Wollaton Hall | |
---|---|
Type | Prodigy house |
Location | Nottingham, Nottinghamshire |
Coordinates | 52°56′53″N1°12′35″W / 52.9480°N 1.2096°W |
Built | 1580-1588 |
Built for | Sir Francis Willoughby |
Architect | Robert Smythson |
Architectural style(s) | Elizabethan |
Owner | Nottingham City Council |
Website | wollatonhall.org.uk |
Listed Building – Grade I | |
Official name | Wollaton Hall |
Designated | 11 August 1952 |
Reference no. | 1255269 |
Listed Building – Grade II* | |
Official name | Camellia House 100 Metres South West of Wollaton Hall |
Designated | 12 July 1972 |
Reference no. | 1255271 |
Listed Building – Grade II* | |
Official name | Doric Temple and Attached Bridge 200 Metres South-East of Wollaton Hall |
Designated | 10 August 1989 |
Reference no. | 1270389 |
Official name | Wollaton Hall |
Designated | 1 January 1986 |
Reference no. | 1000344 |
Wollaton Hall is an Elizabethan country house of the 1580s standing on a small but prominent hill in Wollaton Park, Nottingham, England. The house is now Nottingham Natural History Museum, with Nottingham Industrial Museum in the outbuildings. The surrounding parkland has a herd of deer, and is regularly used for large-scale outdoor events such as rock concerts, sporting events and festivals.
Wollaton Hall was built between 1580 and 1588 for Sir Francis Willoughby and is believed to be designed by the Elizabethan architect, Robert Smythson, who had by then completed Longleat, and was to go on to design Hardwick Hall. The general plan of Wollaton is comparable to these, and was widely adopted for other houses, but the exuberant decoration of Wollaton is distinctive, and it is possible that Willoughby played some part in creating it. [1] The style is an advanced Elizabethan with early Jacobean elements.
Wollaton is a classic prodigy house, "the architectural sensation of its age", [2] though its builder was not a leading courtier and its construction stretched the resources he mainly obtained from coalmining; the original family home was at the bottom of the hill. Though much re-modelled inside, the "startlingly bold" exterior remains largely intact. [3]
On 21 June 1603, Willoughby's son Sir Percival Willoughby hosted Anne of Denmark and her children Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth at Wollaton. [4] Charles, later Charles I, came in 1604. [5]
The building consists of a central block dominated by a hall three storeys high, with a stone screen at one end and galleries at either end, with the "Prospect Room" above that. From this there are extensive views of the park and surrounding country. There are towers at each corner, projecting out from this top floor. At each corner of the house is a square pavilion of three storeys, with decorative features rising above the roof line. Much of the basement storey is cut from the rock the house sits on. [6]
The floor plan has been said to derive from Serlio's drawing (in Book III of his Five Books of Architecture) of Giuliano da Majano's Villa Poggio Reale near Naples of the late 15th century, with elevations derived from Hans Vredeman de Vries. [7] The architectural historian Mark Girouard has suggested that the design is in fact derived from Nikolaus de Lyra's reconstruction, and Josephus's description, of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem, [8] with a more direct inspiration being the mid-16th century Mount Edgcumbe in Cornwall, which Smythson knew. [9] The buildings expert James D. Wenn has identified number of meanings embedded in the architecture associated with the Bible, classical antiquity, Plato and the geometry of the rhombic dodecahedron. These codes are also present in the older Soulton Hall, house of the Geneva Bible publisher Sir Rowland Hill, from which it has been argued influence was taken in the design scheme of Wollaton. [10] [11] [12]
The building is of Ancaster stone from Lincolnshire, and is said to have been paid for with coal from the Wollaton pits owned by Willoughby; the labourers were also paid this way. Cassandra Willoughby, Duchess of Chandos recorded in 1702 that the master masons, and some of the statuary, were brought from Italy. The decorative gondola mooring rings carved in stone on the exterior walls offer some evidence of this, as do other architectural features. There are also obvious French and Dutch influences. The exterior and hall have extensive and busy carved decoration, featuring strapwork and a profusion of decorative forms. The window tracery of the upper floors in the central block and the general busyness of the decoration look back to the Middle Ages, [6] and have been described as "fantasy-Gothic". [13]
The house was unused for about four decades before 1687, following a fire in 1642, and then re-occupied and given the first of several campaigns of re-modelling of the interiors. [6] Paintings on the ceilings of the two main staircases and round the walls of one are attributed to Sir James Thornhill and perhaps also Louis Laguerre, carried out around 1700. [6] Re-modelling was carried out by Wyatville in 1801 and continued intermittently until the 1830s.
