Country Images Magazine North April 2018 | Page 19

The Lost Houses
of Derbyshire
by Maxwell Craven
Spondon House
Lithographic view of Spondon House,
when a school for young ladies 1840.
[Th e late Mrs. Tom Fraser]
S
pondon House was a fi ne 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, well-
proportioned appearance suggest that this event took place in the last quarter of the 18th century.
Th e surviving walls and gate piers, a recent view [MC]
Th e 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 fi rst known illustration of it – a lithograph of
c. 1840 – the ground fl oor windows fl anking this
door had been modifi ed 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. Th e north side, too, apart
from (probably) two ground fl oor 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. Th is
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