We recently caught up with our Trustee, Phil Thomas, about his project to restore the wonderful Grade II* listed, seventeenth-century Knedlington Old Hall in Yorkshire, which we visited with our members for a guided tour led by Phil in the summer of 2022.
Phil spoke about the various challenges he’s facing with both restoring its historic setting and securing its long-term future:
“Since retiring from building conservation in 2018, I seem to spend most of my time deep in the seventeenth century. In 2017 we bought a beautiful, deeply damaged house in Yorkshire, built in 1650, and have been working to understand it and then to undo the worst that the ruthless 1960s threw at it; creatively re-inventing what has been lost or must be replaced in traditional, breathable materials. Trying to both work within sound conservation principles, and offer the future a new layer of beauty and significance, can be puzzling, frustrating and vastly rewarding.
When we came here, the house was surrounded by bleak lawns, so it seemed important to create an appropriate setting; a garden which followed as far as possible the seventeenth century ideal of garden, court, orchard, yard, with appropriate garden structures.
Like the house, the former agricultural outbuildings need repair, conservation and a sustainable future – a significant problem in most rural areas. Our eighteenth-century dovecote, stable and dairy range, for example, is in serious structural distress and has been crudely altered in the past. We propose gently to repair it, restore its visual relationship with the house, and use it as holiday accommodation which we hope will eventually provide an income to help maintain the ensemble of buildings.”
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- New stairs and a breathable brick floor in our C17 East Yorkshire house
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- The unusable C17 garret made habitable by imaginative and honest engineering and inventive design with no loss of historic material
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- Family connections in a recently conserved panel of late-C17 glass by York glass-painter Henry Gyles in the parlour at Knedlington
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- New entrance gateway to our C17 house East Yorkshire gentry house with a name-plaque lettered by Charles Smith in 2022
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- A little garden essay built in 2022 in tribute to the Humberside variety of C17 Artisan Mannerist brickwork
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- The challenge of rescuing and sustaining redundant agricultural buildings – this C18 dovecote has been crudely reduced in height and is in significant structural distress
