Melbourne Hall

Melbourne Hall is a Georgian country house in Melbourne, Derbyshire, England. Once the seat of the Victorian Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, the hall is the origin of the name of the city of Melbourne, Australia. The house is now the seat of Lord and Lady Ralph Kerr and is open to the public.[2] The house is a Grade II* listed building;[3] more than twenty features in the grounds are Grade I listed.

Melbourne Hall
Melbourne Hall main entrance
General information
Town or cityMelbourne, Derbyshire
CountryEngland
Coordinates52.8202°N 1.42420°W / 52.8202; -1.42420
Construction started12th century
ClientSir John Coke
Design and construction
EngineerRichard Shepherd
DesignationsHouse Grade II* listed[1]
Aisled barn Grade I listed
Laundry Grade I listed

Melbourne, a manor that had belonged to the bishops of Carlisle in the twelfth century, was partly rebuilt in 1629–31 for Sir John Coke by a Derbyshire mason, Richard Shepherd.[4] In 1692 it was inherited by Thomas Coke (1675–1727), a gentleman architect in the golden age of English amateur architecture, who laid out the formal gardens that survive, with some professional assistance from Henry Wise, between about 1696 and 1706: there are avenues, a parterre, a yew walk that has become a yew tunnel, basins and fountains, and lead and stone sculpture, much of it supplied by John Nost. Coke travelled in the Netherlands and he turned to Nost, the famous sculptor born in the Austrian Netherlands, with premises in Haymarket, London, who provided lead figures of amorini, vases, baskets of flowers and mythological figures, still identifiable at Melbourne, and most notably the lead "Vase of the Seasons" (1705), that is one of the finest examples of Baroque sculpture in lead in an English garden.[5] Nost also provided a number of chimneypieces in the house as well as for Sir Thomas's London house in St. James's Place, one of which came to £50. At the sale of Nost's effects, Sir Thomas purchased his copy of Serlio's Five Books of Architecture, English'd by Robert Peake, which is still in the Library.

Detail of a figure on a large vase in the gardens of Melbourne Hall

Among fine wrought iron made for the grounds at Melbourne by Robert Bakewell is the wrought-iron arbour known as the "birdcage". This was restored by the architect Louis Osman in 1958, in conjunction with the ironwork specialists George Lister & Sons Ltd. Osman researched Bakewell's plans, removing a ton of paint and inserting a thousand new pieces of wrought iron to replace crude repairs, as well as restoring the original colours.[6]

Though he drew up a plan for remodelling the sixteenth and seventeenth-century house and had the west wing rebuilt by Francis Smith of Warwick, it remained to his son, G. L. Coke to rebuild the east front, facing the garden, and adjust the south front, in 1743–44, to a design by William Smith, the son of Francis Smith.[7] His design for a gatehouse, built "according to his Honour's Draught" was built by Smith of Warwick but dismantled before the end of the eighteenth century. Unidentified alterations undertaken in 1720–21 were carried out by the builder William Gilks of Burton-on-Trent. The figure of George Lewis Coke remains an ambiguous one. Some believe that he was never at Melbourne after he left for a foreign tour in his late teens.

Redecorations of the interior were carried out throughout the century, in several campaigns. In 1745 Joseph Hall of Derby was paid for the chimneypiece in the Great Dining Room;[5] in the 1760s, stucco by Samuel Franceys was executed, and for the First Viscount Melbourne, in 1772, further interior alterations were carried out by the leading Derbyshire architect, Joseph Pickford.[4] The second Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's Prime Minister, was separated from his wife, Lady Caroline Lamb, in 1825, when her liaison with Lord Byron had become notorious.

The house passed into the hands of the Cowper family when Emily Lamb, sister of the childless third and last Viscount Melbourne, married the 5th Earl Cowper. (She later married another Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston.) It remained in the Cowper family until Lady Amabel Cowper married Admiral of the Fleet Lord Walter Kerr who made Melbourne the family home in 1906.

The current owner Lord Ralph Kerr also owns Ferniehirst Castle in Scotland. He is the heir to the Marquessate of Lothian and the chiefship of Clan Kerr, as his brother the 13th Marquess, better known as the politician Michael Ancram, has no sons, though he has two daughters.

Notes
  1. Historic England, "Melbourne Hall (1000682)", National Heritage List for England, retrieved 25 October 2017
  2. "Melbourne Hall and Gardens". Visit Derbyshire.
  3. Historic England. "Details from listed building database (1204079)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 21 April 2015.
  4. Colvin
  5. Gunnis
  6. Hughes, Graham (17 April 1996). "Obituary: Louis Osman". The Independent. Retrieved 8 April 2019.
  7. William Jackson, of Melton Mowbray, was the master mason, paid £1500 (Gunnis).

References
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