Wollaton Hall

Coordinates: 52°56′53″N 1°12′35″W / 52.9480°N 1.2096°W / 52.9480; -1.2096
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Wollaton Hall
Sir Francis Willoughby
ArchitectRobert Smythson
Architectural style(s)Elizabethan
OwnerNottingham City Council
Websitewollatonhall.org.uk
Listed Building – Grade I
Official nameWollaton Hall
Designated11 August 1952
Reference no.1255269
Listed Building – Grade II*
Official nameCamellia House 100 Metres South West of Wollaton Hall
Designated12 July 1972
Reference no.1255271
Listed Building – Grade II*
Official nameDoric Temple and Attached Bridge 200 Metres South-East of Wollaton Hall
Designated10 August 1989
Reference no.1270389
National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens
Official nameWollaton Hall
Designated1 January 1986
Reference no.1000344
Wollaton Hall is located in Nottinghamshire
Wollaton Hall
Location of Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire
Wollaton Hall, rear view

Wollaton Hall is an Elizabethan

Nottingham Natural History Museum, with Nottingham Industrial Museum in the outbuildings. The surrounding parkland has a herd of deer, and is regularly used for large-scale outdoor events
such as rock concerts, sporting events and festivals.

Wollaton and the Willoughbys

Wollaton Hall was built between 1580 and 1588 for

Sir Francis Willoughby and is believed to be designed by the Elizabethan architect, Robert Smythson, who had by then completed Longleat, and was to go on to design Hardwick Hall. The general plan of Wollaton is comparable to these, and was widely adopted for other houses, but the exuberant decoration of Wollaton is distinctive, and it is possible that Willoughby played some part in creating it.[1] The style is an advanced Elizabethan with early Jacobean
elements.

Wollaton is a classic

coalmining; the original family home was at the bottom of the hill. Though much re-modelled inside, the "startlingly bold" exterior remains largely intact.[3]

On 21 June 1603, Willoughby's son Sir Percival Willoughby hosted Anne of Denmark and her children Prince Henry and Princess Elizabeth at Wollaton.[4] Charles, later Charles I, came in 1604.[5]

Description

The building consists of a central block dominated by a hall three storeys high, with a stone screen at one end and galleries at either end, with the "Prospect Room" above that. From this there are extensive views of the park and surrounding country. There are towers at each corner, projecting out from this top floor. At each corner of the house is a square pavilion of three storeys, with decorative features rising above the roof line. Much of the basement storey is cut from the rock the house sits on.[6]

The floor plan has been said to derive from

Giuliano da Majano's Villa Poggio Reale near Naples of the late 15th century, with elevations derived from Hans Vredeman de Vries.[7] The architectural historian Mark Girouard has suggested that the design is in fact derived from Nikolaus de Lyra's reconstruction, and Josephus's description, of Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem,[8] with a more direct inspiration being the mid-16th century Mount Edgcumbe in Cornwall, which Smythson knew.[9] The buildings expert James D. Wenn has identified number of meanings embedded in the architecture associated with the Bible, classical antiquity, Plato and the geometry of the rhombic dodecahedron. These codes are also present in the older Soulton Hall, house of the Geneva Bible publisher Sir Rowland Hill, from which it has been argued influence was taken in the design scheme of Wollaton.[10][11][12]

The building is of Ancaster stone from Lincolnshire, and is said to have been paid for with coal from the Wollaton pits owned by Willoughby; the labourers were also paid this way. Cassandra Willoughby, Duchess of Chandos recorded in 1702 that the master masons, and some of the statuary, were brought from Italy. The decorative gondola mooring rings carved in stone on the exterior walls offer some evidence of this, as do other architectural features. There are also obvious French and Dutch influences. The exterior and hall have extensive and busy carved decoration, featuring strapwork and a profusion of decorative forms. The window tracery of the upper floors in the central block and the general busyness of the decoration look back to the Middle Ages,[6] and have been described as "fantasy-Gothic".[13]

Later history

The house was unused for about four decades before 1687, following a fire in 1642, and then re-occupied and given the first of several campaigns of re-modelling of the interiors.

Longleat were similar.[14]

Oblique view of the main facade
Wollaton Hall and grounds painted c. 1697 by Jan Siberechts

The gallery of the main hall contains Nottinghamshire's oldest

well and associated reservoir tank, in which some accounts report that an admiral
of the Willoughby family took a daily bath.

The Willoughbys were noted for the number of explorers they produced, most famously

North East passage to Cathay. Willoughby's Land
is named after him.

Oblique view from the rear
Wollaton Hall in the late 18th-century (engraving by M. A. Rooker after a drawing by Thomas Sandby)

In 1881, the house was still owned by the head of the Willoughby family, Digby Willoughby, 9th Baron Middleton, but by then it was "too near the smoke and busy activity of a large manufacturing town... now only removed from the borough by a narrow slip of country", so that the previous head of the family, Henry Willoughby, 8th Baron Middleton, had begun to let the house to tenants and in 1881 it was vacant.[15]

The hall was bought by Nottingham Council in 1925. Estate and personal papers of the Willoughby family were used to create the Middleton collection at the department of

Manuscripts and Special Collections, The University of Nottingham. They include the Wollaton Antiphonal and the single manuscript holding the 13th-century post-Arthurian romance Le Roman de Silence.[16]

Nottingham Council opened the hall as a museum in 1926. In 2005 it was closed for a two-year refurbishment and re-opened in April 2007. The prospect room at the top of the house, and the kitchens in the basement, were opened up for the public to visit, though this must be done on one of the escorted tours. The latter can be booked on the day, lasts about an hour, and a small charge is made.

