Worsley New Hall, Worsley, Salford

When Francis Egerton, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater died without issue in 1803, he had transformed the village of Worsley. The construction of the Bridgewater canal in 1760 had brought the village to the forefront of the transport revolution by providing the link with Manchester that allowed the exploitation of the vast coal reserves lying under the estate. The will of the 3rd Duke ran to some sixty pages and was one of the most complex in legal history. His estates in Lancashire and Cheshire together with the Brackley estate in Northamptonshire were separated from the remainder of the estates and placed in trust for the benefit of the Duke's nephew, George Grenville Leveson-Gower, the Marquis of Stafford and later first Duke of Sutherland. On his death the benefit of the estate was to pass to his second son, Francis Leveson-Gower (1800-57) on condition that he took the name Egerton. In July 1833 the first Duke of Sutherland died. Disputes with members of the Trust lasted some time and it was not until 1837 that Francis Egerton finally moved to Worsley with his wife Harriet Catherine. Almost immediately he decided that both the Old Hall and Brick Hall were inadequate for his purpose and thus set about the planning of a new Hall in which he could better entertain his friends in politics and the arts. Charles Greville, Francis Egerton's brother-in-law was disparaging of the decision: of Worsley he wrote:

The place is miserable, ... no resources such as hunting and shooting and no society but the rare visitants from distant parts. In such a place as this they have expended £100,000 on a fine house ....  and they have done this and much more from a sense of duty, from fully recognising the authority of the maxim "Property has its duties as well as its rights".

To prepare the designs for the New Hall at Worsley, Francis Egerton chose Edward Blore, scornfully dismissed by Egerton's sister-in-law, the 2nd Duchess of Sutherland, in 1833 as “the cheap architect."  However, Francis Egerton was a Tory and his brother, the Duke of Sutherland, a Whig. While Blore's clientele were mostly Tory gentry, many Whig peers favoured Charles Barry and it Barry who was selected by the Duke of Sutherland to remodel Stafford House (now Lancaster House) in London. Barry was to receive further commissions from the Duke, subsequently remodelling Clivden as a vast Italianate palace and rebuilding Trentham Hall in Staffordshire. He also prepared designs for Dunrobin Castle, on the Duke's estate in Scotland.  While Charles Barry might have been a more flamboyant designer, Blore, with William Burn and Anthony Salvin were the most successful country house architects of the 1830s. All were prepared to design in different styles although each had his preference. Blore's houses tended to the picturesque in a gently Elizabethan style with just enough intricacy to suit the taste of the times but not enough to increase costs unreasonably. His planning was rational but had already become a little old-fashioned by the time he was producing the designs for Worsley. Blore was a highly skilled draughtsman and his drawings, several of which are in the RIBA library, are highly attractive, often more so than the resultant buildings.  H.S. Goodhart-Rendell considered Blore merely a competent practitioner of a kind of building not logical or consistent enough to be considered a style in its own right and doubted if he had done anything original in his life. His description of a typical Blore country house, based it would appear on Worsley Hall, continued:

 Steep roofs and chimneys of the kind loosely called Tudor are to the manorial style what towers and crenulations are to the castellated. Windows are mullioned and transommed, for the most part without any arched heads or tracery, gables are frequent both in the main roof and dormers, and oriel windows with flat roofs are sparingly introduced. Pointed arches most probably of the flattened, Tudor variety will occur in doorways but nowhere else.  .. The walls will be faced with stonework or with brickwork, the architectural dressings being of stone in either case.

 ... he (Blore) had early learned the habits and customs of the nobility and gentry sufficiently well to be able to plan very adroitly for their convenience... He just built the houses that his employers wanted, making them as manorial as circumstances would allow(3).

The site chosen for the new Hall lay to the west of the village, south of Leigh Road. On slightly elevated ground, it overlooked the Bridgewater Canal and provided still rural vistas over Chat Moss to the distant Welsh hills. Blore commenced work on the designs in 1838, a task that was to occupy him for the next six years. The foundation stone of the New Hall was laid in 1839 and the building completed by the end of 1845 at a cost of £41,000. A description of the New Hall eventually appeared in The Builder in 1850. This noted the large number of bedrooms, substantiating Greville's comments concerning the lack of local Society:

