The Lost Houses of Derbyshire
by Maxwell Craven
Spondon House
Lithographic view of Spondon House , when a school for young ladies 1840 . [ The late Mrs . Tom Fraser ]
Spondon House was a fine Georgian mansion , in reality a secondary seat on the Locko estate of the Drury Lowes . Yet it was not without presence , and its history not without interest .
All accounts of the house , the building records for which are absent from the Drury-Lowe archive at the University of Nottingham Library , aver that it was built as a dower house , and its plain , wellproportioned appearance suggest that this event took place in the last quarter of the 18th century .
The surviving walls and gate piers , a recent view [ MC ]
The house itself , as built , was of brick , a single pile with three bays and two and a half storeys , gable ended with prominent kneelers , with a central arched entrance under a broken pediment , standing in landscaped grounds . By the time of the first known illustration of it – a lithograph of c . 1840 – the ground floor windows flanking this door had been modified with canted bays under perfunctory hipped roofs , part of a Regency makeover which included the addition of a lower , two bay matching wing on the SE angle , still of two and a half storeys . The north side , too , apart from ( probably ) two ground floor tripartite windows , was quite devoid of fenestration .
In the mid-Victorian period , the house was extended yet again by a two storey wing with service accommodation on the NE side . This included the provision of the second staircase and the moving of the main entrance from the centre of the original range to the angle of that and the Regency SE addition , making way for
CountryImagesMagazine . co . uk | 19