bed-linen on bare mattresses, presumably unoccupied since early last century, are interspersed with spruced-up facilities for visitors, complete with interactive computers belting out canned historic voices.

And there are several rooms simply displaying found objects, like a lugubrious version of a trip to Ikea.

Here English Heritage is playing to the crowd, as perhaps it must in economically straitened times, where visitor footfall is the name of the game.

That said, Brodsworth is worth exploring:  the long-neglected gardens are well on their way to recovery, and the café deserves more than one visit per visit.

Details of opening arrangements at Brodsworth Hall are at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/brodsworth-hall-and-gardens.

The 56-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 tour Country Houses of South Yorkshire, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  It includes chapters on Aston Hall, Brodsworth Hall, Cannon Hall, Cusworth Hall, Hickleton Hall, Renishaw Hall, Wentworth Castle, Wentworth Woodhouse and Wortley Hall.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Strawberry Hill forever

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Strawberry Hill: Gallery

Strawberry Hill: Gallery

Horace Walpole (1717-97) didn’t expect his house at Strawberry Hill to last much longer than he did:  he built in plaster and papier-mâché and decorated his “little plaything-house” with wallpaper.

The house that gave its name to a style, “Strawberry Hill Gothic”, was for amusement only, so small that one of his visitors, Lady Townsend, declared, “Lord God!  Jesus!  What a house!  It is just such a house as the parson’s where the children lie at the end of the bed.”

As a reaction to the stern mansion at Houghton in Norfolk built by his father, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole, and indeed to his own town house off Piccadilly, Walpole extended Strawberry Hill between 1749 and 1776 asymmetrically, as if built over centuries, because he was “fond of the Sharawaggi, or Chinese want of symmetry”.

He commissioned a group of friends as his “committee of taste” – among them John Chute (1701-1776) and Richard Bentley (1708-1782) – to advise on designs based on medieval originals.  This is why the chimneypiece in the library imitates John of Eltham’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, and that in the Holbein Chamber is based on Archbishop Warham’s tomb at Canterbury, while the gallery ceiling is derived from the side aisles of Henry VII’s chapel at Westminster Abbey.

The house was a cabinet of curiosities, a Schatzkammer, filled with every kind of object from Cardinal Wolsey’s red hat to the gilded armour of the French King Francis I, James I’s gloves to a lock of Edward IV’s hair “cut from his corpse in St George’s Chapel at Windsor”.    Stripped of Walpole’s collections in a sale of 1842, its rooms currently stand virtually empty.  Yet they have the unmistakable feeling of what Walpole called “gloomth”, which inspired his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1765), an important milestone on the road which leads to Frankenstein, Dracula and Hogwarts.

For a building that was outrageously against the prevalent architectural fashion, it was the object of insatiable curiosity.  Walpole was so pressured by visitors that he issued timed tickets.  “Never build a charming house for yourself between London and Hampton Court,” he wrote to a friend.  “Everyone will live in it but you.”  He declared that he should marry his housekeeper, because her gratuities were such that she had more money than he did.

Strawberry Hill, for many years the core of a Catholic teacher-training college, is now – at a cost of £9 million – as bright and crisp as Horace Walpole would have remembered it.

Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham, is open to the public by timed ticket:  see http://www.strawberryhillhouse.org.uk/visit.php.  The café, called The Committee of Taste, is superlative:  I couldn’t bring myself to eat the cheesecake until I’d photographed it:

Cheesecake

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.