Begun in 1754, and completed in 1757, Nuthall Temple was said to represent the finest Rococo work in England. A classical villa based upon Palladio’s design for Paolo Almerico’s villa at Capra, it featured a vast, octagonal hall festooned with ornate plasterwork.
Shortly before it was set alight, the interior fixtures and fittings were auctioned off. An advert for the forthcoming sale appeared in Country Life and used a photograph from the magazine’s archive to show the exceptional quality of the plasterwork in the Octagon Hall.
Considered the easiest of the four Palladian villas in England in which to live, and also possessing the prettiest gardens, like so many before and after it, the house succumbed to the inter-war period’s toxic trio of agricultural decline, high taxation, and decreasing control of traditional landowners. Attempts were made to save the Italianate building, with an advert placed in The Guardian on October 1, 1927 offering the property and land for sale with the vision for: ‘… a wonderful opportunity to create a Garden City’, complete with: ‘…trams, buses, electric light, gas and mains water' and offering Nuthall as: ‘…a fine old mansion, suitable for a club house, hotel etc’.
It was not to be, however. Just a month later, the estate was split into lots for sale, with sale of the furniture and contents coming in early 1928. The (almost) final nail in the coffin came with a full-page advert in Country Life — illustrated, somewhat ironically, with one of our architectural photographs — for the remaining fixtures and fittings, including the plasterwork in the aforementioned octagonal hall, to be auctioned off ahead of demolition. One Mr J. H. Brough of Beeston was put in charge of the demolition, with a piece in the Lincolnshire Echo on August 1, 1929, excitedly describing his new, more efficient form of destruction. Having underpinned parts of the house, ‘the woodwork was saturated with petrol and paraffin, and when it was ignited there was a tremendous blaze. Very soon the great wall and masonry, weighing about 400 tons, crashed’. It was further noted that Brough’s new method meant that eight week’s work could be completed in eight days, with the loss of woodwork (purists, cover your eyes now) more than compensated for by the saving in labour costs.
This was not quite the end of the house’s somewhat ignominious demise, however. Brough’s inflammatory method had not completely destroyed the rotunda, nor parts of the wings, which stood in ruins for the following 30 years until they, too, succumbed to progress. The shattered hulk suffered a final indignity by being blown up to make way for the M1 motorway in the 1960’s. Her remaining remains rest beneath the J26 southbound slip road.
The Country Life Image Archive contains more than 150,000 images documenting British culture and heritage, from 1897 to the present day. An additional 50,000 assets from the historic archive are scheduled to be added this year — with completion expected in Summer 2025. To search and purchase images directly from the Image Archive, please register here
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