Northwold Manor: 'A place of delight once more after half a century of chaos and neglect'

On May 9, 2013, Warwick Rodwell and his wife, Diane Gibbs, visited Northwold Manor house. It was then a derelict wreck in the process of compulsory purchase by King’s Lynn and West Norfolk Borough Council; the building had last been occupied in 1955. ‘No sunlight penetrated its interior,’ Prof Warwick recalls, ‘and we groped our way around the rooms with torches, climbing over stacks of rotting furniture and debris that clogged the interior… some rooms had gaping holes in the floors and ceilings where structural collapses had occurred.’ The garden, if anything, was worse, choked with vegetation and rubbish including four abandoned caravans.

That scene is unimaginable today. Not only has Northwold Manor undergone a heroic restoration, but its disparate historic structures have been woven together to create a coherent property with a fresh character of its own (Fig 1). The success of this transformation reflects the unusual combination of expertise that its present owners and renovators have brought to bear.

Prof Rodwell has long experience of working with major historic buildings and is now the consultant archaeologist of Westminster Abbey in London, whereas Ms Gibbs is an experienced curator. Added to which, this is the second project of its kind that Prof Rodwell has undertaken, the first being the conversion of Downside Old Church in Somerset, together with the repair of its adjacent vicarage.

Without a big budget, it was clear from the first that the restoration of Northwold Manor would be a demanding, personal endeavour. Having received the keys in April 2014, Prof Rodwell assumed control of every aspect of the project, engaging direct labour, acting as clerk of works and providing oversight. He was also active on the site with Ms Gibbs, who took responsibility for the garden and decoration of the interiors. For the first 2½ years, they rented a house in the village. By March 2017, they were able to move into part of the property and occupied the remainder of the house from 2019. Completing the work has taken about a decade in all.

From the first, the task of restoration has been integrally connected with research into the history and archaeology of the building. This has now been drawn together in Prof Rodwell’s exemplary volume published last year, Northwold Manor Reborn. Architecture, archaeology and restoration of a Norfolk house (Oxbow Books, £55). It is very unusual to have a building of this scale analysed in such detail and the study throws into sharp focus an unexpectedly long and fascinating evolution. It also contextualises the story of the house within the village of Northwold and sets out what is known of its owners.

The story of the building begins in the Middle Ages, when several strips of land — each three perches wide (the perch, rod or pole is a measurement of 16½ft) — were laid out as building and garden plots to the south side of the main village street. These strips, the vestiges of which are still clearly discernible in modern property divisions, were probably a development undertaken by Hugh, a native of Northwold, who became a monk of Bury and eventually Bishop of Ely (in office 1229–54). The present house amalgamates three of them, hence its unusually long street frontage. It sits immediately opposite the parish church of St Andrew, which itself occupies a neat, rectangular plot.

The three strips define the sections of the property today. To the left (east) of the street front is the first of these. Walled and gated from the street, it comprises an entrance yard at the side of the present house and a stable yard beyond. The central strip is occupied by a rubble-built cottage that, to judge from its details, was probably built in the 16th century and is the earliest surviving structure on the site. Behind this is a courtyard enclosed by service buildings. In the third strip to the right (west) is the main body of the house, which is built in brick.

This principal section has evolved around a mid-17th-century building with a regular frontage five window bays wide set back slightly from the street (Fig 5) and a projecting range to the rear that gives it a T-shaped plan. It seems to have replaced a timber frame house with a brick stair turret, the footings of which were discovered during the recent work. Nothing is securely known about the construction of either building, but the will of Richard Carter, written in 1666, identifies him as the owner of the property. It also states that it was given to him by his father and namesake and has an attached inventory of its contents drawn up in 1678 when the will was proved. The Carters were a prominent local family resident in Northwold from the late 15th century.

Carter’s grandson, Thomas (possibly in connection with his older brother Richard), undertook the wholesale remodelling of the house in the early 18th century. Their joint involvement is suggested by the discovery of a loose stone carved with the initials RTC and the date 1714, which is thought to have come from a lost wing extending along the line of the village street. Other works followed in 1721, also celebrated with date stones set in the gables with Thomas’s initials alone. These included the re-fenestration of the 17th-century structure with sashes and the modernisation of the ground-floor parlour, where the date 1722 was found painted on the bricks behind the panelling.

The next major alterations followed the death of the last direct descendant of Richard Carter in 1798. Childless, he bequeathed his estate to a woman in his service, Hannah Kenton. She married a village resident, Thomas Harvey, a year later. The background of neither Hannah nor Thomas is well documented, but they became prominent figures in local society. At this time, the Manor House was one of several large houses in Northwold owned by well-connected families, including those in the circle and family of Lord Nelson.

