The Nottingham Industrial Museum is based in part of the 17th century stable block at Wollaton Hall and as it’s only open on weekends and Bank Holidays it took quite a while before I got around to visiting. It focuses on a wide range of Nottingham industries including lace, bicycles and mining.
The Merchant Adventurer’s Hall is a Grade I listed timber framed building built in around 1357 by a fraternity of York citizens as a charity and business that became the Company of Merchant Adventurers of York in the 16th century.
This building in London used to house the Royal Masonic Trust for Boys and Girls, a charitable children’s organisation that still has offices further down the street.
St Leonard’s Church in Wollaton, Nottingham, has been around since the 1200s and it would have fallen under the care of the Mortein and then the Willoughby families, owners of the nearby Wollaton Hall.
Watson Fothergill is one of my favourite Nottingham architects and I’ve written about him several times before. He had to move his architectural offices to George Street in Nottingham due to the building of the then Nottingham Victoria railway station (now Victoria Centre shopping centre) and this Grade II listed building was built in 1895. In 2015 part of the frontage was damaged by a truck and finally in the last month or so it has been repaired, so I went along to take photos. It says something about how well loved the building is that while I was there several people came up to me to express how pleased they were with the quality of the repair work.
Marble Arch was originally designed as an entrance to Buckingham Palace by the architect John Nash in 1827 but was completed in 1833 by Edward Blore. A well known but untrue story is that it was moved to its present site at Hyde Park because it was too narrow for Queen Victoria’s state coach to pass through, however the coach passed through the arch in 1838 on the way to her coronation without any problems; more likely it was moved as Queen Victoria and her family needed more space and the fourth wing of the Palace was built where it once stood. It moved to its current location in 1850.
This striking looking building is Cheniston Lodge in Kensington, designed in the Queen Anne style and dating from 1885. During the Second World War it was used as an Air Raid precaution store and depot and then converted to a Register Office, and now appears to have returned to being a home. Interestingly the Lodge itself was built on the site of what had been the Catholic University College, set up by Thomas Capel in 1874 to provide higher education to Catholics who were banned at the time from attending Oxford and Cambridge. The site was sold off in 1879 as the University’s experiment ended in failure, mostly due to lack of funds.
The Houses of Parliament, or more correctly the Palace of Westminster, doesn’t really need any introduction. It is thanks to a fire which destroyed much of the site of the palace in 1834 that we owe the present design of the building (the Jewel Tower was among the few buildings to survive intact).
These buildings on Courtfield Road in Kensington, now very nice looking flats, were built by J.R. and W.H. Roberts in May 1880 and designed by Walter Graves. The section pictured would have been the “lesser rooms” with the nicest section facing the gardens at the back (which I didn’t think to investigate at the time). You can find the original floor plans and more details here.
As a follow-up to part one, this post is focusing on some of Coggeshall’s religous buildings, past and present. The first of these is Christ Church (previously known as the Congregational Church). Built in 1710 by Independents, some of whom had been ejected from the Church of England, by 1989 it had combined with the Methodist and Baptist churches.
