Country Images Magazine North Edition November 2017 | Page 20
The Lost Houses
of Derbyshire
by Maxwell Craven
Edward Saunders’s measured reconstruction of the street elevation of Pickford’s Devonshire Hospital of 1777. [M.Craven]
Bess of Hardwick, Countess of
Shrewsbury, as depicted on her monument
in All Saints’, Derby (Derby Cathedral)
designed by her architect Robert
Smythson. [M. Craven]
Th e layout of the Hospital as depicted
in the 1852 Board of Health Map.
[M. Craven]
Th e story goes back to Bess of Hardwick (which
Derbyshire stories oft en do). Th is much married
woman rose from minor gentry to Countess in a
progression of four glittering marriages, and she
ended up allied to royalty, fabulously wealthy
and a formidable operator all round. She was a
patron of the arts amongst other things and a
keen builder, commemorating her projects on her
epitaph in Derby Cathedral.
Her buildings - mainly paid for by her second
husband, Sir William Cavendish and her
fourth, George Talbot, 5 th Earl of Shrewsbury
– included Chatsworth, Worksop Manor,
Oldcotes, Hardwick Old and New Halls, just to
name the most prominent projects. Most were
built under the guidance of the Tudor builder/
architect Robert Smythson, and thereby gained
immortality if only through his ability to build
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spectacularly and innovatively.
On 5 th October 1599 Bess, by then Countess of
Shrewsbury, decided to found a charity in Derby,
the Shrewsbury Hospital, to house eight poor
men and four poor women, to be endowed with a
rent-charge of £100 per annum (pretty generous
in 1599) raised out of the tenants’ receipt from
Little Longstone, in the Peak.
Th e lucky dozen were to be chosen from the
parishes of All Saints’, St. Michael and St. Peter,
and had to be
‘the most aged poor or needy
persons within the said town of
Derby, being of good and honest
conversation, and not infected
with any contagious disorder.’
Detail from Samuel and Nathaniel Bucks’ 1728
East Prospect of Derby showing the river front of
the original hospital. [M.Craven