The country residences of the English nobility and gentry are an important class of structure, comparatively little known beyond their locality. The example we place before the public in the present number of the journal is Worsley Hall, the seat of the Earl of Ellesmere, which was completed at the close of the year 1845, from the design of Mr Edward Blore, architect. It was commenced in 1840, is of the mixed style of the end of the sixteenth century, and is mainly constructed of Hollington stone. The panellings of the principal rooms are of oak, and in character with the exterior of the building. The lodging accommodation is very extensive, - far beyond the usual proportion to the reception rooms. The whole, including the grounds, terraces etc. is a new creation.  The plan shows the appropriation of the rooms........ etc. Worsley, in the parish of Eccles, Lancashire, is about seven miles from Manchester. At Worsley-bridge begins the Bridgewater Canal, executed by Brindley in 1760. [The Builder 8 June 1850]

WORSLEY HALL –This edifice, which was built chiefly with a view to retirement and comfort, rather than a show-house, was commenced in 1840 and completed in about five years, from designs by Mr Edward Blore, the architect. The stone, however, which was procured from the quarries at Hollington, is already beginning to assume a greyish hue, and gives to the house an appearance of greater age than might be expected. The hall is built in the mixed style of architecture of the 16th century, and rises in three storeys from an elevated terrace. It is very lofty and has an extensive view to the south, the prospect in which direction is bounded by the mountains of Wales. Behind the north front is a hill, by which the house is much sheltered from the cold northerly winds. Seen from either the south or the east, the hall has a commanding appearance, and the grouping of the turrets and numerous pointed gables has been skilfully arranged. Its windows are said to command views extending to no fewer than six counties. The interior accommodation is not as extensive as might be supposed from an external view of the house; and the sleeping apartments bear an unusually large proportion to the reception rooms. The principal apartments are panelled in oak, in character with the exterior of the building. Though the furniture is rich and costly, it is still more remarkable for the admirable taste displayed in so much elegance and comfort as to be found in it. In the drawing room, a noble apartment, is Sir Edwin Landseer’s celebrated picture of the “Return from Hawking” in which the artist, while illustrating the customs of a different state of society, has introduced the likenesses of the Earl and Countess of Ellesmere and their family; and in this room too is a piece of sculpture in white marble by Calder Marshall RA, representing “Paul and Virginia.” This room has a southerly aspect and overlooks a spacious terrace on which is a basin and fountain. From its windows there is a delightful and almost boundless view across the country.

Worsley Hall, the seat of the Earl of Ellesmere, is one of the most noble buildings of the locality. It is in the Elizabethan style of architecture, situated in the midst of an extensive park, ornamented with numerous plantations, terraces, slopes and fountains. ..  Its grey turrets rise above the trees in graceful lines, and against a grey sky stands out in bold relief. To obtain a fine view of the Hall with its background of foliage, a walk should be taken over Chat Moss, from which, with a middle distance of furze and dark purple heather, the delicately chiselled Hall looks radiant - like one of Turner's watercolours.[Manchester Faces & Places - Worsley Old Hall Page 108].

Worsley was probably the largest country house Blore was to design. The main house formed a symmetrical block with the family rooms to the eastern end. A large tower and lower service wing to the west. However, the Hall was provided with few facilities. There were no bathrooms and the only cold water supply was to the basement. Gas lighting was still considered hot, smelly, dirty and therefore suitable only for service rooms. The account books indicate that gas pipes were fitted in the kitchens in 1843 and the corridors in 1845.

During the 1914-18 War, the 4th Earl of Ellesmere offered the Hall to the army as a hospital for wounded officers and transferred his country seat to Mertoun estate in Roxboroughshire near Edinburgh. This estate had been purchased by the 3rd Earl about 1912 and was close to the estate of the Duke of Sutherland. The Egertons were never again to live in Worsley.  To pay death duties on the 3rd Earl's estate, the Hall was sold with the rest of the Worsley estates to Bridgewater Estates Ltd in 1923. The new company maintained the building and attempted to dispose of it during the 1920s and 1930s but without success. Various proposals were put forward, including conversion to a convent and Lancashire County Council's scheme to create a new hospital. However, the costs of restoration and alteration proved prohibitive. Not only had there been some deterioration of the fabric of the house while it had been a hospital, the building lacked modern facilities with only a cold water supply to the basement. The Hall remained empty until the Second World War. In May 1940 it was requisitioned by the Army and remained in state control for the rest of the war. By the end of the War it had become apparent that the New Hall would have to be demolished. A fire in September 1943 had caused considerable damage to the roof, attics and upper floors of the central part of the Hall while other areas were seriously affected by dry rot. In addition the mining activities of the Manchester Collieries had caused subsidence and the building had become structurally unsafe. The Hall was sold to a Mr Littler, a scrap merchant from Ashton-in-Makerfield for £2,500 and demolished in 1946-9. Two lions that had stood at the entrance to the new Hall were given to St. Mark's church.

Reference    The Builder 8 June 1850
Reference    Worsley New Hall Bibliography University of Salford