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Conservationists in £25m project to save crumbling Wollaton Hall, a rare jewel of the Elizabethan age

Louise Jury,Arts Correspondent
Monday 29 December 2003 01:00 GMT
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For more than 400 years, Wollaton Hall has been a beautiful example of Elizabethan heritage, an imposing stone building rising from more than 500 acres of the Nottinghamshire landscape.

It attracts in excess of a million people each year, some to visit the local natural history and industrial museums as well as art exhibitions at the Yard Gallery, all situated there, but most to its beautiful landscaped grounds.

Yet in recent years the fabric of much of the interior of Wollaton Hall has been crumbling, so much so that there are fears its Great Hall could collapse. Now expert conservationists are preparing to begin the first, £6m stage of an ambitious project to return the building to its full Tudor splendour.

Wollaton Hall, Grade I-listed, is one of the most historic buildings in Britain. It was built between 1580 and 1588 for Sir Francis Willoughby, the Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, a coal magnate and courtier of Elizabeth I. It was designed by Robert Smythson, who was also responsible for nearby Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire and Longleat House in Somerset - part of a network of grand Elizabethan estates, many of which Queen Elizabeth visited on her tours around Britain.

But it is surrounded by barriers to stop the crumbling stonework injuring passers-by and some of the most beautiful rooms in the hall are barred to members of the public on grounds of safety.

A further group of buildings, which includes a unique camelia house, in the Grade II-listed estate are also boarded up and inaccessible until vital repairs are carried out. Built in 1823, the camelia house is thought to be the oldest cast-iron building in Britain.

The hall and grounds passed into the control of the City of Nottingham, then the Nottingham Corporation, in 1925 after centuries in the Willoughby family, making the site one of the most important in local government control.

But a recent report estimated it would need 25 years and £25m at today's prices to restore it to its full glory as a gem of the Elizabeth age, an impossible sum for the council without lottery support.

Four-fifths of its 110 rooms are inaccessible, either because of the danger or because they are storing thousands of items from Nottinghamshire's Natural History Museum, which has been housed on the site for decades and also needs improvement.

The Heritage Lottery Fund has awarded the City of Nottingham £330,000 development funding with the promise of £4.5m towards the £6.75m cost of the first phase of restoration once it agrees the plans. The city is to give around £1m with about £900,000 expected from the European Regional Development Fund.

The work would include renovating the Prospect Room at the top of Wollaton Hall, which was designed for ladies of the day to view the house and grounds while the men hunted. But plaster has already fallen from the ceiling and there are fears that the room, which was bolstered by steel girders inserted 50 years ago, might collapse into the Great Hall beneath.

Alan Dillon, the council's project manager, said he hoped the plans would be approved by the HLF next year, with work beginning on the first phase of restoration in May 2005 and completion the following year.

Stephen Johnson, director of operations of the Heritage Lottery Fund, said: "It's a great masterpiece and needs conservation work done on it. But it's not just about restoring grand architecture for the sake of it, but restoring something that is much prized locally and can be much better valued."

The park, which needs drainage work to tackle problems with flooding, is the largest open recreational space in Nottingham. At present, around 70 per cent of the 1.2 million people who visit Wollaton every year come to the park, rather than the house.

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