Derbyshire lifestyle magazine – Country Images Magazine

Lost Houses – Swarkestone Old Hall

September 28, 2016 Alistair Plant

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 […]

Lost Houses – Stainsby House

January 6, 2015 Alistair Plant

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 […]

Lost Houses – The Field, Litchurch

August 28, 2014 Alistair Plant

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 […]

Lost Houses: Littleover Old Hall

June 4, 2014 Alistair Plant

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, […]