Country Images Magazine May 2015 - North Edition | Page 16

DERBYSHIRE’S LOST HOUSES: by Maxwell Craven Abbot’s Hill House entrance front, 1926, photographed by C. B. Sherwin [M Craven] Abbot’s Hill House It is very difficult to imagine, when looking at Derby’s Babington Lane with its endless tailbacks of ’buses, that less than a century ago it was virtually rus in urbe: the countryside in town par excellence. Indeed, the last owner of Abbot’s Hill House, that stood for just on two centuries between Babington and Green Lanes, W. H. Richardson, was a keen huntsman and kept his hunters in the stable block there.