Babington Buildings: Bookshop on site of Jacobean mansion
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Local historian Maxwell Craven takes a delve into the archives to discover the history behind one of Derby city centre’s most imposing late 19th-century buildings.
If you go into Waterstone’s in Derby you will be entering a late-19th century edifice called Babington Buildings. High above your head, you will see a carving of two baboons either side of a barrel or tun, giving “baboon-tun” or Babington.
The building was designed by Methodist chapel specialist John Wills for his friend, the Hull-born entrepreneur Councillor G E Franklin.
Franklin was the proprietor of a national footwear chain called the Public Benefit Boot and Shoe Company. Babington Buildings was built to house the Derby branch of the enterprise in 1898, with offices for rent on the upper floors.
But why was it called Babington Buildings? The house on the site, pulled down in March 1897, was latterly called Babington House. It was a venerable Jacobean mansion of splendid appearance and, at the time, its demolition was much regretted by certain sections of Derby society.
Babington House was an early example of a double pile house – built in two parallel ranges, of two storeys, with three flush straight stone coped attic gables front and rear.
It was brick, with stone dressings, and from St Peter’s Street at The Spot the forecourt of the house was entered through a four centred “Tudor” arch beneath a straight gable, decorated with three heraldic beasts set in the high perimeter wall.
Behind was a two storied porch with a crenellated parapet, containing another Tudor arch above a carved ornamental oak door. The door was approached via balustraded steps to a small platform above which was an eight-light mullioned and transomed window with a string course of moulded brick above and below continuing right round the building.
The flanking windows on both floors of this front were large 12-light ones.
There was a lower extension containing the kitchens and service quarters to the left, with five-light mullioned windows and a smaller gable above. The garden front had six-light mullioned and transomed windows only on each floor at the end bays, despite facing south-west.
All the attics were lit by three-light mullioned windows. The gables bore pointed finials and the roofline was set off by massive grouped chimney stacks.
Our knowledge of the interior is a little scanty, but it would appear that the hall was dog-legged across the building with the finely carved oak staircase off to the right as you entered, rising through the whole width of the house and returning in a broad dog-leg.
The best rooms were geometrically panelled, rather like old Norbury Hall.
The house was originally set in 13 acres of parkland and flower beds bordered by Osmaston Road to the east and the gardens of old Babington Hall, where Mary Queen of Scots stayed on January 13, 1585.
It was built as St Peter’s House by Alderman Henry Mellor, the man who became the first ever mayor of Derby under the 1637 charter, but who later died in office.
His family were landowners, his elder brother having just built a timber-framed house called South Sitch at Idridgehay. Mellor, as a younger son, was a prosperous mercer dealing in silk, cotton, woollen and linen goods.
His nephew, another Henry Mellor, inherited the house and paid tax on a substantial 18 hearths in 1670 making the building the same size as Norbury, Etwall, Bradley and Norton Halls, of which only Norbury survives in anything like the state it was in about 1670.
In Derby, only one house compared to it: Newcastle House in the Market Place, also taxed on 18 hearths.
Henry’s younger brother, Robert Mellor, died in 1687 when the house appears to have been sold. The only clue as to who bought the property is contained in a line from William Woolley’s History of Derbyshire of c1715 which reads: “...coming down from Osmaston, on the left hand stands a good house and seat of the Mellors who were a considerable family in this town, now owned by Mr Gregge...
This is supported by an indenture recording the granting, in 1718, from the corporation of a piece of ground called St Leonard’s Flat to Francis Gregge.
This allowed the house’s estate to be extended towards what today is Leopold Street and back to Normanton Road.
It is, in fact, highly likely that Gregge was the purchaser of the house from the Mellors. Descended from a family from Bradley, Cheshire, his grandfather, John, a fifth son, had settled at Ilkeston having inherited from his wife interests in coal mining in the area.
The eldest son, Ralph, went to live in Hammersmith, Middlesex, while his younger brothers, Francis and Robert, remained in Ilkeston.
Francis Gregg was the sixth son of Ralph and, in 1680, inherited the Ilkeston property and the mining interests. He married Mary, daughter of John Borrowe, of Castlefields, Derby.
A lawyer, he also had a Derbyshire seat at Norton Lees Hall which he rented from the Greenwood family, probably because there were more mines in which he had an interest near Sheffield. His younger son, another Francis, bought Norton Lees in 1735.
In due course, the Greggs sold St Peter’s House, in 1732, to Henry Eyre, of Rowtor Hall.
Eyre was a younger son of Gervase Eyre, of Rampton, Nottinghamshire.
He had, in 1717, inherited his Derbyshire estate with its small Jacobean manor house and weirdly set out grounds around Rowtor Rocks from a kinsman, Thomas Eyre, “on condition that he should live in it”.