The hall remains essentially in its original Elizabethan state, with a "fake hammerbeam" wood ceiling of the 1580s, in fact supported by horizontal beams above, but given large and un-needed hammerbeams for decoration. [6] The slightly earlier roofs of the great halls at Theobalds and Longleat were similar. [14]
The gallery of the main hall contains Nottinghamshire's oldest pipe organ, thought to date from the end of the 17th century, possibly by the builder Gerard Smith. It is still blown by hand. Beneath the hall are many cellars and passages, and a well and associated reservoir tank, in which some accounts report that an admiral of the Willoughby family took a daily bath.
The Willoughbys were noted for the number of explorers they produced, most famously Sir Hugh Willoughby who died in the Arctic in 1554 attempting a North East passage to Cathay. Willoughby's Land is named after him.
In 1881, the house was still owned by the head of the Willoughby family, Digby Willoughby, 9th Baron Middleton, but by then it was "too near the smoke and busy activity of a large manufacturing town... now only removed from the borough by a narrow slip of country", so that the previous head of the family, Henry Willoughby, 8th Baron Middleton, had begun to let the house to tenants and in 1881 it was vacant. [15]
The hall was bought by Nottingham Council in 1925. Estate and personal papers of the Willoughby family were used to create the Middleton collection at the department of Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham. They include the Wollaton Antiphonal and the single manuscript holding the 13th-century post-Arthurian romance Le Roman de Silence . [16]
Nottingham Council opened the hall as a museum in 1926. In 2005 it was closed for a two-year refurbishment and re-opened in April 2007. The prospect room at the top of the house, and the kitchens in the basement, were opened up for the public to visit, though this must be done on one of the escorted tours. The latter can be booked on the day, lasts about an hour, and a small charge is made.
In 2011, key scenes from the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises were filmed outside Wollaton Hall. [17] The Hall was featured as Wayne Manor. [18] [19] The Hall is five miles north of Gotham, Nottinghamshire, through which Gotham City indirectly got its name. [20]
Wollaton Hall Park is Grade II* listed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. [21]
The Camellia House [22] is a listed building in its own right, as are many other buildings and structures, [23] including a doric temple and Ha-Ha.
In 1855, Joseph Paxton designed Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, which borrows many features from Wollaton. Both properties have been used as film locations for Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy of films, featuring as Wayne Manor – the latter in Batman Begins and Wollaton Hall itself in The Dark Knight Rises .
Since Wollaton Hall opened to the public in 1926, it has been home to the city's natural history museum. [24] On display are some of the items from the three quarters of a million specimens that make up its zoology, geology, and botany collections. These are housed in six main galleries:
The Museum started life as an interest group at the Nottingham Mechanics' Institution; it is now owned by the Nottingham City Council.
In 2017 the museum hosted a tour of dinosaur skeletons titled Dinosaurs of China, Ground Shakers to Feathered Flyers . The exhibition was attended by over 125,000 people. [25]
From July 2021 to August 2022, the Nottingham Natural History Museum is featuring the world's first exhibit of Titus, a "real" Tyrannosaurus rex fossil which was discovered in Montana, in the United States, in 2014. [26]
Baron Middleton, of Middleton in the County of Warwick, is a title in the Peerage of Great Britain, created in December 1711 for Sir Thomas Willoughby, 2nd Baronet, who had previously represented Nottinghamshire and Newark in Parliament. It was one of twelve new peerages created together and known as Harley's Dozen, to give a Tory majority in the House of Lords.
Middleton Hall is a Grade II* listed building dating back to medieval times. It is situated in the North Warwickshire district of the county of Warwickshire in England, south of Fazeley and Tamworth and on the opposite side of the A4091 road to Middleton village.
Middleton is a small village in the North Warwickshire district of the county of Warwickshire, England. The population of the civil parish at the 2011 census was 630.
Robert Smythson was an English architect. Smythson designed a number of notable houses during the Elizabethan era. Little is known about his birth and upbringing—his first mention in historical records comes in 1556, when he was stonemason for the house at Longleat, built by Sir John Thynne. He later designed Hardwick Hall, Wollaton Hall, Burton Agnes Hall, and other significant projects. Historically, a number of other Elizabethan houses, such as Gawthorpe Hall and Chastleton House, have been attributed to him on stylistic grounds.
Wollaton is a suburb and former civil parish in the western part of Nottingham, in the Nottingham district, in the ceremonial county of Nottinghamshire, England. Wollaton has two wards in the City of Nottingham, with a total population of 24,693 at the 2011 census. It is home to Wollaton Hall, with its museum, deer park, lake, walks and golf course.