In 2011, key scenes from the Batman movie The Dark Knight Rises were filmed outside Wollaton Hall.[17] The Hall was featured as Wayne Manor.[18][19] The Hall is five miles north of Gotham, Nottinghamshire, through which Gotham City indirectly got its name.[20]

Gardens

Wollaton Hall Park is Grade II* listed on the

Register of Historic Parks and Gardens.[21]

The

Ha-Ha
.

Owners of Wollaton Hall

Wollaton Hall Park, by Hendrik Frans de Cort c. 1795

Similar buildings

In 1855, Joseph Paxton designed Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, which borrows many features from Wollaton. Both properties have been used as film locations for Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy of films, featuring as Wayne Manor – the latter in Batman Begins and Wollaton Hall itself in The Dark Knight Rises.

Nottingham Natural History Museum

Wollaton Hall seen from inside the north entrance to the park on Wollaton Road.

Since Wollaton Hall opened to the public in 1926, it has been home to the city's natural history museum.[24] On display are some of the items from the three quarters of a million specimens that make up its zoology, geology, and botany collections. These are housed in six main galleries:

  • Natural Connections Gallery
  • Bird Gallery
  • Insect Gallery
  • Mineral Gallery
  • Africa Gallery
  • Natural History Matters Gallery

The Museum started life as an interest group at the

Nottingham City Council
.

In 2017 the museum hosted a tour of dinosaur skeletons titled Dinosaurs of China, Ground Shakers to Feathered Flyers. The exhibition was attended by over 125,000 people.[25]

From July 2021 to August 2022, the Nottingham Natural History Museum is featuring the world's first exhibit of Titus, a "real" Tyrannosaurus rex fossil which was discovered in Montana, in the United States, in 2014.[26]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Airs, pp. 52-56; Jenkins, p. 581
  2. ^ Jenkins, p. 581
  3. ^ Jenkins, p. 581, quoted
  4. ^ Emily Cole, 'King and Queen in the State Apartment', Le Prince, la Princesse et leurs logis (Picard, 2014), 80: John Nichols, Progresses of James the First, vol. 1 (London, 1828), 170.
  5. ^ Alice T. Freidman, House and household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton and the Willoughby family (Chicago, 1989), 155, 210.
  6. ^ a b c d e Historic England. "Wollaton Hall (1255269)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 13 October 2014.
  7. ^ Sir John Summerson (1954) Architecture in Britain, 1530 to 1830. (Pelican History of Art) London: Penguin Books, p31.
  8. ^ Mark Girouard, "Solomon's Temple in Nottinghamshire" in Town and Country Yale University Press, 1992, pp187-197
  9. ^ Mark Girouard, Elizabethan Architecture: Its Rise and Fall, 1540–1640 (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art) Yale University Press 2009 p.87
  10. ^ "Category: Anglo Saxon". Thegns of Mercia. Retrieved 20 February 2024.
  11. ^ Incubation is the Prescription | Renaissance Medicine in Text and Architecture, retrieved 20 February 2024
  12. ^ Garnet as Emblem of Goodness | Philosophical architecture from Henry III to George III, retrieved 20 February 2024
  13. ^ Airs, p. 52, quoted
  14. ^ Emily Cole, 'Theobalds, Hertfordshire: The Plan and Interiors of an Elizabethan Country House', Architectural History, 60 (2017), p. 84.
  15. ^ Leonard Jacks, Wollaton (1881), online at nottshistory.org.uk
  16. ^ Historical Manuscript Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Middleton Preserved at Wollaton Hall, Nottinghamshire, compiled by W. H. Stevenson (London:, 1911), pp. 221-36.
  17. BBC
    . Retrieved 18 July 2012.
  18. Associated Newspapers Limited
    . 10 June 2011. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
  19. ^ "City was paid for Batman filming". This is Nottingham. Northcliffe Media. 30 June 2011. Archived from the original on 10 September 2012. Retrieved 20 August 2012.
  20. ^ Caroline Lowbridge (1 January 2014). "The real Gotham: The village behind the Batman stories". BBC News. Retrieved 4 January 2014.
  21. ^ Historic England. "Wollaton Hall (1000344)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 2 December 2016.
  22. ^ Camellia House
  23. ^ Listed Structures and Buildings
  24. ^ "Natural History Museum". Archived from the original on 8 April 2010.
  25. ^ Nottingham Post - Nottingham's Dinosaurs of China Exhibit Closes After Roaringly Successful Summer
  26. ^ Ingram, Simon (12 May 2021). "'Titus' the T. rex is coming to the UK this summer. Here's why it's a big deal". National Geographic. Retrieved 30 June 2022.

References

  • Airs, Malcolm, The Buildings of Britain, A Guide and Gazetteer, Tudor and Jacobean, 1982, Barrie & Jenkins (London),
    ISBN 0091478316
  • ISBN 0-7139-9596-3
  • Marshall, Pamela (1999), Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family, Nottingham Civic Society.

External links

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