This was plainly something he couldn’t stand after the death of his first wife, and he decided to move to Derby.
On his re-marriage, in 1745, to a Cotton of Combermere, he raised a £1,200 mortgage on St Peter’s House from Samuel Crompton’s bank.
Eyre’s only daughter by his first wife, Elizabeth, married at St Peter’s, Derby, in 1741 the splendidly named Irish Peer Clotworthy Skeffington, 1st Earl of Massareene, and they lived at St Peter’s House for a while, Lord Massareene’s large and draughty Carolean seat beside Sixmilewater in Co Antrim being too uncivilised for the new countess.
Their descendants retained an interest in the freehold, despite its having passed via the Cottons (who took over the mortgage on Eyre’s re-marriage) to Derby-born Reverend Richard Rowland Ward, of Sutton Hall, Sutton-on-the-Hill.
In 1792, the Third Improvement Commission pitched Babington Lane through the park and, by 1811, Tudor Babington Hall, the neighbouring property, had been demolished as un-lettable and the site re-developed.
Legal complexities aside, the house, coach house, stables, outbuildings, cottage and grounds were finally sold to widow Dorothy Wilmot for £4,000. Her son, Edward Sacheverell Sitwell, of Stainsby House, Smalley, inherited in 1825 what was now Sitwell Hall – inhabited by the previous owner’s cousin, John Buckston of Ash Hall.
He promptly sold St Leonard’s Flat, the southerly portion of the garden, for re-development. He got £9,400 for 10 acres.
The purchaser was a group of men keen to build houses: John Flewker, a lawyer who did the paperwork and put up the money; William Smith, architect and surveyor; and Edward Smith, William’s brother, a joiner and house builder.
They immediately laid out Wilmot, Sitwell and Sacheverell Streets on the land and, in 1830, having built some houses, re-sold plots to various building clubs whose members pooled resources and built houses to be occupied on a rent-to-buy basis.
It was in one of Smith’s rather neat Regency terraced villas in Wilmot Street that the philosopher Herbert Spencer grew up. His father lived in it from new in 1826 and Spencer reminisced in his autobiography about his rambles as a boy southwards towards Osmaston Hall, through the unspoilt countryside which began at their back garden gate.
Meanwhile, this development did little for the tenants of Sitwell Hall, and its inexorable decline began. The Irish miniaturist and author Louisa Stuart Costello, an old friend of the Burdetts of Foremark, and of the Strutts, was frequently a guest both at Foremark and Thorntree House.
On one occasion, in or just before 1845, Miss Costello was “induced by curiosity” to call at Sitwell Hall. She found the house inhabited only by an “old artist”, whom she claims as a portraitist, although directories reveal that this was actually Samuel Kirk, whose chief forte was animal painting.
She goes on: “He conducted us over the curious old house, into numerous rooms, nooks and corners, all in excellent order, with carved walls and ceilings; a complete specimen of the buildings of two centuries back and a most excellent dwelling house for a modern family. Probably when first erected, it stood alone in gardens in a park, but now it is surrounded by houses, chiefly small and new and possessing no character in common with it.”
In fact, Kirk must have moved in during 1843, when the previous tenant, Dr William Fletcher, headmaster of Derby School from 1834, moved on to pastures new.
In 1846, after a brief period empty, the house was let to the Rev Edward Lillingston, vicar of All Saints, followed, in 1848, by wealthy butcher Jarvis Bancroft. But, by 1852, it had been bought as an investment by hugely wealthy solicitor William Eaton Mousley, of Exeter House.
In 1854, Mousley died and the property was sold to John Norton, an enterprising Lincoln draper, who extended the front out across the courtyard to the street and turned it into a woollen and linen wholesale and retail drapery.
It was Norton who, eager to capture for his own business some of the romance lost when Babington Hall was demolished, renamed the mansion Babington House.
Norton, latterly Norton & Sons, continued until 1872 when it was sold to George Linnell, a Derby draper who sub-let part of the shop to china and glass dealer J G Potter.
In the early 1880s, Linnell moved nearer to the centre of the town and the final occupant, Leonard W Brookes, took over.
He turned the place into a “fancy bazaar, warehouse and repository” with, inside the mansion “convenient and tasteful interior arrangements...a place aux dames...”
The building by this time boasted a “70-foot galleried hall” which is difficult to conceive in the house as built and must have been fashioned from Mr Norton’s extensions.
Mr Brookes’ widow, Annie, faced with the persuasiveness of Councillor Franklin’s cash, was more than content to sell up and retire in 1897 and this venerable and much-loved old house was demolished early in the August.
This article is from the Derby Evening Telegraph and is reproduced online here.
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