The Lost Houses of Derbyshire – Parkfields, Derby
by Maxwell Craven
A notable surge in prosperity in Derby during the Napoleonic wars and afterwards, led to the building of nearly a dozen Regency villas on the fringes, in the suburbs and in the immediate area of the borough, of varying size and quality. Most were built by prosperous merchants and a few by landed gentlemen who, like the Batemans of Hartington Hall, found their town houses becoming unlivable, as the town infilled and industrialised. Unfortunately, many have been demolished, no less than three in the first decade of the millennium.
The unfortunate demise of another casualty, Parkfield, occurred even earlier, in summer 1993, despite it being locally listed. Yet, although its merits were perhaps less than apparent in its later years, it was a villa of some style.
Parkfield was originally one of the vast common fields belonging to the ancient borough of Derby, grazing and cultivation rents from which helped provide the town with income. However, this kind of income, along with fairs and tolls, did not bring in enough money for the corporation to spend on infrastructure, so in the 18th and early 19th century, improvement acts were obtained enabling parcels of it to be sold off so people build houses, great and small on the land thus released.
Ironically, no less than four substantial villas were built on portions of the old Parkfield, three called Parkfield! One lay on the north side of Kedleston Road, called Parkfield House – still standing now on Park Grove, although divided into three dwellings now and listed grade II – another in 1818 just to the west of it, called Parkfield Cedars (lost, see Country Images June 2016) and the third, Parkfields, on the west side of Duffield Road, not far north of Five Lamps.
Originally the plot was bought by a family called Bingham, who had iron founding interest in the town, but they later sold it to the Columbell family who were Derby’s fashionable tailors and drapers of the period. One of the improvement commissioners who had originally sold the land on behalf of the Corporation in 1812 was Alderman John Sandars JP (1782-1867). He was a scion of the gentry family long settled at Cauldwell in the south of the country, and of their most notorious son, Col. Thomas Sandars of Little Ireton, the fierce republican commander under Sir John Gell’s command on behalf of Parliament during the Civil War. John himself was a second generation bookseller, however, and he served as Mayor of Derby in 1839-40. Indeed, it was thanks to his fascination with the borough’s ancient records, that he had a considerable number of them at home with him in Parkfield for study when the 1828 Guildhall burnt down on the night of Trafalgar Day, 1841, when those that remained were irretrievably lost.
Sandars built his house in 1833-34, although we are not clear who designed it; quite probably it was a fellow Alderman and prolific amateur architect, Richard Leaper (1759-1838), who had built Parkfield Cedars for himself in 1818. It was in brick under a low hipped roof, was sparing of stone dressings, with facades of varying dispositions. Yet it betrayed some sophistication, having brick Tuscan pilasters at the angles, with stone bases and capitals, a moulded frieze and cornice with stone lintels over the sash windows grooved in a Greek revival manner clearly derived from Sir John Soane’s confected Boetian Order, all similar except for a sarcophagus shaped one over the original front door set in its contemporary iron trellis portico.
There was a curved bow on the west side, and a service wing adjacent; inside there was a good ironwork balustrade on the cantilevered Hoptonwood stone stair, mahogany doors, moulded plaster cornices, polished limestone chimney-pieces and one room was decorated in French revival neo-classical boiserie-style mouldings. This seems to have been something of a favourite with Richard Leaper, because his surviving (but much extended) villa which now houses the Boys’ Grammar School in Littleover has a similar room and there is another at Allestree Hall (another Derby building at risk!) which Leaper modified for J. C. Girardot. The grounds were landscaped by William Barron and at least one of the stone urns from the 1731 Derby Guildhall ended up being rescued by Sandars and used as garden features.
John Sandars died at Parkfield 10th January 1867 at a great age and in 1869 his son sold it to Charles Henry Smith, one of the directors of Boden’s Castlefields Lace Mill. He was succeeded by his nephew, Alderman Sir John (‘Brassy’) Smith, who served as mayor of Derby in 1872 when he was knighted, as was the convention, for being en poste during the Prince of Wales’ visit on 17th December that year. He was also co-founder of Smith’s important white metal (essentially brass for railway rolling stock building) foundry in Cotton Lane which ultimately became a nation-wide concern.
Brassy Smith was one of Derby’s super-rich and set about enlarging the house sparing no expense, with a westward extension, essentially a little taller than the original part, but in matching style, even down to the window lintels, and in so doing, he altered the way the interior plan worked. The new entrance had a stone portico with a fanlight resembling one in Becket Street (suggesting R. Ernest Ryley as the architect) and led into a new lobby and a new main stair was installed, lavishly panelled in mahogany, leading to luxuriously fitted out new bedrooms, and plenty of up-to-the-minute modern plumbing, furnished by Thomas Crump of Friar Gate. Needless to say, there was plenty of opulent looking brass fittings almost everywhere.
Sir John died in 1909, when the house was sold to Thomas Carline Eastwood, a director of Eastwood and Swingler’s foundry (now the new HQ of Great Northern Classics). Eastwood, however, soon moved out to the country, and let the house to Capt. Lionel Morley but, when he left after the Great War, it was sold to Gerard Hamilton Smith JP, a director of the National Provincial Bank, but he in turn sold it in 1927.
In 1928 the house was doubled in size in sympathetic style but of three storeys which was connected to the original house by a simple corridor, to serve as the Queen Mary Maternity Hospital, in which role it continued until the bureaucrats of the South Derbyshire Health Authority decided to close this well-loved facility down and it was duly shut in October 1986.
The site was eventually sold to Gadsbys, developers, and their architects put in plans to demolish all but the 1857 brick lodge, which would be modernised and included within a small estate of what used to be called ‘executive homes’ on the site.
Derby Civic Society attempted to get the building added to the statutory list in 1992, but the recommendation was turned down by the Secretary of State (my lord Prescott of Kingston-upon-Hull, as he later became) and despite objections by the Derby Conservation Area Advisory Committee, the building was destroyed in August 1998. The Civic Society had also tried to suggest to the developer that the buildings would adapt wonderfully well as individual residence (rather than flats), but this was peremptorily refused. We also suggested that the 1928 wing be demolished and that the remaining villa be restored as a prestige residence, but again: no vision, no profit – no dice!
Being then Keeper of Antiquities at Derby Museum, I decided I must try and rescue some of the superb quality brass fittings from the house, the stone Georgian urn and a nice piece of wrought iron Neo-Greek railing, but the foreman had other ideas. He was not willing to donate a single thing to the Museum.
In the end I sneaked an ornate brass door-knob that was hanging about loose and that is still in the collections to this day: a scant memorial to a fine villa lived in by a giant of Derby’s Victorian engineering!
Once the replacement mini-estate was built, one house and the converted lodge were sold to a couple of Derby councillors: amazing – what philanthropy!