Wollaton Park is a 500 acre park in Nottingham, England, which includes a deer park. It is centred on Wollaton Hall, a classic Elizabethan prodigy house which contains the Nottingham Natural History Museum, with the Nottingham Industrial Museum in the stable block.
Elizabethan architecture refers to buildings of a certain medieval style constructed during the reign of Queen [[Elizabeth I of England and Ireland from 1558–1603. Historically, the era sits between the long era of the dominant architectural style of religious buildings by the Catholic Church, which ended abruptly at the Dissolution of the Monasteries from c.1536, and the advent of a court culture of pan-European artistic ambition under James I (1603–25). Stylistically, Elizabethan architecture is notably pluralistic. It came at the end of insular traditions in design and construction called the Perpendicular style in church building, the fenestration, vaulting techniques, and open truss designs of which often affected the detail of larger domestic buildings. However, English design had become open to the influence of early printed architectural texts imported to England by members of the church as early as the 1480s. Into the 16th century, illustrated continental pattern-books introduced a wide range of architectural exemplars, fueled by the archaeology of Ancient Rome which inspired myriad printed designs of increasing elaboration and abstraction.
Aspley is a council estate and a ward of the city of Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, England. It is located within the boundaries of Nottingham City Council. The ward is located 3 miles (4.8 km) west of Nottingham City Centre and is located only 1.6 miles west of Junction 26 of the M1. It lies south of Bulwell, west of Basford and is north of Bilborough. The principal road in the ward is the A610. At the 2001 Census the ward had a population of 15,689, increasing to 17,622 at the 2011 census.
Cassandra Willoughby, Duchess of Chandos was an English historian, travel writer and artist. She spent more than a quarter-century overseeing the restoration of the gardens and rebuilding of the family mansion at Wollaton Hall, now in Nottingham, inherited by her father, Francis Willoughby.
Burton Agnes Hall is an Elizabethan manor house in the village of Burton Agnes, near Driffield in the East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It was built by Sir Henry Griffith in 1601–10 to designs attributed to Robert Smythson. The older Norman Burton Agnes Manor House, originally built in 1173, still stands on an adjacent site; both buildings are now Grade I listed buildings.
Sir Percival Willoughby of Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire was a prominent land owner, businessman, and entrepreneur involved during his lifetime variously in mining, iron smelting, and glass making enterprises in Nottinghamshire. He was also an important investor in the Newfoundland Company.
Thomas Willoughby, 1st Baron Middleton, was a Tory politician who sat in the English and British House of Commons between 1698 and 1711 when he was raised to the peerage as Baron Middleton as one of Harley's Dozen.
Henry Willoughby, 6th Baron Middleton, was an English nobleman, the only son of Henry Willoughby, 5th Baron Middleton.
Henry Willoughby, 8th Baron Middleton, was an English peer.
Digby Wentworth Bayard Willoughby, 9th Baron Middleton, was an English nobleman, the eldest son of Henry Willoughby, 8th Baron Middleton.
Worksop Manor is a Grade I listed 18th-century country house in Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire. It stands in one of the four contiguous estates in the Dukeries area of Nottinghamshire. Traditionally, the Lord of the Manor of Worksop may assist a British monarch at his or her coronation by providing a glove and putting it on the monarch's right hand and supporting his or her right arm. Worksop Manor was the seat of the ancient Lords of Worksop.
Sir Francis Willoughby (1546/7–1596) was an English industrialist and coalowner, who built Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire.
St Leonard's Church is a Church of England parish church in Wollaton, Nottinghamshire, England. Dating originally from the 13th century, the church was restored in the Victorian era and again in the 20th century. It is notable for the large number of funerary monuments it contains. Many are to the Willoughby family, of nearby Wollaton Hall. There is also a memorial to Robert Smythson, designer of the hall, and one of the first English architects. The church is a Grade II* listed building.
Prodigy houses are large and showy English country houses built by courtiers and other wealthy families, either "noble palaces of an awesome scale" or "proud, ambitious heaps" according to taste. The prodigy houses stretch over the periods of Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean architecture, though the term may be restricted to a core period of roughly 1570 to 1620. Many of the grandest were built with a view to housing Elizabeth I and her large retinue as they made their annual royal progress around her realm. Many are therefore close to major roads, often in the English Midlands.
Sir Henry Willoughby was a Knight of the Body to Kings Henry VII and Henry VIII and MGO.