Lost Houses – Swarkestone Old Hall
If you drive along the road from Swarkestone Bridge to Chellaston you will notice, just as you turn east after passing the Crewe & Harpur Arms, a pair of sturdy stone gatepiers topped with large ball finials. Those not having to concentrate upon the road ahead will also see, in the field beyond the gate piers, an engaging stone two storey structure with a pair of ogee domed turrets. The latter, beautifully restored, is now a holiday cottage for two, although I visited once, soon after commissioning, when it was being occupied by a lady barrister appearing at Burton Crown Court. It was ferociously cold and the only way to the loo (in one turret) was to cross the leads from a door (in the other turret). On the day I called, the leads were a lethal sheet of ice, making the essential transition exceedingly hazardous! This is Swarkestone Stand, still with gun embrasures on the side facing the road, evidence of a Civil War siege. Were one to wander beyond the former bowling alley in front of the building, onto the pasture of the present 17th century Swarkestone Hall farm house, one might well notice some unusually high field boundaries, one with superimposed fireplaces still in situ. All these component parts once made up the whole of a lost mid-Tudor great house, built by Chief Justice Sir Richard Harpur (1515-1577), a Royal legal officer who dexterously served four sovereigns – Kings Henry VIII, Edward VI, Queens Mary I and Elizabeth – without losing his head. The Harpurs were an old Warwickshire and later Staffordshire family, seated at Pelsall. Sir Richard’s branch had become merchants at Chester, of which County Palatine Sir Richard latterly became Chief Justice. In 1544 he married Jane Fynderne, whose family owned estates at Findern, Littleover and Twyford. Although she was her brother’s heiress, she was of a junior branch of her family, although when her cousin Michael died two decades after her in 1618, her children inherited all that was left of the family estates. Ironically, most of them had been purchased by the Harpurs years before to prevent young Michael frittering them away! Harpur began buying up land in and around Swarkestone, from the Wilne family, some from the Sacheverells and most in 1558 from John Rolleston. Thereafter he began to build (probably on the site of its predecessor) his ‘newe mansion howse’ which was completed in 1567. From what evidence remains, it must have been quite impressive; the house was approximately 115 ft. square and with a central court yard. The best rooms were, almost certainly, from the evidence of remains, on the first floor (the piano nobile), with others facing the church to the west. The structure was built in coarse Keuper sandstone blocks with fine ashlar quoins and detailing, all from the nearby quarry at Weston Cliff. The whole ensemble was approximately orientated north-south, the northernmost feature being the Stand added by Sir Richard’s grandson in 1632, built by Richard Shepperd at a cost of £111 – 12s – 4d and designed, according to Professor Mark Girouard, by John Smythson, creator of Bolsover Castle. The Stand, or pavilion, has a south facing arcade with a viewing room above with big windows to observe the bowling in the rectangular sward on the south side. Opposite is a re-positioned Tudor door-case set in the surviving boundary wall. Beyond again would have been the 38 foot wide two storey gatehouse, probably also embellished with onion or ogee domes, but now entirely vanished bar a few fragments at ground level. From this a straight drive took one to the north range of the house through an impressive archway and into the courtyard. The present farm house to the south east is post-civil war and some consider it was probably adapted from the original stable block and indeed, it may have served a similar purpose, at least for a while, before conversion, prior to 1750, into a farmhouse. Other schools of thought consider it to have been a factor’s house or similar, as with the equally adjacent ‘Georgian House’ at Hampton Court, but altered later. On the west side of the main house, where there is still a two storey stretch of wall with three chimney pieces surviving. To its west lay a large formal garden with cruciform paths radiating from a circle containing a pond, to divide the parterres, all revealed by work on the farm in 1988 and partly excavated. To the north west lies the so-called tithe barn, tactfully converted into a pair of luxury homes in 1988. Clearly it was never a barn as such, lacking the usual full height wide doors, but the suggestion that it was a malt-house has not found universal favour either. It probably formed part of a utilitarian yard with other buildings, but its five bays of south facing windows in moulded surrounds over two storeys and lack of chimneys would suggest some kind of storage was intended. The best way to appreciate the entire once very grand ensemble is to stand on the leads at the pavilion and look south towards where once stood the gatehouse and main residence. During the Civil War the house, still then held by the Royalist Harpurs, held out, ultimately unsuccessfully, against Sir John Gell’s Parliamentary forces from Derby, under the command of Sir John Harpur (1612-1679) from December 1642 to January 1643. Sir John survived exile as a widower and married again after the war. In 1662 he had to pay the new hearth tax on a massive 28 hearths, one more than Sir Edward Coke at Longford (less than half of whose house survives today), two more than Sutton Scarsdale and two less than Staveley. Risley, another very similar house, was taxed on 33 hearths. William Woolley, writing about 1713, wrote of Swarkeston that it was ‘a large, convenient stone building, seated on the banks of the Trent’, but within months the house had become empty on
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 – 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