In 1814, perhaps enthused by the celebrations surrounding Napoleon’s surrender and abdication, the Harveys decided to replace the extension created exactly a century earlier by Richard and Thomas Carter with what is termed the West Wing. In truth, the wing is a fresh core to the house, incorporating a series of large rooms appropriate to the needs of polite Regency entertainment. At the juncture of the wing with the 17th-century building — which was now largely given over to services — a two-storey porch and a new front door was erected. This gives access to a spacious staircase hall with what was originally a dining room opening off it at ground level and an orangery beyond. Above the porch, at the head of the stair, is a small landing chamber and the former drawing room.

The restoration work has identified the name of the carpenter or builder of the wing, T. Clarkson 1814, carved into a roof timber. Thomas Harvey’s name also appears, as does that of his adopted heir, a nephew called John Langham. The Harveys were childless and the previous year, in 1813, John changed his name to Carter, a reference to the source of his aunt’s fortune. The house descended in his family line until 1919, when it was purchased by William and Mary Fendick, a couple with local Norfolk connections. Their granddaughter, in turn, sold the property to John and Beatty Rudge in 1951, the last owner-occupants of the house.

From 1956, the house passed through the hands of a succession of developers and, in 1963, was purchased by a London-based architect, who transferred it to his wife in 1971. In the meantime, it was used as a furniture store and slid gradually into neglect. As the house deteriorated, a makeshift residence was briefly created in the garden using four caravans and — remarkably — a grandchild of the then owner was born here. Legal wranglings over the restoration of the building began in earnest in 2001 and remained an unwelcome and worrying background concern to the restoration until 2017.

The first task of the restoration was to clear the garden and create a working space to the rear of the property. There followed the gradual clearance of the house and its outbuildings of huge quantities of rubbish. One range alone yielded 136 chairs, all beyond economic repair. Meticulous care was taken to go through all the material removed and to record evidence of anything relevant to the history of the house and its decoration. About half of the property and its outbuildings were roofless. After four months of work, it was possible in August 2014 to survey the whole site. On the basis of this survey, plans for the restoration were drawn up.

To make the project manageable with the resources available, it was planned and executed in two overarching phases. First, the cottage and the courtyard of buildings were restored. Attention then turned to the main house, the principal rooms of which were returned to their historic proportions (Fig 10). In the case of the former 17th-century parlour, now the Green Dining Room (Fig 6), it was possible to re-create the 1722 scheme of panelling. To link these two sections of the property together, a completely ruinous building between them — previously a dairy — was rebuilt as the kitchen (Fig 4). In tandem, the house was fitted with modern services, including electricity and plumbing.

In addition to these changes, the West Wing was extended and adapted. A battlemented porch was added to the rear of the stair hall using pale, salvaged bricks and refitted with the original back doors. The porch creates space for a guest cloakroom and helps insulate the house; its glazed doors offer a welcoming view into the garden from the front door (Fig 3). The former dining room off the hall has become the drawing room (Fig 8) and the room above — decorated with hand-painted wallpaper specially commissioned in China — the principal bedroom (Fig 7).

Meanwhile, the orangery, which had been reduced to little more than a screen wall of brick externally detailed with blind windows, was rebuilt as a two-storey extension incorporating a library (Fig 2). The blind windows facing the street were opened out as sashes and a new upper tier of false ones created to fill the raised parapets. Internally, double-sided oak book presses were bought from the library of Queen’s College, Oxford. They had been designed by C. R. Cockerell in 1841 and removed during the recent restoration of that 1690s interior. The Northwold library floor is of parquet made from salvaged wood.

Also incorporated within the new extension are two studies (Fig 9) facing the garden, one above the other. They are connected by a stair turret of handmade brick in evocation of the lost turret, the footings of which were excavated nearby. As is the new rear porch, this structure is inspired by late-medieval and Tudor buildings nearby, such as Oxburgh Hall. A small belvedere has been created in the top floor of the turret. It offers views of the garden, which has been transformed as completely as the house with the repair of walls, landscaping and the use of carefully collected architectural salvage by Ms Gibbs.

At the foot of the stair turret is a terrace with a balustrade overlooking a formal parterre and a canal spanned by a salvaged iron bridge. There are fountains in the stableyard, the cottage courtyard and the wider garden; eye-catchers include a column and a mount created from the spoil gathered during the works. It is no surprise that this restoration has garnered accolades, including a Georgian Group award. Northwold Manor is a place of delight once more after the chaos of more than half a century of neglect. It’s a remarkable and outstanding achievement.