Condover Hall

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Condover Hall from the driveway

Condover Hall is a country house in the Elizabethan style in a conservation area outside the village of Condover in Shropshire , 6.4 km south of Shrewsbury . The three-story sandstone building has been listed by English Heritage as a Grade I Historic Building.

In Anglo-Saxon times , Condover Hall was a mansion. Until the 16th century it was time Country Estate the crown and sometimes not. In 1586 Thomas Owen , Shrewsbury Member of Parliament and Judge , bought the estate from the Henry Vynars family , a London merchant who had died in 1585. Owen had leased the property since 1578 and was in litigation with his family.

From 1946 the house was a boarding school for over 60 years , initially owned by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) for blind children and later privately as a school for autistic children. While boys were housed in the boarding school, the day school was run for boys and girls. The boarding school and school were closed in 2009.

construction

Owen died in 1598 before the new knight's hall was completed. There are different opinions about the builder: The papers show a John Richmond from Acton Reynald as the original architect, with Walter Hancock taking over his post in 1591 . Lawrence Shipway , the builder of the second (not today's) Shire Hall in Stafford , also seems to have contributed a large part to the building. The most compelling evidence is found in the drawings in Sir John Soane's Museum , which appear to prove that the mansion was designed by influential Elizabethan builder John Thorpe in the early 1590s .

Condover Hall was built from pink sandstone from the nearby Berriewood quarry and has the typical Elizabethan two-story rooms on the ground floor, where light falls through tall windows with their regular ajimez and double skylights . One finds noble fireplaces, gables and a good example of a fitting factory fries . The property is laid out in a formal 17th century style with yew hedges and balustraded sandstone terraces adorned with Italianate terracotta vases. There is a sandstone dwarf at Cound Brook holding a flagpole.

Later years

The country house belonged to the Owen family until the end of the 1860s, when it fell to the Cholmondeley family . Mary Cholmondeley (1859–1925) lived in 1896 for a few months before moving to London. Her uncle, Reginald Cholmondeley (1826-1896), owned the house when he hosted the American writer Mark Twain in 1873 and 1879 . In 1897 the family sold the house and estate to the British politician and businessman Edward Brocklehurst Fielden , who sold it on in 1926.

Local legend persists that no heir to Condover Hall will ever achieve economic success, as the mansion was cursed from the gallows by a butler falsely accused of murder: "For God's sake, I'm innocent despite the son my master swears that I am guilty. And since I die an innocent man, all who follow my murdered master shall be cursed. " The butler had been convicted on the lies of Knyvett's son , Lord of the Manor, who stabbed his own father to death. As Knyvett stumbled down the stairs to the basement, he reached out a blood-streaked hand and left an imprint on the wall that couldn't be washed off. The stone marked in this way had to be ground down.

In 1930 there was the Hall Class 4900 steam locomotive No. 4915 with the configuration 4-6-0 called “Condover Hall”. She remained in regular service until 1965. An electric toy model of this locomotive was released by Hornby Toys in the 1980s . The Hogwarts Express train in the Harry Potter films is pulled by a locomotive of the same class.

Second World War

From August 1942 to June 1945 the country house was used as an officers' mess for the nearby RAF Condover base.

boarding schools

In 1946, the RNIB bought the country house from its then owner, William Abbey, and ran the Condover Hall School for the Blind , a boarding school for children between the ages of five and eighteen. The RNIB had a covered, heated swimming pool built for the students. In 2005 the country house was sold to the Priory Group , which ran a boarding school for autistic children and a college for young people with Asperger's syndrome . The facility opened in 2006, but closed again in 2008. The Condover Horizon School closed in January 2009 and the Farleigh College Condover on July 23, 2009.

The country house then underwent a multi-million pound renovation and turned it into a well-equipped sports and recreation center. Activities on offer include archery , abseiling down a laser maze, and a dance studio. The operators of the facility want to encourage the residents to exercise and offer opportunities for unconventional learning. There is even a Harry Potter style spelling room for smaller children. Sports teams and events are guests here and use all-weather sports fields, a sports hall and an indoor swimming pool. There are also special netball training and tournament weekends . It can accommodate up to 500 guests. The rooms and sports facilities are spread across various newly renovated buildings throughout the property.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c R. B. Pugh (Editor): County History of Shropshire . Volume VIII. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1968. p. 39.
  2. ↑ Specialist colleges are to close . BBC News October 7, 2008. Retrieved January 19, 2015.

literature

Web links

Coordinates: 52 ° 38 ′ 47 "  N , 2 ° 44 ′ 52"  W.