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.
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53 years ago, a Wren masterpiece was replaced with a glorified roundabout. We must not make the same mistake againThe plans to rid Christ Church Newgate Street of traffic should be cause for celebration — but a mistake as bad as the one made in the 1970s is about to happen, says Ptolemy Dean.
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All fired up: 12 of our favourite chimneys, from grand architectural statements to modest brick stacks, as seen in Country LifeNothing says winter like a roaring fire, and plenty of the houses that we've photographed for the magazine's architectural places have fireplaces and chimneys worth boasting about.
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Dorfold Hall: The 'most neat and beautiful house of brick' that owes its existence to a desperate effort to secure successionDorfold Hall in Cheshire is an outstanding Jacobean house, but was an unexpected product of dynastic disappointment. John Goodall examines the remarkable circumstances of its construction; photographs by Paul Highnam for Country Life.
